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By the time Vivienne stepped out of the town car beneath the museum’s columned portico, she had already lived through three separate versions of the day.

The first had ended on a Manhattan sidewalk with Roman’s mouth on hers and the deeply offensive discovery that the world she knew best no longer fit her as neatly as it had that morning.

The second had begun the moment she turned back uptown, put on her sunglasses, and resumed the performance Charles Blackwell had spent her whole life refining in her: composed daughter, precise daughter, useful daughter, daughter whose face did not betray impact.

The third had started at five seventeen, when Charles called and informed her—without asking—that she would be attending the Blackwell Historical Preservation Trust spring benefit after all.

Originally, the evening had not required the children.

That had been the plan as of forty-eight hours ago, and before that, and for most of the month while ivory paper invitations circulated through the city and donor wives compared table placements over lunch. The event had been designed as a polished institutional affair: the BHPT hosting a spring museum benefit in celebration of a new archival preservation initiative—one more respectable ribbon tied around one more expensive mechanism for controlling history. Trustees, curators, donors, city officials, old names, new money desperate to stand near old names. Charles and Eleanor as the visible face of cultivated stewardship. Sebastian and the others left mercifully out of it unless needed for photographs at the very end.

Then, sometime between Vivienne’s return to orbit and early evening, Charles had changed his mind.

He had done it the way he did everything that mattered—through a plausible reason delivered in a tone that made defiance sound adolescent.

There had been increased press interest, he’d said. Too many eyes on the family after the morning’s unfortunate ripple effects. The Trust’s announcement was more visible than anticipated. A unified family presence would reassure the board, settle gossip, and reinforce the public line of continuity.

All technically true.

None of it the reason.

The real reason was as transparent as it was infuriating.

Charles wanted his children where he could see them.

He wanted Vivienne in a room tied directly to the name she had overheard at Rook & Rye, tied to the very institution he had been maneuvering to keep her away from, to see if he could feed her enough elegance and supervision that her curiosity would begin to look childish even to herself.

He wanted Sebastian there because Sebastian had failed him. The Lucian incident—what Charles still treated, with icy offensiveness, as an inconvenience in need of containment—had not kept Vivienne occupied nearly long enough. So Sebastian’s evening plans had been ruined with the same smooth cruelty Charles applied to all punishments meant to pass as necessity.

And Roman—

Roman had been woven into the evening under the kind of excuse only Charles could make sound administrative rather than strategic. Increased donor volume, a private archive component, additional handling oversight, a need for discreet coordination around guest movement and sensitive collections. Roman’s presence had been folded into the logistics of the event as if he were nothing more than another invisible mechanism built to support the family image.

Charles wanted him there too.

Not because he trusted him.

Because he wanted to watch.

Watch Vivienne with him.
Watch Roman with her.
Watch whether the shape between them had changed.

It was almost funny in its ugliness.

Almost.

Vivienne stepped out of the car in dark purple because Charles had asked for it in the tone that meant commanded.

He had not phrased it as ownership, naturally. Charles would never choose a word so crude for a thing he preferred to perform elegantly. He had merely remarked, that afternoon, that the Trust’s spring program leaned toward amethyst and lilac tones and that it would be pleasing if the family looked coordinated in a way subtle enough to suggest effortless continuity.

What he meant was simpler.

Wear your color. Feed the mythology. Remind the room who you belong to.

So she had.

The dress was dark purple velvet, rich enough to read almost black in shadow and then bloom wine-deep under the museum light. It was strapless, the neckline sculpted into a controlled sweetheart curve that should have looked softer than it did on her. The bodice was gathered and precise, fitted close through the waist and hips before falling into a long, dramatic skirt split high along one leg, with heavier side panels of velvet draped like a second, more aristocratic layer behind it. It was not what she would have chosen for herself. That was part of the point. The gown carried Charles’s taste in it—display, symbolism, possession—while still clinging hard enough to her own severity to avoid becoming ornamental. At her throat and ears sat dark purple sapphires set in old platinum, Blackwell stones selected less for beauty than for meaning. A slim black clutch rested in one hand. Black heels, sharp and exact, disappeared beneath the velvet when she moved. Her hair was smoothed into glossy, controlled waves, parted deeply and pinned just enough to hold the shape. Her mouth was painted the kind of restrained shade that made other women lean in to ask the brand. Her face, in every visible respect, was perfect.

She looked like a daughter returned to form.

That was the point.

It had taken most of the afternoon to build that illusion.

After leaving Roman, she had done everything expected of her with such precision it almost made her sick.

She had gone home long enough to change and breathe and stand in the center of her dressing room staring at her own reflection as though it belonged to someone less compromised. She had returned three calls she had been avoiding because each belonged to a woman who confused proximity to the family for emotional intimacy. She had sat through a late lunch at Sant Ambroeus with a preservation consultant and one of Eleanor’s charity acquaintances, smiled in all the right places, said very little, and let them talk at her about spring board appointments and Italian marble as if her life had not split subtly off its old axis before noon.

She had stopped by the Trust offices just long enough to sign something tedious, initial something meaningless, and be seen by the right assistant with the right expression on her face. She had answered Charles’s text within two minutes. She had let Eleanor’s housekeeper steam the gown at the family townhouse because Charles wanted them arriving together, which meant submitting herself to the old ritual of being folded back into the Blackwell procession one visible inch at a time.

All of it boring.

All of it strategic.

All of it designed to send one message up the family bloodstream: Vivienne Blackwell had resumed normal function.

Only internally, nothing about it had felt normal.

Roman had altered the proportions of things too quickly. That was the problem. Not merely that he had kissed her—though that would have been enough trouble on its own—but that after him, after the questions he asked and the truths he handed her without adornment, the old machinery of her world had begun to look less inevitable and more constructed.

She could still operate it.

She just couldn’t unknow that it was a machine.

Which made every polite smile more exhausting than it had been that morning.

“Smile,” Charles murmured beside her as they mounted the museum steps.

Vivienne didn’t look at him.

She didn’t need to.

He was immaculate in black tie, silver hair exactly right, the public face of cultivated money and institutional legacy. Eleanor glided on his other side in pale cream and diamonds, composed and luminously remote in the way women became when they had spent decades learning how to survive a man like Charles without ever calling it survival. Sebastian was two steps behind them and visibly furious in the quiet, banked way that only made him look more Blackwell from a distance.

Vivienne gave the cameras the version of a smile that showed no teeth and no feelings and did exactly what it was meant to do.

The rotunda opened around them in light and money.

Spring had softened the museum into something deceptive. White peonies and lilac branches rose from low stone arrangements placed with choreographed restraint. The marble floor reflected champagne glass stems and polished shoes and the movement of guests circulating beneath the high ceilings. Somewhere beyond the first gallery, a quartet worked softly through something classical enough to reassure the board. Along the far wall, cream signage in serif lettering announced the evening’s purpose:

The Blackwell Historical Preservation Trust
Spring Benefit for the Preservation of Private Archive Collections

There it was.

Memory, stewardship, legacy—every elegant euphemism arrayed under warm light and donor money.

Vivienne’s gaze lingered for half a second too long on the word archive before she moved on.

Charles noticed everything when it suited him. Tonight it suited him greatly.

Which meant her job was to notice more than he did.

She moved through the first half hour exactly as required. There were handshakes. Introductions she had heard a dozen times before. A museum director too pleased with himself to be tolerable. Two women from the junior board who complimented her gown with the overeager warmth of people hoping to be remembered later. One city councilman who spoke to Charles and looked at Vivienne as if she were another piece of institutional furniture, expensive and meant to flatter the room.

She did all of it correctly.

