Chapter 5
Vivi
Dominic chose this dress.
He sent the image to my phone with a time and an address and the particular silence that meant this is not a suggestion.
Black, deep-cut at the back, the kind of construction that requires you to hold yourself a certain way and punishes you if you don't. He liked me in things that announced themselves before I spoke.
I understood the function. An ornament reflects well on the man who chose it.
He chose it for the Harbor Lights Gala, and then he died before it happened, and the dress has been hanging in my closet for four months wrapped in its garment bag waiting.
I put it on.
I stand in his mirror — the long one in the master bedroom that I keep planning to replace — and I look at myself in the dress he picked for a night he never got to use me for, and I think: mine now. The dress. The mirror. The gala he'll never walk into again. All of it. Mine.
Caden is in the living room in a dark suit and a charcoal shirt and an expression that does not change at all when he sees me. He is on duty. Totally focused.
Nothing moves on his face. He doesn't reach for a word. The silence stretches and I feel it move over me the way his eyes do. Slowly. Deliberately. Like he has all the time in the world and intends to use it.
I wait for something.
He says: "Saint's outside."
***
Dominic's foundation board has filled the Morrow Museum's east wing for this particular occasion every June for four years, and for four years I've stood in that wing exactly like this: composed, assembled, performing the Ferraro name in every room that expects it.
The harbor lights are strung along the museum's exterior in the tradition the gala takes its name from, white and cold above the water.
The cars line the drive and the canapés make their rounds and the women with their charitable smiles and their careful eyes take one long look at me and decide what to do with a widow three weeks out.
I know how to act in these situations. There is something I don’t know.
What is new, and alarming, and something I have no prior experience to navigate, is standing in this room with Caden Byrne two feet behind my left shoulder, and wanting him so badly I have to think about what to do with my hands.
The dark suit, the stillness, the way he scans a room in one sweep and then does it again because the first sweep only catches what's obvious and he's interested in what isn't.
I know what his hands feel like on my hips.
I know the specific warmth of his mouth on my throat and the sound I made when I found the place where his shoulder meets his neck and tried to muffle it there.
I know these things because of last night and I cannot stop knowing them and I am standing in a room full of people who are watching me and I need to hold a conversation with the board chair and my body has apparently decided that is not the priority.
The board chair, Aldric Ponte, shakes my hand and says “Vivienne, how are you holding up?” with the particular tone that contains both a question and a verdict. He looks past me at Caden and his expression narrows.
"My security," I introduce.
Caden doesn't offer his hand. He simply looks at Ponte with the level attention of a man who has already run the assessment and filed it, and Ponte gets the message the way men like Ponte always do — by not quite holding the gaze.
"Of course," Ponte says. "Sensible."
He moves off.
"You scared him," I say, low, without turning.
"He scared himself." A pause. "He's been watching you since you walked in. Started at the door."
His voice is aimed at the back of my neck, close enough that I feel the warmth of it, and something pulls low in my stomach.
I keep my smile exactly where it is through an act of will.
Another beat, his voice dropping further, intimate in a room full of people who cannot hear it.
"Stay visible. Don't go anywhere without telling me first."
The way he says it does something I'm not prepared for.
Not an order. Not quite. The space between an order and a request where he tends to live, and I feel it settle somewhere in my chest and radiate outward and I take a glass from a passing tray and hold it without drinking and remind myself where I am.
I hold my glass and I hold my spine and I hold my expression in the careful neutral that requires nothing from anyone and offers nothing back. I do what I've always done in these rooms.
The difference is that every time someone moves behind me, I track it, checking without turning, because I know the particular quality of Caden's presence now and everything else registers as absence.
I've never had anyone at my back in this room. Dominic stood beside me when it served him and away from me when it didn't. What I've had at my back in rooms like this is the architecture — the wall, the corner, the exit I've already mapped. Never a person.
The room looks different from here. Same photographs, same harbor lights through the glass.
But standing in it with Caden two feet behind me and his attention on every door, I don't have to brace.
I don't have to hold the room at arm's length and map my exits and calculate the angle to the door. I can simply stand here.
I hate that it feels like relief and I wonder if I’m ready to fully surrender my safety to this man.
The man in the grey suit is at the bar, then the east corridor, then three people to my left during the museum director's remarks.
I slide to the edge of the remarks circle. "Grey suit, six o'clock."
"Seen him." No pause. He'd already had him. "Morozov, probably. Not the cleaner — a watcher." A beat. "He'll try to speak to you."
"And if he does?"
"He won't."
I don't ask what that means. I already know, and knowing is its own kind of heat.
The man in the grey suit is at the outer edge of the room when Caden separates from my shoulder.
They go into the coat closet off the east corridor.
Fifteen seconds. Twenty. A couple passes close to the corridor door and stops to speak to someone they know, and I stand with my wine glass and my composed expression and think about what is happening ten feet away. I should be frightened.
What I feel instead is this: I want to know what his face looks like right now.
I want to know what he looks like when the controlled professional precision drops away and there's nothing left but the thing underneath it — the part that had me against a kitchen wall with his mouth on my throat and his hands on my hips like he'd already decided I was his and was simply making it official.
I want to know if those are the same thing, if the man in that coat closet and the man in my kitchen are continuous, and I suspect they are, and I suspect that's the most dangerous thing I've let myself think all evening.
The applause is starting for the director's remarks. I am not listening.
Caden comes out of the corridor alone.
He crosses the room, resumes the two feet behind my shoulder, and as he passes me his hand touches the small of my back and the contact moves through me like a lit match.
My breath catches and I convert it to a sip of wine and I look straight ahead at the museum director and I feel the place where his fingers were like it's been marked.
"He's comfortable," Caden says, low, at the back of my neck. "He won't bother anyone tonight."
"Comfortable." I keep my voice level. I have no idea how.
"He needed to sit down."
The applause comes. I join it on instinct, my hands moving while the rest of me stays very still, standing in Dominic's dress in Dominic's gala with a man I cannot stop wanting at my back, and the wanting has been building since the kitchen wall last night and it has nowhere to go and I have to stand here for another forty minutes and make conversation with people who are deciding what to do with me.
The hand at my back is gone. The two fingers of it remain, warm and specific, like a brand I can't see.
***
The drive back is quiet in the way that accumulates.
Saint moves through amber and cold white — the harbour, the cathedral district, the tech glass of Meridian dissolving into the older brick of the Pier.
Caden drives. I'm in the passenger seat rather than the back because somewhere between the coat check and the lobby that became the configuration and neither of us commented on it, and I don't want to think about what it means that I'm glad, so I don't.
We don't speak for ten blocks.
I look out the window and feel every inch of distance between us.
Eight, maybe ten inches of console between my thigh and his.
The gearshift. His hand on it, the knuckles I've been careful not to look at all evening and am looking at now, the scar across the index finger, the particular quality of stillness in a hand that knows how to do damage and is currently doing nothing at all.
The city slides past.
His hand moves.
It settles on my knee. The weight of it is devastating in a way I wasn't braced for, because it isn't urgent, it isn't demanding, it's just his hand on my knee in the dark of the car with the city going past, and the patience of it is worse than anything urgent would be.
It says: I know. I'm not going anywhere. We have time.
I look down at it.
I put my hand over his.
Neither of us speaks.