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Her laugh is short and sharp. "You really picked tonight for this?"

"I didn't know what else to do."

"You could have mailed them if it was that important to you. And I’m sorry… I won’t agree to an annulment."

A few heads nearby are definitely turning now.

I don’t want the annulment either but it was part of the agreement. The trust wants to make us pay for this. They want to make an example of us so no one else tries to pay off something to marry them.

Gabriel appears at her shoulder, polite and controlled and very much in my space.

"Perhaps now is not the best moment," he says.

"He's right," Aria says tightly, though she's looking at me, not him. "Now is not the best moment."

I hold her gaze.

"Then when."

She exhales through her nose like she's counting to ten in a language I don't speak.

"Go back to the villa," she says. "I'll come after the opening."

"Aria—"

"Go."

Gabriel says nothing else. He doesn't need to. The entire gallery is listening now.

I look at her one beat longer, and then I leave.

By the time I get back to the villa, the panic is climbing again. Not the loud kind. The quieter, worse kind.

Tight chest. Wrong air. My own skin feeling too close. I don't bother fighting it by sitting down. I strip down to my boxers and get in the pool. Cold water closes over my shoulders.

For one second, everything goes quiet and I start swimming.

Lap after lap after lap. Anything to give my body something to do besides fall apart. I turn at one end. Then the other. Breathe. Pull. Kick. Again.

By the time I hear her heels on the cement surrounding the pool, my shoulders ache and my lungs are burning and the panic has been reduced to a manageable roar.

I stop at the far edge and look up.

She's standing there with her arms folded over her chest, still in the gold dress, hair looser now, makeup slightly smudged at the corners like she rubbed at her eyes and then thought better of it.

She looks furious. And beautiful. And done with me.

"You know," she says, "I left my own opening while patrons were still there just to come deal with you flying to France with annulment papers. Do you have any idea how insane that is?"

I drag myself out of the pool and stand there dripping onto the concrete.

"Yes."

Her brows shoot up.

"You agree?"

"I'm beginning to."