Chapter 19 #2
The ball is in a house that used to be a house before money turned it into a museum that pretends it still sleeps.
A long driveway with lamps like throat-cut diamonds.
Columns taller than a man’s future. Stone carved into cherubs that look like they have opinions about your outfit.
The hedges are clipped into angels and sins; the fountain is bleeding water the color of rosé into a basin full of floating candles.
People are already drifting toward the doors in masks more expensive than cars and clothes that only know one verb—glitter. You can smell the budget from the road.
The limo slows at the front, then stops. He turns to me like the rest of the world has agreed to wait. “You are certain?”
“Yes,” I say, and I am certain of this, at least; I am certain that for at least a few hours I can keep the stupid ticking machine quiet if I feed it gold. “Mask me again.”
He does not fumble. He does not make a production.
He lifts the lacquered mask and slides it over my eyes with a care that courts worship without kneeling to it, his fingertips precise where the ties meet in my hair.
His breath warms my cheek. His knuckles brush the curve of my jaw like an accident.
The mask bites gently into my temples and I sigh.
The world sharpens. The car becomes a confession booth.
He ties a bow I cannot see but feel resting against the back of my skull like a hand.
“There,” he says, the word a smile. He lifts his own mask—a simpler thing, black satin with bone-white filigree at the eyes—and positions it. He looks like a crime solved too late.
“Ready?” I ask, even though ready is a myth I tell myself to get to the next scene.
He studies me, a long, slow drink that turns my bones fizzy. “I was ready in 1863,” he says, and I decide we will never unpack that line because I’d rather wear it.
We walk away from the driver—man in white gloves who calls me ma’am like I’m someone to be respected.
The valet stand for the peasants flickers with jack-o’-lanterns carved by hands that have never burned themselves on a candle; I grit my teeth against the urge to fix their faces.
The steps up to the portico are marble slick, and Marrow leans his arm for me without thinking.
I take it like I always planned to be a problem on stairs.
The doors yawn open and the ballroom hits like a flood.
Chandeliers like galaxies. Velvet draped from the ceiling in swoops so sumptuous the fabric might sue for slander if you call it velvet.
A string quartet sawing something Baroque and dangerous on a stage edged in skulls made of sugar, each flickering with a candle in its mouth.
Waiters with silver trays of champagne, oysters, and little bites so precious they are practically jewelry.
Masks everywhere: feathered, beaked, horned, jeweled, veiled.
Laughter bubbling like it knows where to go.
Perfume thick enough to drown delicate things.
And under it all, the iron tang of money, like a clean knife.
I laugh, loud and delighted and horribly sincere. “Oh, rich people. You get it so wrong you loop back around to right.”
Marrow’s arm tightens under my hand, a private communion. “This is a temple to vanity.”
I can’t argue with that.
A woman in red silk—the exact shade of a cardinal told a sensual secret—glides by with a skull-tipped cane and says, “Divine,” at my dress without breaking stride.
A man in a wolf mask gestures with his whiskey as if he owns the moon. The host—a tuxedo with a smile inside—makes a speech from the balcony about art as memory and the beauty of decay and donors, and I clap because I am polite, but also because he is right even if he’s insufferable.
“Dance with me,” Marrow says, not a command, not a request, just to the point.
I slip my hand free and drift sideways, letting a trio of masked saints swallow me, letting a waiter with a tray of champagne give me cover.
I take a flute, drink like I mean it, and slide along the edge of the dance floor until the music swells into a waltz that has ruined better people than me.
I step into it alone, because that’s a kind of invitation.
He finds me at the second turn, of course he does; he is inevitable.
His hand appears at my shoulder blade, a polite pressure, and I tip my chin like I’m granting permission when I’m actually begging.
His other hand finds mine, glove on glove, silk rasp kissing silk rasp.
We fall into dance like the floor has been waiting for our weight.
“My love,” he murmurs, mouth near my ear, “you are the only war I want to lose.”
“I want you to lose so hard,” I say, and we spin.
