17. Cali
CALI
"You look dangerous," Ronan says approvingly when I come down the stairs the next week in a backless red dress.
"That's the idea."
He's in a black tuxedo, and speaking of dangerous, he looks like something you'd read about in a warning label.
He holds out his arm, but I don't take it right away.
I lift my hand up first, so the ring catches the light in the entryway—a thin gold band, nothing gaudy, but it's there, and it means something.
I keep looking at it like it belongs to someone else.
"It's a bar association thing," I remind myself out loud. "For the firm. It's a performance."
"Spoken like a woman who has memorized her lines."
"We show up married. We look married. Everybody sees the powerful lawyer and his new wife, and nobody thinks twice about it."
"That's the whole point," he agrees.
"Then let's get ready to perform."
"I'm ready." He takes my hand and folds it over his arm, and his fingers brush the ring once, almost reverently. "Are you?"
The gala is at some hotel ballroom in Midtown with chandeliers the size of subway cars and a string quartet in the corner.
It's lawyers, mostly. Lawyers and judges and the kind of people who own the firms that own the lawyers.
Everybody knows Ronan. That much is clear the second we walk in.
Heads turn. Conversations pause. A ripple goes through the room like a rock dropped in a pond, and we're the rock.
Ronan's hand settles at the small of my back.
He's steering, a little, but mostly just present, warm through the red silk.
We do the rounds. He introduces me the same way he always does, except now, there's a ring.
People's eyes flick down to it, and the story rewrites itself in real time on their faces.
Oh. Oh, that's the wife. That's the new Mrs. Akov.
Nobody says it out loud. They don't have to. I can read a room.
A silver-haired man named Crosby comes up and pumps Ronan's hand. He's a partner at the firm, apparently. He's got a big smile and a bigger handshake and he calls me "the woman who finally domesticated Ronan Akov."
"Congratulations," Crosby says. "Genuinely. We were all starting to think he'd marry the firm."
"He almost did," I say. "I talked him out of it."
Crosby laughs and slaps Ronan on the shoulder, then moves off into the crowd to work someone else. Ronan watches him go for a second, and something crosses his face, quick, gone before I can name it.
"You okay?" I ask.
"Fine."
"You made a face."
"Did I?"
"Yeah. The one where you're thinking about something you're not going to tell me about."
His mouth twitches. "You're getting good at that."
"Nah," I tease. "You're just easier to read than you think."
"You wish," Ronan murmurs, but he's smiling when he says it, and then a waiter drifts by with champagne and I take a glass off the tray just to have something to hold that isn't him.
The string quartet transitions into something slow. Couples move toward the middle of the floor. Ronan holds out his hand.
"We should dance," he says. "It's expected."
I let him lead me out under the biggest of those subway-car chandeliers.
I put one hand on his shoulder and the other in his and remind myself, very sternly, that this is a performance.
We are two actors playing a role for a room full of people who need to believe it, because the belief buys time and keeps my kids safe.
Then he starts to move. My body follows his the way it learned to do weeks ago in a different ballroom. Somewhere, between the first turnout and the second, I lose the thread of which thing I'm doing.
Because his hand is solid at my back and his thumb is drawing a slow line along my spine, just above the hem of my panties, and he's looking at me the way he looked at me at the aquarium, the way I asked him to look at me during the dress rehearsal—except nobody asked him to do it now.
There's no clerk to convince. There's no fed at the bottom of the steps.
There's just us, turning under the light. I find myself thinking, Wait, is this the performance or is this the real thing? and I honestly cannot tell.
"You've gone quiet," he says.
"I'm concentrating."
"On what?"
"On not stepping on your very expensive shoes."
"Hm, I don't think that's the full story." He spins me out and reels me back so I collapse against his chest, breathless, one hand splayed on the black velvet lapel. "I'd like to listen, if you'd like to share."
"What makes you so sure there's something to share?"
"This." He touches the furrowed space between my brows, gently, with the pad of his thumb.
Well, I guess that's me getting caught red-handed. Or red-eyebrowed, I guess.
"It's supposed to be pretend," I tell him in a confused whisper, so the couple waltzing past us can't hear. "So why does it keep feeling so—" I stop and shake my head. "Never mind."
His arm tightens. A subtle change of pressure that pulls me a half inch closer, chest to chest, and he sways us into a slower turn. "In case you're wondering," he says against my temple, "I stopped pretending somewhere around the vows."
The song ends before I have to figure out what to do with that. Applause, polite and scattered. Ronan steps back and offers his arm again like a gentleman, or a stranger, or a man who did not just say what he said.
I'm reaching to take it when I spot the woman who just won't quit.
Agent Gia Mercer is standing by the bar in a black cocktail dress that is doing an admirable job of pretending it isn't a federally-issued uniform.
She has a glass of something clear in her hand that I would bet the deed to my house is water.
She's watching us, obviously. I don't think anyone here is quite as high on the FBI's Most Wanted List.
"She's here," I mumble.
Ronan doesn't turn his head. "I know. She came in two minutes after us."
"You noticed and didn't tell me?"
"You were busy pretending to concentrate on my shoes, remember?"
