Chapter 40 – Aurora
The sound of the string quartet has the exact tempo of my anger—measured, relentless, and impossible to ignore.
I stand beside Cassian at the edge of the ballroom, smile glued in place while donors with winter tans and polished teeth tell me how “moved” they’d been by my last show.
My cheeks ache from courtesy. Every time I blink, I see the moment replay: his mouth shaping the word girlfriend like it belonged to him.
A claim made in front of cameras, spun like silk, and anchored with the weight of his hand at my back.
I keep my chin high. The chandelier light flashed off crystal; the floor smelled faintly of wax and old perfume; the journalists floated the perimeter like sharks trained to smile.
I nod when a museum trustee praises “the honesty” of my canvases, and I thank an heiress for admiring my “color choices” as if I’d picked them from a rack.
Inside, I was counting my breath and rehearsing the words I wanted to put in Cassian’s ear the second we were out of the flash.
My clutch digs into my palm until my knuckles go numb.
Every time I shift my weight, the silk at my back whispers against my skin, reminding me of everything I’d agreed to and everything I hadn’t.
Across the room, Senator Caldwell laughs with a donor, but his eyes cut like a blade when they find me.
He looks at Cassian the way men look at problems they intend to fix with headlines.
The string quartet slides into another song without a seam.
“You’re shaking,” a woman in a diamond cuff says gently, misreading it for nerves. “First galas can be overwhelming.”
“Firsts always are.” I smile with my teeth.
Cassian’s hand squeezes the back of my arm once.
I feel him bend toward another donor, shift his voice into the smooth register he uses when he wants people to believe the world is safe if they just write the check.
He’s good at it. I’ve watched him turn a room.
Tonight he’s turned me into a narrative too, and I want to peel that word, girlfriend, off my skin and hold it up between us like a knife.
A photographer lifts his camera, and I feel Cassian tug me half a step closer, the angle calculated. The flash burns white. I turn my face slightly.
“We need to talk,” I tell him under the applause for someone’s speech. My smile doesn’t move. My mouth barely does.
He angles his head like he is smelling the air. “Yes,” he says lightly, as if I’d suggested fresh air or champagne. “This way.”
He threads us through donors, board members, and the honeyed air of winter money.
He doesn’t hurry; he doesn’t need to. People make room for him the way they do for a tide they’ve learned not to fight.
He stops at a velvet-draped door that looked like decoration and presses his palm to the brass lever.
Inside, the air changes. It is a side parlor; the kind people use for private calls they don’t want overheard and staff use to stash cases of wine.
One lamp glows at a low table, light pooled on mahogany.
Velvet curtains soften the edges of the room.
A credenza stands against the far wall with a line of unused glass carafes.
The hum of the gala bleeds in through the seams like ocean noise under a dock.
He closes the door but doesn’t flip the lock.
“Really?” I throw my hands in the air. “You’re going to leave that—”
“Unlocked,” he cuts in simply. He slip his hands into his pockets and watches me like I am the unsteady thing in the room. “Yes.”
“Girlfriend?” I bite off the word. “Without asking me.”
“If I’d asked,” he starts, calm as a bench, “you’d have said no. It was the cleanest line through Caldwell’s trap.” He shifts his weight a fraction. My eyes track it like a reflex. “Now he can’t posture on camera about me hiding women. You’re visible by choice.”
“My choice,” I take a step forward, “is mine. It isn’t something you pick up and pin on me because it serves your war.”
“I don’t pin anything on you,” he counters too evenly. “I move pieces so the people I protect don’t get crushed when men like him decide outrage is better television than nuance.”
“I’m not one of your pieces.” I can hear the heat sharpening my voice. I see it land in his eyes. “I’m a person. A person you decided to rename, in public, because it made your story cleaner.”
“I decided to change where you were standing,” he replies softly. “So the bullets would miss.”
“Don’t dress control as safety,” I snap. “You don’t get to decide how I’m seen.”
He steps closer without menace, and I feel the credenza at my hips before I realize I’ve backed into it.
“I decide,” he whispers low enough the lamp’s filament could hear, “how you’re protected while you stand next to me.
Out there, in that room, where men like Caldwell purport to save the world by exposing its soft parts, I decide what gets exposed.