She stood where Charles placed her for the opening remarks. She let Eleanor lightly touch her elbow when photographers approached, making the tableau look maternal instead of arranged. She accepted a flute of champagne and did not drink from it. She said three measured, intelligent things about preservation funding and public-private partnerships without once revealing the degree to which the phrase private archive collections made her want to rip the signage from the wall and see what had been hidden behind it.

Sebastian endured the evening with the expression of a man considering arson as a valid social response. Charles occasionally turned a small look in his direction—nothing dramatic, just enough to remind him that punishment, in the Blackwell household, was rarely loud. It was scheduled. It was dressed. It arrived in black tie and donor rooms and the cancellation of whatever night a man his age had intended for himself.

Vivienne might have found the whole thing grimly satisfying if she had not been too occupied resisting the urge to search the room every fifteen seconds.

Roman was there.

She knew he was before she saw him.

The knowledge moved through her like a second pulse.

When she finally found him, he was near the eastern gallery entrance beside a display case housing restored nineteenth-century correspondence. He wore black so cleanly it almost qualified as formal deference, though nothing in him looked deferential. One of the museum trustees was speaking to him with the slightly patronizing ease wealthy men reserved for people they believed functionally useful and socially invisible. Roman’s face remained unreadable. He looked, to anyone else, like he was listening.

Vivienne knew better.

His attention found her once across the room.

Only once.

A glance, no more.

But it was enough to change the temperature of the museum under her skin.

She looked away first, because Charles was close enough to see and because she had no interest in spending the rest of the evening being examined for signs of volatility.

Still, after that first glance, she became aware of him everywhere.

Not beside her.

Never that obvious.

But in the architecture of the room.

At the edge of a doorway while Charles spoke to a board member.
Near the staircase when Sebastian disappeared briefly toward the bar.
Across a reflective glass case when Vivienne turned too quickly and nearly caught herself on the fact that he had already shifted his position to where he could see her.

It was never blatant.

That made it worse.

Twice she watched him redirect his own path in ways subtle enough that no one would think to read them as anything but event management. Once he murmured something to a waiter whose tray had drifted too close to the knot of donors around her, and the man rerouted. Once he intercepted a younger trustee who looked a little too interested in cornering her near the catalog table, drawing him off with some logistical question before he ever made it within arm’s reach.

Protective, if one knew where to look.

Plausibly professional, if one didn’t.

Charles, thankfully, preferred his own narrative. He saw Roman where he expected him to be: useful, employed, in motion for reasons that had nothing to do with his daughter beyond the general maintenance of the evening.

Vivienne, on the other hand, saw everything.

And every time she did, it became more difficult to remain the woman Charles believed he had dressed for the room.

At some point Eleanor drifted toward a curator she knew from years of mutually beneficial board service, and Charles was pulled into conversation with the museum’s largest surviving donor. Sebastian vanished with a woman Vivienne recognized from a downtown gallery crowd and did not care enough to resent on his behalf.

That was the opening.

Not large. Not obvious. But clean enough.

Vivienne took it with the grace of long practice.

She moved first toward the manuscript gallery as if the exhibition itself had finally remembered her attention was required. She paused beside a glass case displaying restored letters and a donor placard that credited the BHPT’s extraordinary commitment to preservation and historical continuity. She let one older couple pass in front of her. Accepted a catalog from a passing docent and laid it unopened on the ledge beside the wall text. Waited long enough that her shift in position looked organic rather than chosen.

Then she stepped into the narrow pocket of space between galleries where the traffic thinned and the light dimmed by half a shade.

Roman was there a moment later.

Not too close.

Not yet.

Close enough that she could smell the clean darkness of his coat under the museum air and feel the old, fresh damage of the day rearrange itself again under her ribs.

Vivienne kept her face turned toward the wall text for another second, as though what had drawn her there was the exhibition and not him.

When she finally looked at him, her expression was cool enough to pass at a distance and nothing like calm at all up close.

“We’re discussing art,” she said quietly.

No greeting.
No softness.
No visible trace of the sidewalk.

Her eyes flicked once toward the gallery opening, then back to him.

“So if you found anything useful, I’d suggest you make it sound like restoration notes.”

Roman didn’t look at her immediately.

That was the first smart thing he did.

He kept his attention on the case beside them a second longer, one hand tucked loosely in his trouser pocket, the other holding a folded program he had absolutely no intention of reading. To anyone glancing over, he looked like exactly what Charles wanted him to be tonight—useful, forgettable, professionally stationed near expensive paper.

Only the slight turn of his mouth gave him away.

“Mm,” he said, eyes skimming the display card. “Terrible restoration ethics, if you ask me.”

Then he looked at her.

And there it was again—that same charged, private shift in the air that had been following them since the sidewalk, now dressed in museum lighting and donor money and pretending very badly to be about archival materials.

Roman’s gaze moved over her once, carefully enough not to get them both killed and slowly enough to make the effort obvious anyway.

The dark velvet.
The sapphires.
The exact, punishing elegance of Charles Blackwell’s taste wrapped around a woman who looked far too alive inside it to belong fully to him anymore.

His eyes came back to hers.

“That color is deeply unhelpful,” he said quietly.

Dry enough to pass.
Not remotely innocent.

Then, because she’d asked for useful and he was, on rare occasion, capable of behaving—

he angled the folded program open and held it between them like he was referencing a floor note.

“Margot’s nephew arrived at Brass Rail at twelve oh-eight,” he said, voice low and even. “Thirty-seven minutes early, which tells me he was nervous enough to need a drink before pretending he wasn’t. Ordered a bourbon he couldn’t afford and spent the first ten minutes trying to make sure everyone nearby understood he knew someone on the Saint Agnes expansion committee.”

Roman’s finger tapped idly at the printed museum schedule as if he were pointing out a line of text.

“He wanted to impress someone he thought had access to donor placement and future board visibility. Which means his ego remains the cheapest room in the building.”

A beat.

“I let him decorate it.”

His mouth twitched.

Not into anything so careless as a smile.
Just enough to suggest he’d enjoyed the work more than was strictly professional.

“He gave me three useful things and one emotional monologue I did not deserve.”

His eyes cut briefly toward the gallery opening, checking movement without moving his head much at all.

Then back to her.

“First: Margot’s been unusually jumpy about anything tied to the trust’s private archive subcommittee. Not the museum side. Not the public grant language. Specifically the private archive review chain.”

His tone remained level.

“As in, she’s been asking who’s been in rooms she normally doesn’t bother monitoring. Which suggests she doesn’t know everything, only enough to know she should be worried.”

Roman shifted the program slightly, the movement shielding the fact that he’d stepped half an inch closer.

“Second: her assistant’s been making off-hours calls to Saint Agnes twice a week for the last month. Not to the main office. To a direct line tied to development records.”

There.

That one mattered.

He watched her absorb it and liked—far too much—the exact way her mind sharpened when she got hold of something real.

“Third,” he said, “and this is where your family’s favorite little institution starts to get interesting—there was a private donor preview held off-calendar three weeks ago. Small guest list. No formal photography. A ‘preservation briefing’ hosted through the Trust under the excuse of donor stewardship.”

Roman’s voice dipped lower.

“Your father attended.”

He let that sit.

Not dramatically.
Just long enough to do damage.

Then:

“So did a representative from Saint Agnes.”

The quartet swelled faintly from the next room. Somewhere behind them, a docent laughed too brightly at something a donor had said. The museum kept breathing around them, polished and expensive and full of people who would have fainted if they knew what was actually being traded in its side galleries.

Roman looked back at the display case.

“Beautiful handwriting,” he murmured, as if returning obediently to the fiction. “A little dishonest in the margins.”

His eyes slid back to her.

“The nephew didn’t know names. But he knew enough to mention that Margot’s been trying very hard to keep one particular file from circulating through the usual channels.”

A pause.

