Chapter 7 — The Harvest Gala #2
The white pocket square came out folded to a point, crisp as paper.
He wiped his own fingers first, one by one, unhurried, then caught my right hand before I could pull back and blotted the champagne from my skin with the same square.
Dab. Press. Dab. The linen rasped over the place he had just crushed.
His tic, neat and paternal, cleaning up what he spilled.
Beneath the blotting, my wrist bloomed red in the shape of his fingers, two inches wide, already darkening at the thumbprint over my pulse.
“There,” he said softly. “Pretty again.”
Rage came up through the pain like a fox through tall grass. Low. Silent. Showing teeth. My left hand found the slit of my dress by instinct, two fingers brushing the sheath's edge under the silk, the mother-of-pearl hilt steady against my thigh.
“You are making a scene, Marcus,” I said, quiet, each word placed like a heel on marble. “Let go of my wrist.”
His smile thinned. His fingers tightened one final quarter-turn, a punctuation mark, and then a shadow fell across the tower table and a voice arrived at my left shoulder, low and even.
“Mind if I steal her, Marcus.”
Dante Kross stood there in his black wool coat, too dark and too still for a charity ballroom, his scarred knuckles empty at his sides. He did not look at my wrist. He looked at Marcus, level, unhurried, a man reading load-bearing walls.
“She owes me a dance,” Dante said.
Silence stretched one beat, two. The tower girl froze with the bottle tilted.
Champagne trembled at the top tier and spilled whispering down.
Marcus's eyes flicked from Dante to me to the ring of faces now openly watching, Julian among them across the floor, Gideon Slade a pale cutout by the cloakroom door.
Witnesses stacked three deep. Whatever Marcus had planned for the dark corner of a public room, it needed no audience.
He let go.
He folded the damp square once, twice, and pocketed it. His smile re-seated itself.
“Mr. Kross,” he said. “The Cleaner dances now? How modern.”
“Only when the song is worth the floor,” Dante said.
Marcus picked up a fresh flute and raised it to me. “Remember what I said, my dear. Stay where we can see you.” He leaned on his cane and turned to a couple from the art institute as if I had already been escorted away, dismissed into the music.
My wrist throbbed in open air. The red stood out obscenely against my pale skin, four finger bars and a thumb oval, already edging purple at the deepest point. I tucked my right hand against the skirt of my dress before the nearest camera could find it.
Dante moved half a step closer. He did not touch me. He held his left arm out at exactly the distance where I could take it or leave it, his voice pitched for me alone.
“Wren. I'm going to put my hand at your back, high between your shoulders, in two seconds, so the room reads us together. Say no and I walk away.”
One. Two.
His palm settled high between my shoulder blades through the silk, warm and steady, weight without grip.
The room exhaled. I felt it happen, the story locking into place around us like ice forming.
Oh, look, she's with Kross. Oh, that's why she smiled.
Julian's brows lifted across the floor and then smoothed into something almost amused.
Gideon kept watching from the cloakroom doorway, lashless eyes catching the light.
I slid my left hand, clutch and all, into the crook of Dante's arm. My choice. My fingers, not his. The silk of my dress whispered against his wool coat. The locket cooled against my skin as my heart slowed one notch, then another.
“Terrace,” I said under my smile. “East. Now. Before I shake.”
“East terrace,” he repeated, loud enough for the nearest ears, easy as a man claiming a dance he was owed. “You promised.”
He walked me out of the circle with his hand at my back and my wrist hidden in burgundy folds, two steps back from the tower into the crowd's soft murmur, then along the rim of the dance floor where couples parted without knowing why.
No one followed. That was the point of doing it in front of everyone.
A theft witnessed becomes a story, and stories have rules even men like Marcus obey until they find a darker room.
The east terrace doors were glass and sweating with the difference between inside and out.
A waiter opened them and October hit my bare shoulders like clean water.
Fifty-two degrees, starless and city-orange at the edges, the lake wind cutting through the heat clinging to my skin.
The sounds of the ballroom dulled behind glass.
I made it to the far end of the rail before my knees remembered what my wrist knew.
I gripped the cold stone with my left hand, clutch crushed between palm and rail, and bent over the city with my right arm cradled to my stomach.
Do not cry. Do not shake where Gideon can see.
Breathe through the nose. Count. The bruise pulsed with its own heartbeat, hot and tight, skin already drawing shiny over the swelling. Two inches. Finger-shaped. His.
“I'm going to get ice,” Dante said from a careful foot away. “Wrapped in a napkin. Left side of your vision in three seconds. I won't touch the wrist.”
I nodded without looking up. I heard his shoes cross stone, heard the low murmur of him speaking to the terrace waiter, heard him return.
A white bundle entered my sight from the left, as promised.
I took it with my left hand and pressed the cold to the inside of my forearm above the bruise, not on it, hissing through my teeth at the relief.
“Water,” he said. “Also left. Take your time.”
A glass appeared on the rail. I drank left-handed, water instead of champagne, the cold running straight down the middle of me.
Below us Chicago glittered, Gold Coast windows and streetlights and the black cut of the lake.
Somewhere north the boathouse rotted into the shore with its charred pine and lake rot.
Somewhere south his garage sat with its motor oil and cedar.
Here, eight floors up, hothouse lilies ghosted out every time the doors opened, mixing with cigar smoke and cold stone.
“He marked you in front of three hundred people,” Dante said quietly. Not a question. His hands rested on the rail a full foot from mine. The black coat moved faintly in the wind. “He wanted Julian to see you handled. He wanted me to see it too.”
“He wanted me to stay pretty and visible,” I said.
My voice came out steadier than my hand.
“On Julian's arm or his. Like a vase moved to a safer shelf.” I lifted the ice and looked at the wrist straight on for the first time.
The thumb oval had gone plum at the center. “It's going to show tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
“Good.” I pressed the ice back to my forearm and met his eyes for the first time since the tower.
Ice-gray, scar splitting the left brow, temples gray in the sconce light.
He watched my face the way he watched everything, counting breaths, but his hand stayed where it was, announcing itself by staying still.
“Let it show. Let Ophelia see. Let the cameras wonder why I'm wearing a cuff bracelet for a week.”
Something shifted in his expression, grim and almost tender.
“Wren,” he said. “I'm going to stand here until your shaking stops. Then if you want to go back in, we go back in together, on your signal, your hand in my arm like before. That locks the story. Nobody touches you twice tonight after being seen handing you to me.”
The doors opened down the rail. Gideon Slade stood in the spill of gold light for one long second, shaved head gleaming, scarred right hand in his pocket, eyes fixed not on Dante but on my wrist cradled against burgundy silk.
He noted it. Filed it. Then the doors sighed shut and he was gone back into the warmth, leaving cold air and lilies in his wake.
My shaking slowed. The ice numbed my forearm.
The water steadied my stomach. I set the napkin bundle on the rail and straightened, rolling my shoulders back until the silk settled and the locket lay flat.
Displayed, then defended. The math had changed.
An hour ago I had walked in as Julian's orphan, available to be arranged.
Now I walked back as a woman another man had claimed in front of witnesses, bruise hidden or not.
I looked down at the wrist one last time, red blooming unmistakable under gold light, and tucked it into the shadows of my skirt.
“Signal in three,” I said. “Two. One.”
I slid my left hand into his arm.
Behind the glass the quartet played on, and we opened the doors and walked back into the heat together.