Chapter Five
THE MEN IN BLACK SUITS poured into the ballroom like weather through a broken window.
There were at least a dozen of them, and they didn't run and didn't push; they simply filled the room the way rising water fills a cellar, fanning out along the walls with their hands folded and their eyes moving, and the party guests who'd been edging toward the exits discovered that the exits now had opinions.
Valerio Le Sabre released Amybeth Schnapp's wrist as though setting down something he'd finished reading.
And the ballroom, being a ballroom full of society parents who could sense power the way sharks sense distress, immediately tried to reach him.
A hedge-fund father was already extending his hand and his firm's name.
Two mothers had begun the complicated work of turning up at his elbow by apparent coincidence. Someone, somewhere, said the word golf.
Valerio crooked one finger.
That was all. One finger, without even looking, and a man in hotel livery appeared out of the crowd at a speed that suggested he'd been waiting his entire career for that finger.
The hedge-fund father found himself smoothly intercepted.
The coincidence mothers were re-coincidenced toward the buffet.
And the hotel manager planted himself before Amybeth Schnapp, gray and glistening, a man performing surgery on his own retirement.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Schnapp, but please refrain from making a scene, or you'll have to be escorted out by security."
For a moment Amybeth simply stared at him, and Aislinn, who was still holding her son and her breath, watched the woman's face perform its whole repertoire, disbelief, calculation, rage, in the time it took the quartet to abandon ship entirely.
"This is my son's party," Amybeth said, at a volume that sent the nearest waiter fleeing, "and I'm the one you're asking to leave? Are you insane? You're clearly stupid. Who's your boss? Who owns—"
The manager looked at Valerio.
Valerio nodded, once.
"Mr. Le Sabre," the manager said apologetically, "is the owner of this hotel."
The ink on that particular fact, Aislinn would learn later, was approximately forty minutes old, which meant the man had bought the entire building faster than most people bought umbrellas in the rain.
At the moment, all she knew was that the sentence moved through the ballroom like a cold current, and the knot of women who had, one hour ago, been so very brave about single mothers and blank school forms began, delicately, to back away from Amybeth Schnapp.
Not far. Just far enough to be out of the photograph.
Amybeth saw it. Aislinn watched her see it, and watched the seeing make everything worse.
"You think you can fix this with money?" Her voice cracked upward. "Then I'll sue you—"
Valerio crooked another finger.
This time what stepped forward was a woman, and Aislinn's first, unworthy, entirely human thought was oh, come on, because the woman was tall in the way of people who are paid to walk toward cameras, ash-blonde, thirtyish, and beautiful with such casual efficiency that two of the retreating mothers stopped retreating just to stare at her.
She wore a suit the color of bone and carried a slim leather folder, and she looked at Amybeth Schnapp the way a cat looks at a wounded and self-important bird.
"Please do," the woman said gently, and produced a card between two fingers. "Here's my calling card."
She gave it to Amybeth, who took it the way people take things they've already lost.
"We've already built a case of bullying," the woman continued, in the same gentle voice, which somehow kept getting worse. "We welcome seeing you in court."
The backing-away became general. It was quite something to watch, a whole ballroom of the best families in the city discovering, individually and in waves, that they'd never really known the Schnapps at all, had barely spoken to them, had in fact only come today out of politeness.
Nannies appeared. Children were gathered.
Somewhere near the cake, Brooklyn Schnapp began to wail that it was his party and nobody was allowed to leave, and was evacuated mid-sentence by a woman in sensible shoes.
"In the meantime," the blonde woman said, closing her folder with a small, final click, "please refrain from disturbing my employer and his partner."
Partner.
The word settled somewhere under Aislinn's ribs and stayed there.
Around her the exodus accelerated, mothers hurrying their children toward the doors with their eyes fixed carefully forward, and nobody, nobody at all, met Amybeth Schnapp's eyes on the way out, and Aislinn took all of it in dimly, from a great distance, because her entire mind had snagged on one word like a sleeve on a nail.
Partner. She would need to say something about that word.
She would need to say several things, in fact, just as soon as she remembered how sentences worked.
It was Louis who moved first.
