5. Sienna
CHAPTER FIVE
SIENNA
The Starlight Conservatory Ball was my favourite event in Harlan.
Even before I was old enough to attend, I used to beg my mother to let me stand at the top of the stairs and watch the cars arrive.
I loved the women in pale dresses, the men in black tuxedos, the lanterns hanging through the glass corridors, the music drifting out over the winter gardens like something from an old fairy tale.
The conservatory itself was made of curved glass and black iron, with a ceiling.
Thousands of tiny lights hung from the beams like trapped stars.
White orchids climbed the pillars. Silver ribbons trailed through branches of indoor cherry blossoms forced to bloom out of season.
Beyond the glass walls, the gardens were dark and wet from rain, and every path glowed with lanterns.
It felt enchanted.
I knew better than to believe in enchanted things.
Still, I loved it.
I arrived with Jamison because the invitation was formal and because, after the last event everyone in Harlan would be watching us.
I sat beside him in the car with my hands folded in my lap. My heart tapping too quickly, and tried not to look at the side of his face.
He had not spoken to me since getting into the car.
He wore a black tuxedo tonight, elegance only made him look more brutal. Dark ink showed at his throat where his shirt sat open by a single button. More tattoos marked his hands, climbing over his knuckles and disappearing beneath his cuffs.
I had always loved his hands.
That was a stupid thing to admit, even to myself.
They were too big and too violent-looking to love. Hands that had blood on them sometimes, though I had trained myself not to think about where it came from.
Still, I had loved them. Maybe because they were the only part of him he sometimes gave me.
Hand, please.
My foolish little ritual.
The car turned through the conservatory gates.
I leaned closer to the window before I could stop myself.
It was even prettier than last year.
The whole front entrance had been draped in white flowers, with silver branches woven above the doors and little glass birds hanging from them.
Jamison said nothing.
I smiled anyway.
I wanted to be happy tonight. One night where the beauty was stronger than the ache of standing beside him.
The car stopped.
A guard opened Jamison’s door first. He got out without looking back. Another guard opened mine, and I stepped carefully onto the gravel.
My dress was soft silver-blue, with tiny crystals were sewn through the fabric, so every time I moved, I caught the light.
Emmie had said I looked like a winter fairy.
My mother had said the neckline made me look childish.
I had decided to believe Emmie.
Jamison stood several feet away, already checking his phone.
I moved toward him, slower than usual. My ankle was better, but I still felt each uneven stone through my heel. One of his guards glanced down, noticed, and subtly shifted to block the worst patch of gravel from the path.
“Thank you,” I said softly.
His expression didn’t change, but he gave the smallest nod. Jamison looked up from his phone. His gaze moved over me once. Assessing.
“Don’t limp in there,” he said.
My smile faltered for half a second before I fixed it. “I’ll try not to.”
“Try harder.”
I nodded.
Jamison turned toward the entrance.
Panic fluttered in my chest. Because he had started walking without me, the front steps were full of people, and every head in Harlan seemed ready to turn. My social anxiety flooded me in seconds. Attention came with the Crow name and I had always found it too intense.
So I reached for courage.
“Jamjam?”
He stopped. His shoulders tightened before he even looked back.
I held out my hand.
“Hand, please.”
For one suspended second, my hand waited between us in the cold air.
Jamison stared at it. His jaw worked. I thought he might refuse. After a long, awful pause, he stepped back and took it. His grip was hard. My fingers disappeared inside his. I smiled because he had given me what I asked for, and I had to make that enough.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
We walked inside together.
The conservatory took my breath for the second time.
The entrance hall opened into a long glass passage lined with white trees, their branches hung with crystal drops and small golden lanterns. At the far end, the ballroom shimmered beneath the glass dome. Above us, the real night pressed close, while the lanterns made false stars below it.
I forgot Jamison’s mood.
“This is beautiful,” I said before I remembered not to.
His hand tightened around mine. “It’s a room.”
I should have gone quiet then. Instead, I kept smiling, because if I stopped smiling, I would have to feel the sting of every small thing.
We entered the ballroom.
People looked.
They always looked when Jamison Crow entered a room, but tonight they looked longer.
The hotel fire had turned him into an even darker kind of fascination.
The Crow name had been on everyone’s mouth for weeks, tucked behind champagne glasses and polite concern.
Business problems, everyone kept saying while men vanished from positions they had held for years.
