Chapter Six
Damon
The gala had been on his calendar for six weeks before any of this started, back when the biggest complication in his life had been a supply chain dispute in Rotterdam.
Now Damon stood in front of his closet at seven in the evening, staring at a row of identical black suits, and found himself thinking not about optics or shareholders but about whether Elena owned a formal enough dress or whether he needed to have Margaret handle that quietly, without making it feel like charity.
He hated that he was thinking about it at all. Hated more that he wanted to be the one to think about it.
"You're stalling," Anya said from the doorway, arms crossed, watching him with the particular amusement she allowed herself only when she was certain no one else could see it. "Ten years I've known you, and I've never seen you take longer than ninety seconds to choose a suit."
"I'm not stalling."
"You're deciding whether to seat her at your table or three tables away where it 'looks professional,'" Anya said, using air quotes with visible relish.
"Just seat her next to you, Damon. Half the board already assumes something's happening.
The other half will assume it the second they see how you look at her. "
"Nothing is happening."
"No," Anya agreed, entirely too pleasantly. "That's why you rearranged the seating chart four times."
Damon didn't dignify that with a response, mostly because he didn't have one that wouldn't prove her point.
The truth — the truth he had not said aloud to anyone, including himself, in terms more direct than complication — was that in five days, Elena Voss had done something no one had managed in a decade.
She had made him want to be looked at. Not admired, not feared, not respected — those he had in abundance, and none of them had ever once made him feel like a person instead of an institution.
Elena looked at him like he was a puzzle worth solving rather than a wall to be navigated around, and Damon had discovered, somewhere in the last five days, that he had missed being looked at that way more than he'd let himself know.
It terrified him more than Concord did.
Elena
The dress Margaret had sent over — with a note so carefully casual that Elena knew immediately it hadn't been Margaret's idea — was midnight blue, structured, expensive in the particular way that didn't announce itself loudly but simply sat differently on the body than anything Elena had ever owned.
She stood in front of the safe apartment's floor-length mirror and told herself, firmly, that she was attending this gala as a security precaution and nothing else.
Damon wanted her visible, accounted for, inside a room he controlled rather than out in a city where someone had already proven they could walk through her walls.
That was the story she told herself while she put in the earrings that had arrived in the same box as the dress, small and dark and clearly worth more than her car, and it held up right until Damon Castellan came to collect her from the safe apartment's lobby, wearing black on black, and stopped three steps into the room like he'd walked into something he hadn't braced for.
"You look," he started, and then didn't finish, which told her more than any completed sentence could have.
"You look like you forgot the rest of that sentence," Elena said, mostly to cover the fact that her pulse had done something complicated at the way he was looking at her — not the assessing, cataloguing look from her first day, but something slower, something that made her feel, absurdly, like the most important object in a fifty-story building full of expensive art.
"I did," Damon admitted, and the honesty of it — the fact that a man who ran a global empire on precision and control had simply lost words — undid something in her chest that she'd been keeping carefully bolted shut since the moment she'd first seen him through the glass.
The gala itself was exactly the kind of event Elena had spent her whole life on the outside of — a ballroom on the top floor of Castellan Tower strung with warm gold light, a string quartet playing something she half-recognized, women in dresses that cost more than her rent and men who all seemed to know each other's net worth the way normal people knew each other's names.
She kept close to Damon's side not out of fear but out of a kind of gravity, and found, to her surprise, that he kept his hand at the small of her back the entire time, a point of contact so light it might have been accidental, except that every time she stepped away to speak to someone, his hand found its way back the moment she returned.
"You're doing that on purpose," she murmured, during a lull, as a board member drifted off toward the bar.
"Doing what."
"The hand. Every time I move, it comes back."
Something almost like embarrassment crossed his face — quickly suppressed, but there, real — and he said, low enough that only she could hear, "I'm making sure you're still in the room. It's not entirely rational. I apologize."
"Don't," Elena said, before she could think better of it. "Apologize, I mean. Don't."
They stood like that a moment too long, close enough that she could see the exact shade of gray in his eyes under the ballroom's gold light, and Damon's hand at her back pressed just slightly firmer, an anchor rather than a courtesy, and Elena thought, with the clarity of someone finally admitting something they'd been avoiding for days: This is not a security precaution anymore.
This hasn't been a security precaution for a while.
Across the room, watching them both with a champagne glass held loosely in one hand and a smile that had comforted a grieving twenty-four-year-old at a funeral nine years ago, Victor Kessler raised his glass in Damon's direction, and Damon — a decade of instinct still fully intact even now — felt the smile land against his skin like something cold.