“He called it ‘the family thing.’”

That landed sharper than the rest.

Roman didn’t soften it.

He just watched her for half a beat, then went on.

“He also said Bellamy’s been angry lately because he was excluded from a dinner he assumed he’d be useful at. Which means your read on him was right. He’s not first access, but he’s probably wounded enough to become second-tier leverage if I need it.”

Roman folded the program once, cleanly, and tucked it under his arm.

From a distance, it looked like the end of a perfectly boring institutional conversation.

Up close, his expression said something else entirely.

“I can get to Margot’s assistant,” he said. “Not tonight. Too visible. But soon.”

His gaze flicked once toward the rotunda where Charles’s voice rose and fell among the donors.

“And if Charles is using this room to keep his children decorative and his liabilities visible, then he’s nervous enough to make a mistake.”

There was the edge of it.
The live wire under the charm.

Roman’s eyes returned to hers, slower now.

“Which, for the record,” he said, “makes this evening much more interesting than the Trust intended.”

Then, because he was incapable of letting a moment sit cleanly if there was any opportunity at all to make it worse for her—

his gaze dropped once, deliberately, to the line of her mouth before lifting again.

“You’re doing a beautiful job of looking correct, by the way.”

Quiet.
Precise.
Far too knowing.

“If I hadn’t seen you on a sidewalk an hour ago, I might almost believe it.”

The corner of his mouth tilted.

Not kindly.
Not cruelly either.

Something more dangerous than both.

He leaned just enough closer that anyone watching would assume he was pointing out a flaw in the exhibition text rather than quietly ruining her evening.

“And since we’re discussing restoration,” he added, voice lowered to something meant only for her, “you should know your father’s version is slipping.”

A beat.

“He’s looked at you three times in the last seven minutes when he thought you weren’t watching.”

Roman’s gaze flicked once, barely, toward the opening of the gallery.

“He knows something changed. He just doesn’t know if it’s you, me, or the room.”

His eyes came back to hers and stayed there.

“That uncertainty is expensive. We should keep charging him for it.”

Then, because she’d asked for restoration notes and he was feeling particularly generous—

he shifted the folded program and, with infuriating composure, let the back of one knuckle brush the inside of her wrist where it rested near the catalog ledge.

So light it could have been accidental.

So absolutely not accidental it nearly qualified as insolence.

Roman’s expression did not change.

“If you can get within ten feet of the donor preview seating chart tonight,” he said, “I want names. Doesn’t matter if it’s on paper, a program, or whispered over bad champagne.”

His gaze stayed fixed on the wall text as if he were still discussing document repair.

“I’ll get the assistant. You get the room.”

Then he finally looked at her fully again.

Dark-eyed.
Steady.
Altogether too pleased to find her in his orbit under chandelier light and family surveillance.

“And Blackwell?”

A tiny pause.

“If we’re pretending this is about manuscripts, try to look a little less like you’re thinking about kissing the archivist.”

That crooked, infuriating grin flashed briefly at one corner of his mouth.

“People will talk.”

Vivienne did not so much as inhale differently.

That was the first victory.

No visible start at the word archivist. No shift in posture. No tell in the mouth Charles had trained her to keep still and Roman had already made dangerously memorable. She remained exactly what the room believed her to be: a composed woman in dark velvet, half-turned toward a display case, receiving some faintly tedious comment about preservation.

Inside, however, her equilibrium had become a far more expensive thing to maintain.

He was too close again.

Not scandalously. Not even noticeably, unless someone was already looking for evidence and knew exactly what to call it. But close enough that his presence pressed at the edges of her concentration like heat through expensive glass. Close enough that the clean darkness of his coat kept threatening to collapse distance into memory, and memory into the sidewalk, and the sidewalk into the deeply offensive realization that she had liked the way his mouth had felt on hers far too much for a sane woman with her surname.

And Charles was near.

That was the older problem. The more wired one. The one that lived lower in her spine and required no conscious invitation at all.

Vivienne had been watched for most of her life. Not in the romantic, flattering way foolish girls in novels imagined. Not with wonder. Not with care. With assessment. With strategy. With the cold patience of a man who believed daughters should be elegant enough to display and disciplined enough not to deviate. Years of that did not simply fall away because she had begun to understand the mechanism. Fear did not vanish the moment it was named. Deprogramming was slower than outrage. Slower than desire. Slower, humiliatingly, than the body.

So she stood perfectly still and let none of it touch her face.

Only her mouth moved.

“Then the exhibition staff should consider retraining its more obsessive handlers,” she said softly. “One of them has been shadowing the same piece all evening with a level of personal devotion that’s beginning to look less like stewardship and more like bad behavior.”

At a distance, it would have sounded like irritation. Up close, it was something else entirely.

Her fingers shifted against the ledge beside the unopened catalog, a small, elegant adjustment. Nothing more. Certainly not an attempt to disguise the pulse still misbehaving at the inside of her wrist where he had touched her.

Her eyes went to the display glass instead of his face.

In the faint reflection, the museum fractured itself into marble, candlelight, shoulders, movement. Charles appeared only in pieces—a black sleeve, the silver edge of his head, the shape of one hand lifted mid-conversation as he performed civility for donors with inherited surnames and donor-class hunger. Not looking directly toward them. Not openly.

That did not help.

With Charles, direct observation had never been the only danger. He noticed absence. Timing. Temperature. The emotional weather of a room, especially when the weather belonged to one of his children. The old awareness of that moved through her like something physical.

Still, she kept her tone level.

“The piece itself is older than this institution’s current fiction,” she murmured. “It has survived mishandling, reclassification, private interference, and any number of men confusing proximity with entitlement. I doubt one more overbred watchdog will be what finally ruins it.”

There.

Sharper than flirtation. Closer to a complaint. And yet the soft current beneath it remained obvious enough for him to catch if he was half as intelligent as he kept insisting on being.

Her gaze slid to him at last.

Only for a second, but fully.

That made it worse.

Roman in black under museum light looked like an insult someone had tailored on purpose. Too controlled. Too dark-eyed. Too aware of her. He never seemed diminished by rooms like this the way other men did. The trustees, the donors, the board members, the husbands—all of them became decorative in institutional light, blurred into polished variations of wealth and appetite. Roman somehow became more distinct. More dangerous. Less easy to ignore.

Vivienne disliked that about him with a sincerity bordering on obsession.

“Margot is frightened,” she said. “The calls tell us that. The nephew only confirms what frightened people always do when they lose control of a process—they start asking who has seen what and pretending that qualifies as containment.”

Her voice had cooled into analysis now, which was safer. She knew how to do cold. Cold had structure.

“Development records matter. That means signatures, movement, approvals, revisions.” Her fingers closed lightly around the spine of the catalog. “Not gossip. Not Bellamy’s wounded vanity. Actual provenance.”

A beat.

“And Bellamy,” she added with exquisite dryness, “is not provenance. He’s a damaged annotation in the margin trying very hard to become the main text.”

The corner of her mouth tipped the barest fraction.

Not warmth. Not quite amusement. Something that would read, to anyone else, like disdain sharpened into social polish.

Roman would know better.

Of course he would.

Infuriatingly, he seemed to know better about her most of the time.

The quartet swelled in the next gallery, something soft and old and expensive enough to reassure everyone who needed culture to sound like permission. A waiter passed the opening with a silver tray. A woman laughed too brightly somewhere out in the rotunda. The museum kept breathing around them, all warm light and curated respectability, while the real machinery of the evening turned underneath it.

Vivienne lowered her voice just slightly.

“And as for the archivist,” she said, as if the word itself annoyed her, “he should try not to look so territorial. It’s impossible to enjoy an exhibit when the same man keeps appearing in every doorway as though he expects the frame to lunge.”

There.

That was better.