Society loved danger when it arrived in a tuxedo.
Jamison ignored them all.
His brothers were already near the Crow table. Marcel stood with Emmie at his side, both of them turning when we approached. Harrison leaned against the back of a chair, speaking to a woman but his attention flicked to us.
Harrison’s gaze dropped to my ankle. “How’s the traitor limb?”
I laughed. “Better.”
“Good. I was prepared to carry you dramatically if needed.”
Jamison’s hand went rigid around mine.
A waiter appeared with champagne. Jamison didn’t take one.
“Whiskey.” He said, and released my hand.
“There should be a bottle at the inner bar. I arranged it.” I said to the waiter who was still frozen.
Jamison looked at me. He was annoyed by me arranging something for him because now it existed.
The waiter nodded. “Of course, Miss Bellemere.”
Jamison’s eyes stayed on me.
I tried to make my voice light. “I remembered you hated the champagne here last year.”
“I hated the event.”
“Oh.” My smile twitched. “Well. The whiskey is better than the champagne too.”
The waiter left.
Guests drifted toward the first round of music, couples stepping beneath the dome while a live orchestra played from a raised platform half-hidden by flowers.
The first dance at the Starlight Ball was ceremonial.
I loved it. I had watched it as a little girl with my chin on the stair rail. I had dreamed of dancing under the glass dome, little lanterns stars above me, flowers around me.
A silly dream.
Jamison’s whiskey arrived. He took it and drank half. I stood beside him, hands clasped in front of my dress.
“You don’t have to dance,” I said softly.
He glanced down at me. “I wasn’t planning to.”
“I know.” I nodded quickly. “I just meant, don’t worry. I won’t ask.”
I had learned that lesson within the first year of our engagement.
Something in his face shifted, but not enough for me to understand it.
Marcel spoke then, drawing Jamison into a low conversation about the hotel. Harrison joined, his humor gone. Emmie touched my arm and asked about the dress, the flowers, my ankle, anything gentle enough to give me somewhere to look besides Jamison’s back.
For a little while, I was almost okay.
I saw a dark smear across Jamison’s right hand, near the base of his thumb, going up his wrist.
Blood.
He was speaking to Marcel, while his fingers flexed around the glass.
I stared at the smear.
I would bet that blood wasn’t his.
“Jamjam,” I said quietly.
He kept talking.
I took a small step closer. “Jamjam.”
His eyes flicked down to me, sharp with warning.
I held out my hand by instinct, not because I wanted to hold his exactly, but because I needed to show him.
“Your hand—”
“If you ask for my hand one more time,” he said, voice low and vicious. “you’ll get it.”
Everything went far away. The orchestra kept playing. I faintly heard a woman laughed somewhere beneath the dome.
You’ll get it.
Jamison’s hand.
The one I held in my lap while I traced tattoos and pretended I was not begging for evidence that he could be gentle.
My first thought was stupidly clear.
I wouldn’t survive his hand.
He was so much bigger than me.
So much stronger.
One hit from Jamison Crow would not be a slap in a dramatic story. It would be shock and the whole world going white. My body learning exactly how much violence he had kept out of reach until now.
I had never considered that before.
Jamison frightened me. He humiliated, snarled, forgot me and made me feel like a burden he had inherited with a family contract.
But physically?
No.
Some naive part of me had always believed there was a hard line there. He would not cross it. Now I stood beneath a ceiling full of false stars, and wondered how foolish I was.
Jamison realized what he had said almost as soon as the words left his mouth.
The fury did not disappear, exactly, but something cut through it. His eyes sharpened on my face, then dropped to my body as if cataloguing the way I had gone rigid.
His hand lowered slowly, whiskey forgotten.
“Sienna,” Jamison said. My name sounded different.
I took a step back before I could stop myself.
His gaze flicked to the movement.
I pointed at his hand, or tried to. My finger trembled, so I curled it back into my palm.
“There’s blood on your hand,” I whispered.
His eyes dropped.
He looked at the smear like he had never seen it before.
Then back at me.
“Sienna—”
I didn’t wait to see if he would follow through or apologize or become angrier because I had flinched in front of his brothers. Fear moved faster than manners.
I turned and left…not in the elegant trained way my mother had taught me to leave rooms.
I rushed.
My ankle protested immediately, but I barely felt it. I pushed through the edge of the crowd, past lanterns and startled glances.
The music blurred with my pulse until the whole room sounded underwater.