Chapter 7 — The Harvest Gala
◆
One second after I understood I had let the Cleaner lie for me, headlights swept the alley mouth and Felix Rourke pulled Dante's black Escalade tight to the print-shop door without a sound I could name over my own breathing.
Three quiet nights carried me from that Tuesday to this Friday.
Tuesday night Felix drove the long way while I rode separate in a night car to my Gold Coast apartment.
Wednesday I slept eleven hours and ate soup standing up in my kitchen and scrubbed my hands until they were only hands again.
Thursday Ophelia locked the Opal Room doors at noon and fitted the burgundy dress herself on her knees with pins in her mouth.
Friday at seven fifty-five a car brought me to the Gold Coast hotel, and I walked through the metal detectors with my chin up while the wand skimmed wide of my left thigh, and checked my wrap at coat check, and stepped into the ballroom at eight forty-seven with three hundred people already shining under the light.
The heat hit first. Warm air washed over my bare shoulders, thick with hothouse lilies and spilled champagne and the lemon-oil polish of a floor that had been buffed for this exact crowd.
The string quartet played low under three hundred voices and the constant bright clink of glass on glass.
Chandeliers poured gold wash over everything, and for one breath I just stood in the doorway and counted the way I always counted.
East terrace doors. Service corridor behind the champagne tower.
Main stairs past coat check. Foyer elevators. Four ways out.
My dress held like it had been sewn on me, which it nearly had.
Floor-length burgundy silk on thin straps, the left slit cut high enough that my fingers could find the sheath strapped to my thigh without hiking anything anyone would notice.
Gold strappy heels. Huntress-red on my mouth.
Honey-blonde hair pulled into a glossy chignon that bared my throat.
My mother's vintage locket closed warm at the base of my neck.
In my left hand a little champagne clutch, and inside it my burner phone, silent and faceless as a spare tooth.
Ophelia found me before I took five steps.
“There she is, baby bat,” she said against my cheek, loud enough for the couple beside us, her black bob sharp as a blade and her six-inch heels putting her eye to eye with me. She wore emerald cut to the navel and smelled of clove and hairspray. “Breathe. You look like money that bites.”
“I feel like bait in a good dress,” I murmured, smiling at a woman from the museum board whose name I knew the way I knew exits.
“You are bait in a good dress. Difference is you know it.” She slid her arm through my right one and steered me into the current.
“Left hand stays free for shaking. Sip, don't drink.
If anyone asks about Lang's shop, you haven't left the Gold Coast in a week except to hold my handbag while I cried over seating charts.”
Iris Bellamy caught us by the ice sculpture, all tall mint-fresh efficiency in borrowed navy, her steel thermos nowhere in sight for once. She kissed air by my ear.
“Wren. God. That color should be illegal in three states.”
“Only two,” I said. “I checked.”
She laughed and lowered her voice while her eyes kept smiling. “You hear about the alderman's wife and the florist? Tell me yes so I can live through you.”
“Tell me first and I'll confirm with great authority,” I said, and let her talk, because Iris talking meant I could scan.
I scanned.
North pillar. Black wool coat. Stillness.
Dante Kross stood where the chandelier light did not quite reach, one shoulder to the pillar, hands empty at his sides.
He did not nod. He did not look away either.
From across three hundred guests and a forest of lifted flutes, his attention sat on me like a weight I had agreed to carry.
Ledger for ashes. That was the bargain. He burned his cleanup order for me Tuesday night and told Marcus Thorne there was no trace, and now we were both in this room pretending we were strangers who had never stood in a garage with a knife at a throat.
My pulse ticked once, hard, under the locket chain. I smiled at Iris and asked about the florist's van.
Julian Corvine found me ten minutes later, the way warmth finds a room.
“Wren, my girl,” he said, and the whole circle near the dance floor turned to watch him kiss my cheek.
He smelled of cedar and cigar smoke going sweet with age, his silver mane combed back, his three-piece suit charcoal and perfect.
His right hand cupped my elbow, fond and proprietary, and as he drew back I saw it.
A rust-red smudge along the edge of his right cuff.
Ink. He always had ink on him somewhere.