I did not call you anything you aren’t already becoming, Rory.
I gave a word to something that already exists and used it like a shield because we needed one. ”
Fury spikes and feels chemical. “That wasn’t a shield. That was a brand.”
He looked down at my mouth the way men look at an instrument they know how to play too well and have promised themselves they won’t touch. “You’re beautiful when you’re furious.”
“Stop doing that.”
“Doing what?” His tone changes and becomes quieter, and hungrier. “Making you feel?”
The hum of voices rise and fall on the other side of the door like the tide of a rich sea. Someone laughs. A glass clinks. I can taste my own pulse.
“Don’t.” It is the warning you give yourself when the first drop gives way to the slide.
He braces his hands on either side of me and leans in. Heat rolls off him. His eyes hold mine like a steady hand on a tremor. “You want to yell at me?” he asks gently. “Yell.”
“So you can tell me I’m wrong softly?” I shoot back.
“So you can say what you need to say,” he answers.
“I need—” I begin and then stop. Because what I need in this exact second isn’t to list the ways he’s crossed a line.
It isn’t to tally the clauses in the contract or recite Nadia’s voice.
It isn’t to be righteous on a credenza in a velvet room while a senator sharpens his teeth two doors over.
What I need is to erase the frozen smile from my face with my mouth against something real.
I grab his lapel and drag him down, my fingers twisting into the crisp fabric like I'm trying to rip through to his skin.
I kiss him like my anger is a jagged blade I can blunt on his tongue, shoving it deep, tasting the sharp bite of whiskey and salt from his earlier drink, his restraint cracking under the assault.
He meets me with that coiled tension at first—lips firm, unyielding—then it shifts to takeover, his mouth claiming mine, directing the chaos, his hand clamping my jaw to hold me steady while I push harder, teeth clashing, tongues warring in a slick, messy tangle.
The careful woman I've been curating for the cameras splinters on the edge of his teeth, shattering into something feral, my cunt already throbbing, slick and aching from the rage-fueled heat building low in my belly.
He spins me with a bruising grip at my waist, slamming my hips back against the credenza, the varnished wood digging into my ass like a punishment I crave.
He swallows the guttural noise that rips from my throat, his mouth devouring mine, tongue thrusting deep as his hand shoves up my thigh, bunching the silk dress higher, exposing my bare skin to the cool, stale air of this forgotten room.
The space narrows to our ragged breaths, the faint murmur of the gala bleeding through the walls, and that door—still deliberately unlocked, a thin barrier between us and the polished vultures outside.
My pulse hammers in my ears, the risk twisting my guts into a dark thrill, my thighs slick with arousal as I grind against nothing, desperate for friction.
“This is insane,” I whisper against his lips, my voice raw and broken, sounding like the shadowed bitch I've buried for years, finally clawing her way out to breathe. “Someone—”
“Is on the other side of a door,” he growls into my mouth, his breath hot and ragged, stroking my swollen lip like a tease.
“And if you don’t want this, you open it and leave.
Now.” His eyes scan mine, dark and piercing, catching the flicker of doubt, the flare of hunger.
“Say the word and I’ll go out there and work the room like none of this—”
“Don’t you dare.” The words snap out as a command laced with a desperate plea, my nails digging into his shoulders. “Don’t you dare stop.”
He nods once, sharp and final, and reaches up to slide his tie free, the silk whispering like a serpent uncoiling.
I watch him loop it, my breath catching as his eyes check mine again—a silent question in that invented language of ours, power and consent tangled.
I give him an answering nod, lifting my wrists willingly, my heart pounding as he binds them loosely, the silk biting just enough to send a jolt straight to my clit, a knot I could slip with a twist if I wanted.
He showed me how once: a small demonstration, a promise of exit, control even in surrender.
He kisses the inside of my wrist, his lips hot and wet, tongue flicking out to taste the pulse there, turning the tie into something filthy and intimate rather than just functional, then lowers my bound hands to the small lip of the credenza’s edge.
His palm covers my fingers, pressing them down.
“Hold,” he murmurs, voice low and gravel-rough.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I say, swallowing what bubbles up like a twisted laugh, because it's true in too many fucked-up ways—trapped by him, by this need, by the darkness I've invited.