Rogue (Reckless Kings MC #10)

Prologue

Lennox

The mirrors didn’t lie. They didn’t flinch.

They handed me back the same girl from every angle -- hair pinned high, veil arranged into a long pale river down my back, mouth painted into a soft, agreeable shape that didn’t belong to me.

I sat very straight on the velvet bench in the center of the bridal suite and counted the lilies banked along the vanity because counting was something to do besides screaming.

Twenty-two stems in the nearest arrangement. Thirty in the one by the window. Hundreds more downstairs, I knew, because I’d signed off on the order three weeks ago when my mother put the florist’s invoice in front of me and waited, pen in hand, for my signature.

“Stop touching your face.”

My mother’s reflection in the largest mirror didn’t look at mine.

She tugged the cathedral veil another inch to the left and smoothed it flat across the beaded bodice as if she were dressing a mannequin in a department store window.

Her own gown was champagne silk. The diamonds in her ears had been her grandmother’s.

She hadn’t asked me a single question since I’d stepped out of the dressing room two hours earlier.

The coordinator stood near the door with her clipboard pressed to her chest, ticking through the afternoon in clipped, professional sentences.

Processional at four. Ceremony forty minutes.

Receiving line in the rotunda. Photographs on the south lawn.

Cocktail hour. Grand entrance at six fifteen.

First dance. Toasts in the following order.

Father-daughter at seven oh five. She recited it all without looking up from her clipboard, and when she finished, she started again from the top while my mother agreed to every detail.

I worked the seam of my glove, the satin giving where my thumbnail pressed. A faint dent at the wrist. No one would notice. The string quartet was warming up somewhere below us, and the sound came up through the floor in pieces -- half a phrase, a tuning note, a run of scales.

The coordinator’s phone buzzed. She glanced at the screen and her professional smile thinned.

“Mr. Stewart is on his way up.”

My mother paused with her hand on the veil for a fraction of a second and then resumed.

“He shouldn’t be,” the coordinator said, as she stepped back from the bench and tucked her clipboard tighter against her chest as if it were a shield she’d been issued and intended to return at the end of her shift in good condition.

The knock was soft. Two raps. My mother crossed the room without a word and pulled open the door. The coordinator stepped out into the corridor without being asked, and my mother followed a beat later, closing the door behind her with a soft, click.

Grant didn’t hurry. He never hurried. He came in with the door barely making a sound and stopped just inside it to look at me, head slightly tilted.

He was already in his suit -- charcoal, custom, the lapels narrow as he preferred -- and as he crossed the room he straightened his platinum cufflinks, first one, then the other, turning each a quarter rotation as if it might have shifted in the eight feet between the door and where I sat.

“Stand up, Lennox.”

I stood. The skirt of the gown was heavy. The train caught against my heel, and I lifted it with one hand.

He came the last few steps and stopped close enough that I could smell the faint, cold sweetness of his cologne, the same one he’d worn the first night my father had brought him to the house for dinner two years ago.

I’d been sixteen and unsure what to do with my hands, and he’d touched the small of my back when he pulled out my chair.

“Look at me.”

I looked at him. His pale blue eyes were the color of a swimming pool in winter.

He reached for my wrist without hesitation, yanking me to him.

He took my jaw between his thumb and the curl of his fingers -- not tenderly, not as a question -- and squeezed.

His thumb drove up under my chin, and his nails -- manicured, square, immaculate -- bit into the soft place beneath my ear.

He never raised his voice. But he didn’t shy away from leaving marks.

“You won’t embarrass me tonight.”

I didn’t move. I couldn’t have moved.

“You will walk down the aisle. You will smile when the photographer asks you to smile. You will dance with your father, and you will dance with mine, and you will dance with me. And you won’t look at the floor while you do it.” His thumb pressed harder. “Are you listening, Lennox?”

I made some small sound that he took for yes.

“Two years ago, your father sat in my father’s office and asked for a great deal of money to save the company his own father built.

He needed cash and connections. Something about zoning exemptions.