A complaint, if overheard. A callout, if understood. And under it, quieter but no less real, the admission she would never make plainly:

I noticed. All of it. And I did not hate it.

That was the most troubling part, perhaps.

Not that Roman had been watching her.

That it had felt different.

Charles’s version of protection had always come with ownership attached, surveillance masquerading as care, containment sold as concern. It constricted. It diminished. It made room smaller. Roman’s had done the opposite. He had not penned her in. He had quietly altered the architecture around her—redirected, intercepted, repositioned, making space instead of taking it, as if he understood instinctively that protecting her and controlling her were not the same act.

Vivienne had no vocabulary for how dangerously appealing that was.

So naturally she wrapped the feeling in contempt before it could grow teeth.

“You’ve been embarrassingly conspicuous,” she went on. “One waiter. One junior trustee. At least two changes in position I noticed without even trying. If you intended to behave like a guard animal, you might at least have chosen a subtler breed.”

Her eyes dipped, just once, to the folded program beneath his arm and came back to his face.

“Something quieter,” she said. “Less inclined to circle.”

The line sat between them with perfect deniability.

Anyone else might have heard a society woman dryly reprimanding staff. Roman, she suspected, heard the exact shape of the truth inside it.

Her gaze went back to the reflection in the case.

Charles had shifted half a degree more.

Not toward them. Not enough. Still too much.

The old fear tightened again, clean and precise as a pulled wire.

It never arrived as panic with him. That would have been easier. Easier to resist, easier to hate. No—Charles produced something more efficient. A bodily alertness. A sharpened awareness of timing, placement, expression. The instinct to become perfect because imperfection cost too much.

Vivienne despised how fluent she still was in that language.

She made herself breathe slowly once before speaking again.

“If there was an off-calendar preview,” she said, “then there will be a shadow record somewhere nearby. Seating drafts. A marked donor grid. Some ugly little administrative relic they never meant anyone to treat as evidence.” She lifted the catalog from the ledge, more to give her hands purpose than because she needed it. “People like Margot do not trust one copy when money and hierarchy are involved. They duplicate. Annotate. Hide things in portfolios and call it discretion.”

Her gaze returned to him.

“I can find it.”

That was the clearest part. The rest she buried back inside code.

“You,” she said with the faintest hint of annoyance, “can stop pacing the perimeter like the museum assigned me a particularly ill-mannered protection detail.”

There it was at last, the line she had been circling toward.

Better than the user words. Sharper. More her.

And because she could not help herself, because the tension between them had become too alive to leave untouched, she added in the same cool, clipped tone, “Though I admit the act has had its moments. The donors seem much less irritating when they’re kept at a respectful distance by someone who looks like he might bite.”

That one she felt all the way through.

Not because it was bold. It wasn’t, not on the surface.

Because it was true.

Her eyes slipped, very quickly, to his mouth.

A mistake. A tiny one. Still a mistake.

She covered it by closing the catalog with a soft snap and settling it against her hip.

Annoyance was such a useful disguise. It let a woman say nearly anything if she wore the right face while saying it.

“The collection can survive five minutes without snarling at passersby,” she murmured. “Try to remember that while I inspect the back room.”

Code, and obvious enough for him: I’m going after the list. Hold your position. Watch the room. Watch Charles.

And then, because some self-destructive, unwell part of her wanted one more private thread tied between them before she stepped back into the performance, she let her eyes narrow slightly and said in a tone that would have sounded coolly reproving to anyone else, “And do try not to look quite so pleased every time I notice you. It encourages repetition.”

There.

Flirtation disguised as exasperation. Teasing disguised as command. Exactly dangerous enough.

She stepped back then, one measured pace, restoring propriety without relieving the tension of it. The slit of her gown shifted softly against her leg. The sapphires at her throat remained cold and dark and symbolically offensive. Her face was perfect again by the time she turned toward the gallery opening.

Only internally did the truth remain untidy.

Roman’s nearness still clung to her nerves like static. Charles’s unseen attention still pressed against the edges of her focus. And beneath both, quieter but steadier now, was the strange, unwelcome warmth of recognizing a kind of protection that did not feel like a cage.

Vivienne moved out of the narrow pocket between galleries with unhurried grace, returning to the rotunda as though she had spent the last two minutes exchanging nothing more consequential than administrative irritation. She crossed the marble floor through the soft blur of peonies, donor silk, and reflected light, catalog in hand, expression composed enough to survive scrutiny from fifty angles.

She did not go to Charles.

That would have looked too responsive.

Instead she angled toward Eleanor, who stood near a bronze urn arrangement with the museum’s deputy director and a woman from the board whose pearls looked inherited and whose opinions certainly were. Vivienne waited exactly long enough to be seen approaching and then entered their orbit with a smile so polished it could have passed for filial ease.

“Mother,” she said lightly, her voice pitched for public hearing now, “I need your opinion before someone makes a terrible seating decision and blames preservation funding for it.”

Eleanor’s gaze settled on her daughter’s face.

Only a second. Long enough.

It was one of the things Vivienne had inherited from her mother, perhaps: the ability to read a room without appearing to, the talent for noticing the fracture line beneath the porcelain. Eleanor’s expression did not change, but something in it quieted, sharpened, assessed.

Good.

Let one woman in this family understand what she was looking at.

The board woman laughed on cue, delighted by the prospect of invisible logistical drama. “Oh, don’t tell me they’re still moving Mr. Bellamy around.”

“They are,” Vivienne said, allowing just enough fatigue into her tone to make it seem trivial. “Apparently everyone is determined to preserve his feelings despite the poor condition.”

Another ripple of polite laughter.

Eleanor excused herself with the effortless authority of a woman who had spent decades learning how to leave a conversation without ever appearing to end it.

Vivienne guided her two steps toward the floral installation, far enough for privacy, not far enough for suspicion.

“The donor preview,” she said quietly the moment they were obscured. “Three weeks ago. I need tonight’s comparative seating draft.”

Eleanor did not visibly react.

Interesting.

“The real one,” Vivienne added. “Not whatever pretty fiction is floating through the room on cream paper.”

Her mother’s eyes flicked once—not toward Charles, but toward the side corridor beyond the rotunda.

“The old print room,” Eleanor said after a beat, her tone mild enough to pass if anyone had been listening. “Second door on the left. Mrs. Vale has been treating it like a chapel.”

Margot.

Of course.

“There’s a clipboard copy with her,” Eleanor continued. “And a marked backup in a blue portfolio on the worktable behind the registrar’s station. Bellamy objected to his placement. She cross-referenced tonight against the preview attendee list during cocktails.”

Vivienne held her mother’s gaze.

You knew, she thought. Or at least you knew enough.

Eleanor’s expression remained composed, pale, and utterly unhelpful in the specific Blackwell way that often meant the opposite.

“Try not to be seen leaving with anything,” she said.

Vivienne almost smiled.

“I wasn’t planning on being seen at all.”

Her mother adjusted one of the loose waves near Vivienne’s shoulder, an affectionate gesture to anyone watching. A coded dismissal to anyone who knew her.

Then Eleanor returned to the room, pearls and cream and practiced survival gliding back toward the deputy director as if she had never stepped away.

Vivienne turned before Charles could redirect his attention toward either of them.

Across the rotunda, near the pillar by the manuscript gallery, Roman had shifted again.

Not toward her. Never that obvious.

Just enough that if something changed in the room, he would see it first.

The knowledge moved through her in that same unwelcome, thrilling way.

Watchdog, she thought. Ill-mannered one.

And God help her, she was beginning to enjoy having him at her heels.

She crossed toward the side corridor without hurry, every inch the daughter Charles had dressed for public consumption, catalog against her hip, expression composed, spine straight, dark velvet drinking up the museum light.