The quartet plays something that remembers blood.
The room tilts. Marrow is a perfect dancer, infuriatingly so; he guides without pushing, he follows without yielding, he moves like he remembers bodies better than gravity does.
I let him steer because I’m busy watching our reflection peel across the windows and settle on the night outside, where the gardens glow like a bribe.
“You’re very good at this,” I say, which is code for, I’m thinking about your hands on my hips and your cock between my legs.
“I have been practicing since I was four,” he replies. “Practice improves the odds of survival.”
“Who wants to survive?” I laugh, high and bright. “Not me.”
“Not me,” he says, softer, and there’s a darkness in it I want to kiss just to see what color it turns.
We pass couples in brocade and velvet, masks nodding, jewels blurring.
A woman with a peacock headpiece eyes Marrow like he’s a painting that might bite; I cut her a smile that would snake through a keyhole and lock it from the inside.
A waiter tries to intercept with caviar; I bite one and let the salt explode on my tongue and hand the spoon back with a look that says I’ve licked better things.
“You are scandalous,” Marrow says, proud and pained.
“I am honest,” I say, and I am. I want him, I want this, I want every chandelier to crash just for dramatics, I want to bury the tick-tock in music thick enough to choke. “And I’m bored of being alive politely.”
So I stop being polite.
He’s close enough that his breath fogs the little black feathers at my mask.
I let my fingers drag down the front of his waistcoat, slow, like I’m mapping out a murder scene.
My nails find the line of his trousers where fabric hugs bone and sin, and I press, just once, testing the world.
The press becomes a rub. The rub becomes a deliberate slide, palm flattening over the promise I can feel through wool, the seam a tightness that answers me in a way only honest clothes will.
Marrow inhales like someone who’s been holding a secret too long and they’ve finally let it out of its cage.
His jaw works. His hands find my hips—polite, at first, like a gentleman adjusting a sculpture—and then they want more, want to own the motion like a creed.
I push my hip into him on purpose, the small of my back arching so the contact quivers from bone to bone.
His fingers tighten. The glove creases white where it grips my flesh through silk.
I brush the heel of my hand against the head of him, over fabric, over certainty.
It’s a flirt that should be juvenile, but the effect is volcanic.
His breath leaves in a single, sharp sound.
I like that sound; it belongs on a leash I could pull when I want to make him hurry.
He is the sort of man who holds storms in the pockets of his coat, and I am the sort of girl who likes to finger the lightning until it laughs.
I slide a little lower, the pad of my thumb finding a place that makes him lose the polite part of him—that tiny, human wobble at the center of control.
His face colors, an honest, impossible bloom against bone.
I press again, harder, because cruelty is sometimes the truest kindness: I want to wake that animal while he still remembers how to be civil afterwards.
“Stop teasing me in public,” he says, voice a low thread of silk fraying at the edges. It’s an order wrapped in a confession.
“Oh?” I purr, an invitation and a dare. My knee bumps the inside of his thigh—deliberate—so that his body forgets how to be statuesque.
He shifts, and the place my hand rests becomes an argument he can’t quite win.
The music swells, and with each measure he unravels a little more, like an austere poem giving up its last line.
I lean in until my mask brushes his cheek, breath warm and dangerous. “I like you distracted,” I tell him in a whisper that might be prayer or might be sabotage. “It makes your hands greedy.”
They are greedy. They move, first to steady me, then to take me.
The first brush of his mouth is a question; the second is an answer.
When he kisses me, it’s not polite. It’s a pulling, a claim, a soft and terrifying collapse into wanting that tastes like church incense and broken vows.
His tongue finds the space behind my lips like he’s looking for contraband and I let him.
The world narrows to the press of his chest against mine, the rough of his stubble, the scent of him—bitter tea and something older—and the ridiculous, brilliant certainty that if the machine in my ribs is a bomb, his mouth is the only fuse I trust.
We kiss like we are consecrating something dangerous. It is a hard, hot closing of distance, and when our mouths part for air it is only because the room insists they do, not because we want it.