We didn’t have to give the money to him.

We did. Because he offered collateral.” He dropped his gaze to the beading on my gown.

“And that collateral is standing in front of me.”

He let go.

He stepped back. He smoothed the front of his jacket where it had not needed smoothing. He glanced once at himself in the largest mirror, lifted his chin to check the knot of his tie, and adjusted the platinum bar of his cufflink another quarter turn.

“I’ll see you downstairs.” Without another word, he walked out.

The door clicked.

I didn’t move. The quartet ran the same scale again somewhere beneath my feet.

I lifted one hand -- slowly, carefully, fingertips hovering first -- and touched the hinge of my jaw.

I felt the warmth there, saw the faint, already-fading shape of him in my skin.

In the mirror, the same girl looked back at me from every angle, hair still pinned, veil still draped, mouth still painted into that soft, agreeable shape.

I stood there. The quartet finished tuning and went quiet. Below, guests quietly settled into their seats.

I hadn’t cried since the second tranche had cleared.

The door was four steps away and I’d taken two of them when I heard him.

My father’s voice. Low and clipped, it came through the thin wall of the adjoining anteroom.

The wall was papered in pale silk, just like the rest of the venue.

I knew how thin it was. I’d heard the coordinator’s heels clicking on the other side earlier.

Now it carried every word he was saying to where I stood just feet away in my mother’s veil.

I stopped.

“… the cleanest arrangement I’ve brokered in a decade,” he was saying, and his voice carried the warm, lubricated register he used in boardrooms and on golf courses and at the country club bar after his third drink.

“No. The initial payment was just the beginning. The other assets transfer at close. The Stewart side handles the rest. We’re talking a clean nine-figure return inside three years if their projections hold, and Grant’s projections always hold. ”

A pause. A laugh -- short, two syllables, the kind he gave to other men.

“Of course, she will. She was raised for it.”

I put my hand on the doorframe because my legs had gone strange.

“Listen, Tom, between us -- there were three other families on the short list in ‘21 and the Stewarts were the only ones who came in clean. No leverage on the back end. No clawback clauses. Grant wanted what he wanted and the old man wrote the check. That’s the kind of partner you build a future with.” Another pause.

“No, she’s fine. Her mother’s handling it. ”

He didn’t say my name. Not once. I was the asset. The transfer. The best deal he’d brokered in a decade.

I let go of the doorframe.

I turned back into the room.

The mirrors caught me again -- all of them, from every angle, the girl in the veil, the gown, the long pale river of lace down her back -- and I made myself walk to the largest of them. I stood in front of it and looked.

I pulled the long lace sleeve of the gown up past my wrist, then my forearm, then my elbow. I held it bunched in my fist and looked at the inside of my upper arm in the mirror, then my gaze went down to my wrist.

The older bruises were green now, going yellow at the edges.

There was a darker one higher up, almost to the shoulder, that was still purple in the center.

They were spaced like fingers. They had been spaced like fingers when they were fresh, too, three weeks ago, when he’d held me against the wall of his study after a charity dinner because I’d laughed at something the senator from Virginia had said and Grant had not found it funny.

I’d covered them with concealer for nineteen days. I wore long sleeves to brunch with my mother, and she said nothing. To my final dress fitting, where the seamstress simply pinned around them. Last night, my own grandmother patted my cheek and told me wedding nerves were making me look tired.

I let the sleeve drop.

I looked at the girl in the mirror for one more second. I didn’t recognize her, and then I did. The recognition was not the soft, frightened thing it had been an hour ago when my mother was adjusting my veil. It was fear hardened into something sharper. Something I’d always known was there.

I crossed to the closet.

The closet was deep -- built for brides who came with three changes and a going-away dress -- and I’d used that.

Behind the long white garment bag that held the reception gown my mother had picked out, on a low hook screwed into the back wall, hung a canvas tote.

Brown. Unremarkable. The kind of bag a woman might carry to a farmer’s market.

I’d been packing it for six weeks, a little at a time.