Anyone watching would have seen a woman moving through her family’s evening with elegant purpose.

No one would have guessed that under the polish she was balancing three dangerous things at once:

the old fear, the new want, and the steadily hardening determination not to let either one make her stupid.

The corridor beyond the rotunda was quieter, lined with framed prints and softened by lower light. The first door stood open to stacked crates and museum linens. The second showed only a narrow blade of gold beneath the frame.

The print room.

Vivienne slowed just enough to become casual, then reached for the handle with the same calm precision she used for everything else in public.

On the surface, there was no sign at all that her heart had just started beating harder again.

Underneath, she felt like a woman stepping not just into a room, but farther out of the life she had been arranged to live.

Roman didn’t follow her.

Not immediately.

That would have been the obvious move, and he had no interest in giving Charles anything obvious to read.

Instead, he stayed exactly where she’d left him—one shoulder angled toward the display case, posture loose, expression faintly bored in the way men like the trustees understood as competence without ambition. The folded program remained tucked beneath his arm, one thumb idly tracing the edge of it as if he were still considering the ethics of ink restoration.

From a distance, he was stationary.

In reality, nothing about him was.

He tracked the room in reflections first—the glass case, the polished marble, the curved surface of a silver tray as it passed too close to the rotunda’s center. Vivienne’s movement registered as a shift in the rhythm of the crowd rather than a direct line. Velvet cutting through pale silk. Purpose disguised as drift.

Good.

She was doing it cleanly.

Roman’s gaze lifted just enough to catch Charles in profile across the room. The man’s attention moved in arcs—donor to board member, board member to Eleanor, Eleanor to the room at large. Controlled. Intentional. And then, briefly, without any visible cause—

a flicker.

Not toward the corridor.

Toward absence.

Roman filed it.

“Enjoying the correspondence?”

The voice came from his right—one of the trustees, older, moneyed, the kind of man who liked to hear himself positioned as the guardian of something he hadn’t built.

Roman turned just enough to acknowledge him.

“It’s holding up better than expected,” he said evenly. “Given how many hands have tried to improve it.”

The trustee chuckled, satisfied by the illusion of shared understanding.

“Yes, well, that’s always the risk with preservation, isn’t it?”

Roman inclined his head slightly, already letting the man fall away before the sentence finished.

His attention returned to the room.

Two waiters shifted their path near the rotunda’s edge. He caught the subtle redirect—one of his earlier adjustments holding. Good. The junior trustee he’d intercepted earlier was now occupied near the bar, laughing too loudly at something Sebastian wasn’t listening to.

Also good.

Roman moved then.

Not toward the corridor.

Across the gallery instead, cutting a shallow arc that repositioned him closer to the side passage without ever appearing to track it. He paused once beside a different display, letting a couple pass between him and the doorway, then continued just far enough that he could see the corridor in peripheral reflection.

The door.

Closed now.

A thin line of gold still visible at the base.

He didn’t look at it directly.

Didn’t need to.

Charles had shifted again.

That was the more interesting problem.

Roman let his gaze drift back to the rotunda, catching the exact moment Charles’s attention stilled—not on any person, not on any conversation, but on the absence where Vivienne had been.

There it was.

Not suspicion.

Not yet.

But the beginning of it.

Roman adjusted his position half a step, angling himself so that when Charles’s attention inevitably widened, it would catch him in motion—visible, occupied, exactly where he was supposed to be.

He picked up a passing champagne flute from a tray without breaking stride.

Didn’t drink it.

Just held it.

A prop. A signal. A man embedded in the function of the room.

Charles’s gaze passed over him.

Paused.

Roman met it.

Just briefly.

Nothing in his expression offered challenge. Nothing invited scrutiny. If anything, it leaned slightly toward deference—professional, contained, the kind of man who existed in rooms like this to make sure they ran without incident.

Charles moved on.

Roman watched him go.

Then, finally, his attention returned to the corridor.

Time stretched.

Not long.

Just enough.

The door opened again.

A fraction.

Vivienne stepped back out with the same composure she’d gone in with, catalog still at her hip, expression untouched by anything as inelegant as success or failure.

Only the smallest thing gave it away—

the precision of her pace.

Tighter.

Decided.

Roman’s mouth tilted, just barely.

He shifted away from the display, falling into motion again as if nothing in the room had changed at all. By the time she re-entered the rotunda fully, he had already adjusted his path to intersect hers two movements later—near the edge of a column, where sightlines broke cleanly and conversation could exist without echo.

He didn’t look at her right away.

“Find what you were looking for?” he asked quietly, eyes on the passing crowd.

To anyone else, it sounded like polite follow-up.

To her, it was exactly what it was.

His gaze slid to her then, quick and sharp and entirely his.

And there it was again—that same controlled, infuriating composure wrapped around something far less contained underneath.

“You’ve got about ninety seconds before Charles decides he wants you visible again,” he added, voice low. “And another thirty before he pretends it was always the plan.”

A beat.

His eyes flicked once, briefly, to the catalog at her hip.

Then back to her face.

“You look very convincing,” he said.

Calm.

Measured.

And just crooked enough at the edge to mean something else entirely.

Vivienne let his timing settle over her without changing expression.

Ninety seconds.

Another thirty before Charles made a performance out of wanting her visible again.

Of course.

Roman said it with that infuriatingly calm precision of his, as if he were commenting on weather or crowd flow rather than the particular mechanics of her father’s control. On the surface, she gave him nothing in return beyond the same cool, polished attention she had worn all evening. A woman in dark velvet, catalog at her hip, listening to a logistical remark near a column while donors drifted past in pearls and black tie.

Inside, his steadiness did something far more troublesome than irritation.

It settled her.

Not completely. Not enough to soften anything important. But enough that the room stopped feeling quite so slippery for a second. Enough that the old alertness under her skin—the one that rose whenever Charles was near and the air in a room began to change—had something solid to push against.

She found that oddly dangerous.

She also, on principle, still found Roman irritating.

Vivienne turned her face just enough that from the rotunda it would look as though she were merely answering a staff question she had not entirely enjoyed.

“The print room was less archival than devotional,” she said quietly. “Mrs. Vale has been guarding it like relics. Your donor preview was cross-referenced twice—once on the clipboard, once in a blue portfolio behind the registrar’s table.”

Her voice stayed low, crisp, efficient. No wasted words. Their time was too short for elegance for its own sake.

“Six seats. Charles at center. Margot. Elias Crane from Trust counsel. And Saint Agnes’s development records liaison—Julian Voss.” Her eyes flicked once to his, then away again. “Bellamy’s name had been penciled onto an earlier draft and struck through hard enough to dent the paper. Someone was very determined to make his exclusion look procedural.”

A waiter drifted too near the rotunda’s center. Vivienne tracked him without seeming to.

“There were blue notations beside two names,” she went on. “Voss and Charles. Same hand. Same pencil. Margot also had tonight’s donor seating compared against the preview list during cocktails. Three overlaps. Pembroke, Sloane, Wetherby.”

That one mattered.

If Roman wanted the room, there it was: the private briefing, the legal counsel, Saint Agnes, and three donors important enough to be threaded through both evenings.

Vivienne closed the catalog with a soft, neat sound and let it rest against her side.

“That is all you’re getting before my father remembers he has one.”

Her tone was dry enough to pass as annoyance.

The truth beneath it sat elsewhere.

Roman still held the champagne flute he had taken as cover. Vivienne looked at it once, then at him, and before she could overthink how much of the impulse was thirst and how much of it was something less manageable, she reached across the narrow space between them and took the glass from his hand.

Her fingers lingered a fraction longer than was necessary around the stem.

Long enough to feel the heat of his hand through the chill of the glass. Long enough to know it. Long enough to want another second and dislike herself for wanting it.