Before I can decide whether to be annoyed or impressed, a figure detaches from the crowd and strides toward Mercer with the loose, unbothered walk of a man who has decided the whole evening is a joke and he's the only one in on it. Dark suit, dark hair, a grin already loaded.
"She's Navi's concern tonight," Ronan adds with a chuckle. "I'm not sure which of them has their hands more full."
"Should we be concerned?" I ask.
"Oh, yes," he agrees. "But for whom?" Ronan's mouth twitches. "Watch this."
Navi has planted himself directly in Mercer's sightline, blocking her view of us. Whatever he's saying is making a tense vein in her forehead do jumping jacks. She says something back, short, clipped. Navi laughs and pats her shoulder. She recoils with a wrinkled nose.
"He's running interference," I realize.
"He's enjoying the thrill of pissing off a woman who is quite literally paid to despise him. There's a difference, but not much of one, in Navi's case."
We drift closer because I want to hear. By the time we're within range, Navi is leaning one elbow on the bar, entirely too comfortable with the whole setup, and Mercer has turned to face him. I get the sense it's only because she wouldn't dare turn her back on such a man.
"—federal agent at a lawyers' party," Navi is saying. "That's like a shark showing up to a fish's birthday. You could at least try to blend in."
"I am blending in."
"Agree to disagree. You're drinking water and glaring. Half these men have already asked me if you're a bitter ex-wife."
Mercer sneers. "And what did you tell them?"
"That you're way worse than that.”
The agent's mouth flattens, but I've been trained, brutally, by weeks of living with Ronan Akov, to read the difference between a flat mouth and a genuinely angry one, and this is not the second variety.
This one is fighting something. There's a light in her eyes that has nothing to do with the report she's writing.
Dare I say that Mercer finds Navi Akov a wee bit intriguing?!
"You're the cousin," she says. "Navi Akov. You've been very hard to schedule a conversation with."
"That's on purpose."
"I figured."
"You want to schedule a conversation, Agent Mercer, you'll have to bring a subpoena like a big girl."
"I don't need a subpoena just to talk to you."
"No," he agrees, and his grin sharpens, "but you'd need one to get me to say anything. Otherwise, I'll just talk. I can talk for hours. My cousin will tell you. It's my worst quality."
"I doubt that's your worst quality."
"See, now you're flirting."
"I am absolutely not."
"You are. It's fine. It happens. I have that effect on women."
Mercer takes a slow sip of her water. Over the rim of the glass, her eyes flick to me and Ronan, and then back to Navi.
"Here's what I know about you," she drawls.
"You're a glorified errand boy. You do the things that the big boss doesn't want on his own hands.
You've got a passport with more stamps than sense and a habit of being in the wrong country at exactly the wrong time.
And you think this—" She waves the glass in a small circle that takes in the chandeliers, the tuxedos, the whole gilded room, "—all of it, is beneath you. "
Navi's grin broadens. "That's a lot of homework for a woman who says she doesn't need a subpoena."
"I like to be prepared."
"So do I." He straightens off the bar, and for one second, I remember that he is just as dangerous as Ronan is, albeit in his own way. "I'd like to clarify, Agent Mercer: It's not beneath me. I just don't like being told where to stand."
"Likewise."
They hold it there, the two of them, a beat too long and a notch too tense. I look at Ronan, who just sighs and shakes his head.
"They're going to be a problem," I murmur. "Aren't they?"
"They already are." He steers me away with a hand at my back before either of them notices we've been eavesdropping. "Leave them to it. Navi will keep her occupied for the rest of the night. It's the most useful thing he's done all month."
As we depart, Crosby reappears near the ballroom's edge, phone pressed to his ear, one finger in the other.
He mouths sorry at someone and slips out through a side door into the hall, the way a hundred men slip out of a hundred parties to take a hundred calls.
Nobody in the room thinks a thing about it, least of all me.
Just a partner working late on a Saturday. Just a man with a firm to run.
The rest of the gala passes in a blur of names I won't remember and a plate of food I mostly move around.
Ronan doesn't leave my side. We leave a little before midnight.
Paolo drives. Ronan's hand rests on the seat between us, not on me, obeying the daytime rules even though it's the deepest part of night.
The sitter—one of Juliet's replacements, vetted twice as hard—reports the kids went down easy. Ronan pays her, walks her to the car one of his men is idling at the curb, comes back inside, and locks the vault-heavy door.
I'm standing at the bottom of the stairs when he turns around.
Neither of us says anything. Every other time, there have been words, negotiations, my long list of grievances recited aloud. Tonight, I've got nothing left to recite. I'm too tired for that.
I just go up. He follows.
Not to his room. To mine.
The hate-fucking is grim and silent and it's over faster than usual.
He doesn't call me his queen. He doesn't tell me to keep my eyes open, either, so I don't. I keep them shut the whole time, and I let myself pretend, in the dark, that the hands on me now are the same hands that were at my back all night, warm through red silk, steering me gently into a future that I can almost believe is real.
He lets me pretend.
Afterward, he doesn't ask to linger. He gets up, finds the sweatpants, and pauses at the door.
"Goodnight, Ms. Meadows," he says.
"Goodnight," I mumble into the pillow. "Close the door on your way out."