Chapter 12 #2
“I remember enough. I remember Mama in a green dress she hated because he liked how it looked in photographs. I remember her taking it off in the car on the way home and not saying one word the whole drive. I heard the argument about that when they got home.” Angelina’s voice doesn’t rise as she states facts.
“You want to believe you rescued this family by dying. Maybe you did. Then you came back, and the first thing you did was find a beautiful woman with nowhere else to go and start deciding what she wears. I need you to at least see the pattern because Papa never could.”
I let the silence stretch because I don’t have anything true to put in it that wouldn’t prove her point.
“I’m not trying to own her,” I say finally.
“I believe you’re not trying to.” Angelina’s face softens by a degree, which is worse than the anger. “That’s not the same as not doing it. He wasn’t trying to either. He just never once asked Mama what she wanted, and by the time she might have told him, she’d stopped expecting to be asked.”
She puts a hand on my arm, the first gentleness she’s shown me since I came back from the dead. “Ask Piper what she wants. Not what keeps her safe. What she wants. It’s a different question, and I’ve never once heard you ask it.”
My phone buzzes with Adrian’s name, and I step back into the main room to read it, which lets me stop answering Angelina, and we both know that’s why I do it.
Confirmed the gala guest list. Two names you’ll want to know about.
Emil Vogt is attending under his Geneva shell, and a collector named Duvall is registered as a bidder.
Duvall’s financing runs through the same lender that holds the Voss debt, and he’s brokered pieces for Shilov’s people twice.
She’ll be in the room with both of them.
You’ll want her positioned to be seen as protected, not as a target. I can advise on placement if useful.
Adrian’s message is useful. Vogt and Duvall are exactly the names a careful trustee would flag before he let the widow walk into that room.
I forward the message to Platon and tell him to confirm Duvall’s financing through a second source, because I confirm everything through a second source, and tonight is not the night to make an exception.
The phone goes back into my pocket with nothing decided.
Across the room, Piper has turned to catch her reflection in the tall mirror, and Vera stands behind her adjusting the fall of the silk at her shoulder, the two of them a young woman and an old one taking in the same image, and I can’t read what’s on Vera’s face when she thinks no one is watching.
“The necklace,” I tell Denova. “Bring the vault case.”
Angelina is right, and I’ll be proven righter than I want to be.
The stones say untouchable, and untouchable is a message every man in that ballroom will read, including the ones I don’t want reading Piper at all.
A thing built to mark her as mine also marks her as worth reaching for.
I know it as I say it, and I buy the necklace anyway, because the alternative is sending her in unmarked, and I’ve decided the risk I can manage is the one I can see coming.
She brings it on a rolling stand, a shallow steel case the size of a serving tray, and when she turns the key and lifts the lid the light off the stones reaches the far wall.
Six pieces sit against black velvet under a light angled to wake them up, ranging from tasteful to obscene, and I pass over the tasteful ones without slowing down, a choker of small stones that would flatter and disappear, and a pendant that is elegant and forgettable.
Angelina watches me skip them. She knows what I’m doing before I do it, because she grew up in the same house, watching the same father teach us both that in these rooms a woman’s jewelry is a number everyone present can read.
I choose the one at the far end, a construction of graduated diamonds that costs what the salon costs.
The plan doesn’t require diamonds. Every man at that gala needs to look at Piper’s throat and read what these people read instead of names, that she stands under a protection expensive enough to be a threat.
“That one,” I say. Then I make myself address my sister’s point. “I want you to wear it because every man in that room will understand what it means. You can refuse it. I’d rather you knew why I chose it than wore it because I told you to.”
Piper turns from the mirror and watches me, because I’ve never once handed her the choice before, and she’s deciding whether to trust the version of me that just did. “It costs more than a building.”
“It buys you a room where no one can afford to touch you.” I hold her gaze. “That’s the whole point of it.”
She hears the double meaning but doesn’t mention it. Then she surprises me.
“Fine, then I pick the earrings.” She says it to Vera, not to me, and she reaches past the obvious choices to a pair of small drops at the tray’s edge, plain gold, the least expensive thing in the case. “These. If I’m going to be a walking price tag, I get one thing on me that’s my taste.”
Vera looks at the earrings, then at Piper, and takes a second longer than the moment needs before she speaks.
“Those are the ones I’d have chosen,” she says grudgingly.
“Restraint reads as confidence. Everyone drowning in stones looks like they’re trying.
You’ll look like you don’t have to.” She sets the gold drops aside for Piper to put on, then takes the diamond necklace from Denova, checks the clasp with two deft fingers, and fastens it around Piper’s throat herself.
She does it gently, which is not a word I have ever needed for Vera before today.
“There.” Vera steps back to look at the whole of it. Her voice gives away nothing. “Now she won’t embarrass us.”
Angelina catches my eye in the mirror and holds it a beat too long. I look away first, because I’ve run out of ways to tell my sister she’s wrong.
Denova closes the vault case while Vera orders the garment bags sent ahead to Water Mill. Tomorrow night, Vogt and Duvall will see Piper bearing my name and the diamonds that say she’s under my protection. What they decide to do about it is the one part of this that no amount of silk can control.