It would have looked innocuous from a distance—one of those effortless acts of entitlement wealthy daughters performed without thinking, appropriating whatever was nearest because the room had been arranged for them anyway.

Which, tonight, was even true.

Vivienne lifted the flute to her mouth and took a measured sip.

Cold. Dry. Useful.

When she lowered it, a senior trustee passed too close behind Roman’s shoulder—close enough that she caught the scent of expensive cologne and the rustle of old money moving on polished shoes. Instinct sharpened her immediately. The tension between them was still too alive in the air.

So she corrected the room.

“Honestly,” she said, with sudden patrician sharpness pitched just loud enough for the passerby to hear, “if I have to take it from you myself, you’re not being especially helpful.”

To the trustee, it read exactly as intended: a rich girl correcting a subordinate in the mild, lazy tone of inherited hierarchy. To Roman, it read nothing like that at all.

Because when she looked at him, the truth was in her eyes.

Not anger. Not even really reprimand.

Something hotter. Amused. A little reckless. Entirely too aware of where her fingers had just been.

The trustee moved on, disinterested, satisfied by what he thought he understood.

Vivienne let the mask settle back into place as if it had never slipped. She kept the champagne.

Of course she did.

Her gaze skimmed the room once more and caught the next problem almost instantly.

Not Charles. Not directly.

The solution Charles had arranged.

The man was angling toward them from the donor cluster with the sort of confident ease money taught early and often—the assurance of someone who had rarely been denied access to anything he wanted, least of all women whose fathers approved of him. Mid-thirties, maybe. Beautiful tuxedo. Hair too carefully careless. A face built for summer houses, campaign donations, and old families who liked their sons-in-law to come with bankable last names and no surprises.

Pembroke, she thought.

Of course it would be Pembroke.

Her mouth barely moved as she spoke, eyes still on the approaching figure.

“Ah,” she said under her breath, the word almost lost beneath the quartet. “There’s the officially sanctioned restoration plan.”

It was nearly a joke.

Nearly.

An inside one, if two people could have an inside joke this quickly and under circumstances this bad.

She did not look at Roman when she said it. She didn’t need to. The line was for him anyway.

By the time Henry Pembroke reached them, Vivienne’s expression was immaculate again.

“Vivienne,” he said warmly, as though finding her had been a happy accident rather than an assignment. “I was beginning to think the museum had swallowed you whole.”

His eyes passed over Roman without landing. Not out of caution. Out of dismissal. He registered him the way men like Henry registered waiters, drivers, security, staff—useful if needed, beneath notice if not. Roman, to him, was simply part of the event’s invisible machinery.

Vivienne found that both predictable and deeply uninteresting.

“Henry,” she said, turning toward him with a smile so perfectly social it could have been poured. “How reassuring. I was just thinking the evening had begun to feel under-curated.”

He laughed, pleased by what he assumed was wit in his direction.

“I was hoping I might steal you for a drink before the speeches become unbearable.”

Vivienne lifted the champagne flute slightly, her fingers still around the glass she had taken from Roman’s hand.

“I’ve already appropriated one,” she said. “And I’m afraid my attention has been tied up by something unnecessarily persistent.”

The line slid out with such polish that Henry only smiled wider, taking it for flirtation or banter or whatever else men like him liked to hear in women’s mouths.

He never realized she wasn’t speaking to him at all.

Because Roman was still close enough to hear every word.

Henry tipped his head. “Persistent can be charming in the right setting.”

Vivienne’s eyes moved, very briefly, to Roman’s shoulder and back again.

“It can,” she said. “Though in some cases it simply circles until one gives up and lets it stay.”

Henry’s laugh came easily, oblivious and self-satisfied. He assumed, naturally, that the sentence had turned in his favor.

Of course he did.

That was the trouble with pre-approved men. They mistook proximity for inevitability.

He shifted closer to her, angling his body so that Roman was all but erased from the geometry of the conversation.

“Charles was saying the Trust may be expanding some of its archival partnerships,” Henry said. “He thought I might be interested in hearing more from you.”

There it was.

Not even disguised very well.

Vivienne almost admired the efficiency of it. She vanished for a few minutes, and Charles dispatched a suitable distraction with a surname and cuff links.

“Did he,” she said smoothly.

Her face remained serene. Her tone, impeccable. The daughter Charles expects stood there in velvet and sapphires, holding a champagne flute and receiving a well-born man’s interest exactly as she had been raised to do.

But under the surface, Roman still had her attention.

Enough of it, in fact, that when Henry continued speaking—something about the Trust, about private holdings, about how nice it was to see her out after the morning’s noise—she could feel Roman’s nearness like a second line of awareness running just beneath the conversation.

It made Henry seem even duller.

Vivienne smiled at the appropriate moments. Tilted her head. Offered him the polished fragments that kept men like him content without giving them anything substantial enough to keep.

When he said, with a pleased little grin, that he was glad she was no longer occupied with whatever had drawn her away, she let her mouth curve and answered, “Unfortunately, I rarely am.”

Henry took it as invitation. Roman would know it was the opposite.

She sipped again from the champagne she had taken from Roman’s hand, the gesture so seamless that Henry only saw a glamorous woman managing the room.

He did not see the private insolence in it. He did not see anything at all.

“And how are you finding the evening?” Henry asked.

Vivienne’s gaze slipped once, quick as a knife flash, toward Roman before returning to Henry.

“There’s one unexpectedly compelling element,” she said. “The rest is mostly decorative.”

Henry smiled as if she had complimented him.

Poor thing.

Roman, she suspected, heard every word exactly as intended.

The quartet changed pieces again. Somewhere near the center of the rotunda, applause started and died. Charles, across the room, was speaking with one of the donors from the preview list—Wetherby, if she remembered correctly. Not looking at her. Not yet.

Vivienne let Henry continue for another sentence and then, while he was talking about a summer benefit in Newport or Southampton or some other place where men like him practiced being inevitable, she turned her eyes past his shoulder.

To Roman.

The look lasted less than a second.

But it said everything she needed it to.

This is dreadful. You see that, yes? Save me.

Not seriously. Not quite. Something lighter curled through it—something almost playful, almost flirty, something that acknowledged perfectly well that he could not interrupt this, could not pull her away, could not do anything except stand there and hear her being dutiful while she pretended not to mean half of what she said.

It was a terrible look to share under her father’s roofline. It was also, annoyingly, a little fun.

The moment it left her face, she checked herself.

Her gaze slid away from Roman and crossed the room to Charles.

Just to be sure.

He was still with Wetherby and a museum trustee, his attention where it ought to have been, one hand resting lightly at his side, his posture all cultivated authority and gracious control. If he had caught anything, he did not show it.

Good.

Vivienne turned back to Henry with her smile intact.

He was still talking.

Of course he was.

“—and I told my mother the museum would overdo the lilacs, but she never listens.”

“How brave of you,” Vivienne said.

He laughed again, oblivious to the fact that her mind had already moved elsewhere.

She stood there exactly as Charles would have wanted—beautiful, composed, socially fluent, politely occupied by a man he approved of. Every inch of her performed correctly.

Only the details betrayed the truth.

The champagne in her hand had become an absurd little thread back to Roman—something cold and elegant and entirely too aware of where it had come from. Her pulse still misbehaved whenever she became too aware of how close he remained. And beneath her perfect expression sat the private, wicked satisfaction of knowing that while Henry Pembroke might have been the man Charles sent to keep her busy—

he was not the one who actually had her attention.

Roman didn’t move.

Which, in that room, was often more useful than movement.

He stood where Henry Pembroke had all but edited him out of the composition and let the man do exactly what men like him always did when handed polished access and a woman trained not to embarrass a donor in public: mistake choreography for chemistry.