Her son slipped his hand into hers, warm and sure. Then, with the gravity of a head of state, he offered his other hand to Valerio Le Sabre.
"Let's go?"
And the most dangerous man Aislinn had ever known looked down at the small hand being offered to him, and something crossed his face that she felt in her own ribs, and he took it.
They left the ruined party like that, the three of them, hand in hand in hand, past the abandoned chocolate fountain and the ice sculpture weeping quietly onto its table, and Louis, who'd apparently decided the situation was now stable enough for business, began asking questions the way other children skipped stones.
"Is the hotel really yours?"
"As of today."
"The whole thing? The pool too?"
"The pool too."
"Louis," Aislinn managed, in a voice that came out two sizes too small, "sweetheart, maybe we shouldn't, um, interrogate—"
"It's not an interrogation, Mama. It's due diligence." Louis looked back up at Valerio. "Do you play chess?"
"Yes."
"Are you any good?"
"Yes."
Louis nodded, the nod of a boy ticking boxes on an internal form, and Aislinn stammered something even she couldn't parse, and Valerio answered every question with the calm of a man who'd waited his whole life to be interrogated by exactly this examiner, and somewhere in there the elevator arrived and swallowed them all, entourage and impossible lawyer included.
It was outside the elevator, in the hush of the top-floor corridor, that Louis paused, looked up, and pointed at the blonde woman.
"Do you trust her, Papa?"
"Of course. Minna doesn't want to admit it—"
"And yet here you are, breaking your word again," the lawyer said seriously.
"—but she's my cousin, which makes her your aunt."
Louis absorbed this the way he absorbed everything, completely and at once, and Aislinn could actually see the calculation finish behind his eyes before he spoke.
"Then can I go with Aunt Minna while you and Mama talk it out?"
"What?" Panic hit Aislinn all at once, everywhere. "No, um—"
"That's a good idea."
That was Valerio, and it was already done.
That was the thing about him, had always been the thing about him.
By the time you heard the decision, the world had already rearranged itself around it.
Minna held out her hand, Louis took it with the composure of a small diplomat being reassigned, and her seven-year-old, her whole heart, her only family, walked away down a hotel corridor with a supermodel attorney, turning once to give his mother a thumbs-up that suggested he believed he'd done her a tremendous favor.
"Minna will feed him, won't she? He doesn't love vegetables, he only eats broccoli if you call it tiny trees, and his bedtime's eight but he negotiates, he's very good at negotiating, he gets that from—"
"Aislinn." Valerio's voice was gentle, and it stopped her cold. "He'll be fine."
She exhaled. "Right. Right, of course. Sorry, I don't know why I—"
The suite doors closed behind them.
And the moment, the very moment, they were alone, Valerio hauled her into his arms.
"I thought you were dead!"
She froze.
Every plan she'd had, every speech she'd rehearsed in eight years of imagining this impossible moment, every wall she'd built brick by brick by brick, all of it simply stopped, because his arms were around her too hard and his heart was slamming against her cheek and his voice had come apart on the last word in a place where voices don't pretend.
He pulled back just enough to cup her face in both hands.
"All these years, Aislinn."
His hands were shaking. She could feel them shaking, this man who'd emptied a ballroom with two fingers, and she shook her head against his palms, no, no, because this wasn't the script, he wasn't allowed to be the wounded one, and she pushed at his chest and twisted and tried to be free of him.
He wouldn't let her go.
"I thought you were dead," he said again, wrecked, final, like a man laying down evidence.
And Aislinn looked up into his eyes and found the one thing she had never once, in eight years, allowed herself to imagine there.
Pain. Old pain, the load-bearing kind, the kind you build a life on top of because there's nothing else to build on.
No man alive could counterfeit that. No dead man could carry it either.
Whatever story she'd survived on for eight years, whatever had kept her walking, working, hiding, breathing, it just broke. Straight down its spine.
He wasn't joking.
He wasn't lying.
So when he pulled her in again and kissed her, grief and fury and eight lost years all at once, Aislinn stopped being sensible for the first time in nearly a decade, and kissed him back, and let the world rearrange itself around that, too.
He kissed her like a man correcting the record.