Someone near us laughed and said Julian signed everything but the dance cards, and he chuckled the way godfathers chuckle in photographs.
“Look at you,” he said. “Vivienne would have wept. How are you sleeping, little one?”
“Better now the gala's here,” I said. “You always make October bearable.”
“Flatterer.” He squeezed my elbow once. “Stay where I can see you tonight. I want the photographers to get the good side of this family.” He moved on in a wash of handshakes, leaving the ghost of his cologne and the small bright weight of being claimed by the safest man in Chicago.
Ophelia leaned in. “Two hundred for charity and fifty for showing off his favorite orphan. Smile like you don't know the math.”
“I am smiling,” I said through the smile.
“I know. Terrifying.”
I took a champagne flute from a passing tray with my left hand, the clutch tucked under the same arm, stem pinched light between two fingers.
The first sip was cold needles, too sweet, exactly right for the part I was playing.
I circulated. I air-kissed. Somewhere to my left the champagne tower glittered, five tiers high, a girl in black gloves feeding the top with steady hands.
Marcus Thorne stood beside that tower with his cane planted and his eyes on me.
He was a big man going soft in the middle, silver buzz cut catching the gold light, his tuxedo tailored to hide what the years had added.
He smiled when I looked. He lifted his glass an inch.
Across the room, my name left his mouth. Not loud. Loud enough.
“Wren Halloway. Come rescue an old bore from the champagne fumes.”
Heads turned. Smiles widened. Oh, look, Marcus wants the pretty orphan.
Oh, look, she's blushing. The room did the thing rooms do, arranging itself around a small public kindness, and I felt the shift like a draft.
A minute ago I had been display. Now I was target.
Every eye that followed me to that tower would remember who walked me there and how long I stayed.
with my flute in my left hand and my clutch under my arm and my right hand empty, because empty hands look harmless.
The marble under my heels gave way to carpet near the tower. The air there smelled sharper, yeast and sugar and cold. The girl with the gloves kept pouring. Marcus watched me come the way men watch doors they own.
“Mr. Thorne,” I said, bright as a bell. “You look like a man hiding from the silent auction.”
“Marcus, please.” His voice was smooth corporate-corpse politeness, every edge filed down to a smile. “Your godfather parades you for the cameras and leaves me to beg for a minute. Cruel. You are lovelier every time I see you, and every time I see you, you are running.”
“Running keeps the dress fitted,” I said. Someone beside us laughed. I set my flute on the tower table to free both hands for the little helpless gesture that makes older men feel gallant. That was the mistake. I knew it the instant the stem left my fingers.
His right hand closed around my right wrist.
Not a grab. A cuff. Fingers wrapping clean over the small bones, thumb pressing into the pulse hollow, the boar ring cold against my skin.
He smiled down at me, shark-flat brown eyes wet with reflected chandelier light, and turned the ring once with his middle finger so the boar's snout ground into the vein.
“Be reasonable, my dear,” he said quietly, under the quartet, under the murmur, for me alone. “You have been asking questions in rooms that do not belong to you. Print shops. Morgues. Little girls who play detective get displayed in worse places than ballrooms.”
My body understood before my manners did. The carpet tilted. My breath shortened to a thin pull through my nose. The pressure climbed, deliberate, a man turning a dial he had turned a hundred times, until the small bones shifted and fire ran from wrist to elbow.
“Marcus,” I said, still smiling because three hundred people were watching and cameras loved a crying girl. “You're hurting me.”
“Am I?” He tilted his head, concerned as a doctor. “Then lean closer and listen so I don't have to hold on.”
I leaned. The chignon pulled at my nape. The locket swung and tapped once against my sternum.
“You will stop visiting Iris Bellamy after hours,” he murmured. “You will stop calling in favors with that night-shift detective. And tonight you will stay visible, on Julian's arm or mine, where the people who worry about you can see you. Do you understand?”
The pain crested. My left hand jerked on the tablecloth and caught the base of my own abandoned flute.
Glass tipped. Champagne sheeted over the white cloth and across the back of his hand and mine, cold as a slap, fizzing over the boar ring and into the crease of my wrist where his thumb dug deepest.
He released me just enough to reach his breast pocket.