His face gave nothing away.

Not irritation.
Not amusement.
Certainly not the very particular satisfaction of hearing Vivienne Blackwell weaponize perfect manners in real time while another man smiled like he’d been handed something.

He held still, one hand loose at his side, the other adjusting the folded program beneath his arm as if that occupied the full bandwidth of his evening.

It didn’t.

He caught the look she gave him over Henry’s shoulder and felt it land exactly where she’d meant it to.

This is dreadful. You see that, yes? Save me.

Not panic.

Not even a real request.

Worse than that.

Trust, sharpened into play.

The corner of Roman’s mouth threatened once, very briefly, before he flattened it back into something fit for museum lighting and donor money.

Henry was still talking.

Something about Newport now.

Christ.

Roman let him go on for another ten seconds purely out of professional curiosity—mostly to determine whether the man was capable of hearing his own voice and breathing at the same time—before deciding he’d had enough of the experiment.

Not enough to intervene badly.

Just enough to intervene well.

A passing museum coordinator moved through the edge of the rotunda carrying a slim black folder and looking faintly hunted in the way event staff often did once the speeches were within twenty minutes of becoming everyone’s problem. Roman stepped into her path smoothly enough to look accidental.

“Excuse me,” he said quietly.

She paused, grateful and harried.

He angled his body just enough to keep the exchange from drawing attention.

“Pembroke’s mother is asking for him,” he said in the calm tone of a man relaying a fact he had no personal investment in. “Near the west staircase. She seemed… insistent.”

The coordinator’s face changed immediately.

“Oh God.”

“Mm.”

“She’s already asked twice.”

“I figured you’d want to save someone the embarrassment.”

The woman gave him a look of profound, weary gratitude.

“Thank you.”

She pivoted without another word and cut neatly toward Henry with the efficient desperation of someone who had no desire to mediate old-money family dynamics but every intention of surviving the night.

Roman returned to stillness before she even reached them.

From across the room, it would read as nothing at all.

He watched, without looking like he was watching, as the coordinator interrupted Henry with just enough apology to preserve everyone’s dignity. Pembroke blinked, clearly annoyed, then tried to cover it with the smile of a man too well-bred to openly resent maternal summons in public.

Vivienne, of course, handled it beautifully.

She would.

Henry leaned in with some final promise—probably about finding her after the speeches or showing her some summer house or explaining private holdings to her in a voice he thought passed for depth.

Roman didn’t need to hear it to know the type.

Then Henry was gone.

Pulled back into the machinery that had sent him.

Roman waited exactly long enough not to make the rescue obvious.

Then he crossed the few feet between them with the same measured pace he’d used all evening, stopping at her shoulder just inside the acceptable radius of staff and family-adjacent logistics.

He glanced once in the direction Pembroke had disappeared.

“He seems sturdy,” Roman said under his breath. “I’m sure his mother will have him recalibrated by dessert.”

His eyes moved to the champagne flute in her hand.

Then to her.

The expression he gave her was mild enough to pass in public and far too knowing to be mistaken for innocence up close.

“You kept my drink,” he murmured.

There was no accusation in it.

That would have made it easier.

Instead it came out like a private observation he was enjoying far more than was decent.

His gaze dipped once to the stem between her fingers, then lifted back to her face.

“Good to know your standards collapse under pressure.”

A beat.

Then, before she could decide whether to cut him for that or reward him with one of those looks that had become a legitimate threat to his concentration, Roman’s attention shifted cleanly back to the room.

“Wetherby’s moving,” he said quietly, all business again. “He just broke from Charles and headed toward the east donor wall. Sloane’s already there. If those three overlap in one place tonight, it won’t happen by accident.”

His eyes skimmed the rotunda, cataloging movement, exits, angles.

“Pembroke was bait,” he added, voice low enough that only she would hear the edge in it. “Pretty, approved, and boring enough to make your father feel clever.”

Then his gaze slid back to her and softened into something drier.

“Bit insulting, honestly.”

The quartet shifted into something slower.

Applause flickered somewhere near the front entrance.

Roman looked toward the east side of the room again, already building the next move in his head.

“If Margot’s nervous enough to duplicate lists, she won’t stay near the speeches once the room settles. She’ll go where paper is. Or where she thinks she can still move it.” He tipped his chin almost imperceptibly toward the donor wall. “You’ve got about five minutes before she starts trying to disappear elegantly.”

Then, quieter—

“You want Wetherby or the room?”

Roman didn’t look at her when he asked it.

He kept his gaze on the room—on Wetherby’s slow drift toward the donor wall, on Sloane already anchoring himself like he intended to be found, on the subtle tightening of space that meant something was about to overlap whether anyone in the room admitted it or not.

“You can’t take both cleanly,” he said, voice low, measured. “Not without someone noticing you’re choosing.”

A beat.

“Wetherby gives you proximity to Charles’s conversation trail. The room gives you Margot before she decides she prefers shadows.”

Only then did his eyes flick back to her.

Just long enough.

Just enough to take in the champagne still in her hand, the controlled set of her mouth, the way she held herself like nothing about the last hour had altered her balance at all.

It almost made him laugh.

“You look very convincing,” he repeated, quieter this time.

His gaze dropped—brief, deliberate—to the line of her dress where the velvet caught the light and darkened again with her breath.

“Though I’m starting to think the museum lighting is doing you a disservice,” he added, tone casual, as if the observation had just occurred to him and wasn’t remotely inappropriate. “Too much restraint. It’s hiding the interesting parts.”

Then, like it hadn’t happened at all, he shifted back to the room.

“Margot will move first,” he went on. “She won’t risk being stationary once the speeches start. If she thinks the nephew’s loose, she’ll want to control whatever paper trail still exists before anyone else realizes it’s worth looking at.”

His fingers adjusted the edge of the program again, absent, controlled.

“You already saw the portfolio. If she goes back for it, she won’t be alone.” A glance toward the corridor. “Assistant, maybe one of the registrar staff. Someone deniable.”

His eyes came back to her.

“Which means if you want the room, you take it now—before she decides to be careful.”

Another beat.

Then, quieter—

“And if you go for Wetherby…” His mouth tilted faintly. “You’ll have to pretend to be interested for at least three minutes. I’m not sure you have that kind of patience left tonight.”

There it was again—that dry edge, just enough to provoke without pushing.

He let it sit for half a second, then added, softer, almost like an afterthought—

“Though you’ve been full of surprises.”

His gaze held hers for a fraction longer than necessary.

Then he looked away again, back to the room, as if he hadn’t just said anything at all.

The interruption came cleanly enough that only someone watching for design would have noticed it for what it was.

Vivienne saw the coordinator appear at Henry’s shoulder with a folder clutched to her chest and an apology already arranged on her face. She watched Henry’s expression flicker—first annoyance, then the quick, expensive correction into civility men like him learned before they were old enough to vote. His mother, apparently, wanted him.

Of course she did.

Vivienne did not look at Roman.

That was how she knew.

Henry angled back toward her with an apologetic smile that made a polite effort at regret and failed, chiefly because he was too pleased with himself to be convincing even while being dragged elsewhere.

“I seem to be wanted,” he said, as if this were charming rather than inconvenient. “Don’t let the museum lose you again. I’ll come find you before the speeches are over.”

He said it like a promise. Vivienne received it like weather.

“How reassuring,” she replied, every inch of her still perfect. “I do hate when the preservation efforts become disorganized.”

Henry laughed, missed the point entirely, and gave her a look that assumed inevitability before following the coordinator away toward whatever maternal summons had been invented for him.

Vivienne watched him go for precisely one second too long.

Not because she regretted his departure. God, no.

Because it had been too neat.

Too efficient. Too quick.

And because some small, disobedient part of her had the nerve to be pleased that Roman had apparently taken her earlier, half-coded complaint and acted on it. He had not let Henry linger. He had not stood there looking bored and superior while Charles’s chosen distraction took up her oxygen. He had done something about it.

That should have been merely useful.

Instead, it landed somewhere a great deal less manageable.

Her first instinct was to check the room for Charles.

She didn’t do it openly. She let her gaze move with the traffic of the rotunda, over the donor wall, the peonies, the quartet’s corner, the soft arc of trustees and trustees’ wives. Charles was still across the room, where he had been, engaged with Wetherby and one of the museum men who thought a title made him interesting. If he had noticed how quickly the distraction he’d arranged had been removed from the board, he gave no sign of it.

That did not reassure her nearly as much as it ought to have.

By the time Roman was near her again, she had already arranged her face back into something polished enough to survive being watched.

His comments came low and dry and precise, each one dropped between them like he was setting tools on a table rather than provoking her on purpose. Pembroke’s mother. The drink. Her standards. Wetherby moving. Pembroke as bait. Pretty, approved, boring enough to flatter Charles’s sense of himself. The room or Wetherby, but not both cleanly. Margot likely moving before the speeches. Her patience, allegedly, not built for Wetherby’s species.

Vivienne listened without interrupting at first.

On the surface, she looked serenely attentive—a woman accustomed to absorbing information and deciding what mattered without ever appearing rushed. Only the faint stillness in her shoulders betrayed the fact that Roman’s nearness still interfered with her concentration in ways she deeply resented.

He did not give her nearly enough time to be offended by the standards comment before he moved on to strategy, which was rude of him in a way she almost admired.

All she managed, in a voice that could have passed for bored correction if anyone had drifted too close, was, “Don’t romanticize a stolen drink. It lowers the tone.”

Her fingers tightened very slightly around the stem of the champagne flute.

Then she tipped her head, let her gaze skim once toward the retreating line of Henry Pembroke’s back, and said, “Publicly, Henry is Pembroke Shipping, Pembroke Capital, Pembroke summer houses, Pembroke charity galas, Pembroke’s mother on three boards and his father’s name on a pediatric wing. The official line is that he is an old family friend.”

Her mouth curved.

“Privately, he is cuff links with a trust fund and the conversational range of decorative plaster.”

There. Efficient. Accurate. Done.

She shifted the catalog against her hip and finally turned enough to let Roman see the finer edge of her expression.

“And since you were apparently so struck by how pretty he was,” she murmured, “perhaps you should have kept him. I’m sure he’d have been delighted to spend fifteen uninterrupted minutes explaining himself at you.”

The thought almost improved her mood.

Almost.

Roman’s assessment of Wetherby and Margot sat between them now, heavier than the teasing. Vivienne followed the line of Wetherby’s movement toward the donor wall and knew he was right before she had even finished measuring the distance. Wetherby would still be there in some form once the speeches began. Margot, on the other hand, would not. Margot was already frightened, already moving paper, already patching holes with expensive hands and administrative piety.

Vivienne lowered her voice another fraction.

“Margot,” she said. “And the room.”

There was no hesitation in it.

Not because her patience was as thin as he believed—though he was not wrong about that either—but because this was not, in fact, the part of the evening best handled by charm and proximity alone. Margot was frightened. Margot was managing paper. Margot would recognize the language of a well-bred institutional woman faster than she would recognize danger in it.

“I’m better for her right now,” Vivienne added. “She’ll hear concern if it comes from me. She’ll hear threat if it comes from you.”

Her eyes lifted to his then, cool and exact.

“You take Wetherby. He’s already halfway in love with his own significance. All you’ll have to do is stand near the right conversation and let him assume he’s being overheard by someone who matters.”

That, too, was true.

The quartet shifted pieces. Somewhere near the front of the rotunda, the first subtle cues of the coming speeches began to ripple through the room—staff straightening, conversations narrowing, donors orienting themselves toward the center.

Vivienne’s gaze cut briefly toward Charles again, then back to Roman.

“You also need to tighten up,” she said.

The words were smooth. The meaning wasn’t.

“You keep telling me how convincing I look.” Her tone remained mild enough to pass in public; only her eyes sharpened. “At this point I assume that’s less an observation and more an attempt to persuade yourself of something else.”

She let that sit for half a beat.

“What exactly, I haven’t the time to decide.”

The faintest lift of one shoulder.

“But decide it later. Right now, I need you useful.”

She was very aware, suddenly, of how close they were standing again.

Not enough to cause comment. Too close to be lazy.

That mattered.

Charles may have had her near the top of the evening’s internal watch list, but she was not foolish enough to think Roman was moving unwatched through the room either. Men like Charles did not only observe their daughters. They observed the orbit around them. Staff with too much access. Men who arrived where they were needed a little too fast. Employees who met a gaze a fraction too steadily.

Her voice cooled.

“And don’t mistake his attention to me for blindness about you,” she said. “If we keep being seen like this, best case he decides I’m still indulging the help.”

A tiny pause.

“At worst, he stops underestimating us.”

That was the real danger.

Not scandal. Recognition.

Vivienne took one measured sip of champagne and let the glass lower slowly, using the movement to put breath and composure back where they belonged.

“We separate now,” she said. “Margot will drift before the room settles. Wetherby will still be talking once everyone turns their chairs toward a podium. When the speeches start, Charles will have to perform stewardship instead of surveillance.”

That, too, landed neatly in her head the moment she said it.

The speeches were their cover. The performance was always the cover.

Her mouth tipped, faintly, with something that looked almost like amusement.

“So for the next few minutes, do try not to appear heartbroken by our parting.”

It was a joke, technically. An irritating one, by design.

But when she looked at him, the finer truth of it lived in her eyes for a second—sharp, controlled, and unhelpfully alive.

Then she stepped half a pace back, enough to restore the room’s preferred geometry between them without quite breaking the private line of the conversation.

“You get Wetherby,” she said. “I’ll get Margot, the room, and whatever else she thinks she can move before the lights dim and the board starts congratulating itself.”

Her fingers adjusted on the stem of the champagne flute.

“And Roman—”

She stopped there, just briefly, because the next thing wanted to come out softer than she intended.

Vivienne corrected the impulse before it could embarrass her.

“If Henry doubles back after his maternal recalibration,” she said instead, “you’re welcome to keep him. I wouldn’t want to deprive you of a second encounter with a man you found aesthetically promising.”

There.

Better.

Then, because the room was tightening and the first speech cues were already beginning to ripple outward from the front, she turned her shoulders toward the route she meant to take and let the rest of her settle back into the exact daughter Charles expected to see: poised, calm, socially untroubled, carrying herself as if nothing more consequential than donor logistics had passed between her and the man near the column.

Only before she left, she let her gaze hold Roman’s for one final second.

It said what the rest of her would not.

Be good. Be sharp. Do not get noticed. And if you absolutely must get noticed, make sure it’s for the right thing.

Then Vivienne smiled the small, effortless smile the room liked best from her and moved away toward the edge of the donor wall, the print-room corridor, and Margot Vale’s rising panic—champagne in hand, catalog at her side, and not one visible sign that anything inside her had gone even slightly off script.

Roman watched her decide.

Not theatrically. Not with any visible investment that would have meant anything to the room.

Just the quiet, attentive stillness of a man who knew exactly when to stop talking and let the sharper mind in front of him finish building the structure on its own.

Margot and the room.

Of course.

It was the correct call, and the fact that she reached it cleanly without needing him to drag her there did something low and private to the edge of his mouth that never quite became a smile.

She was better for Margot. She was right about that too.

Margot would hear concern in Vivienne’s voice and mistake it for safety. She would hear the language of polished female containment, of private alarm made socially acceptable, and step toward it instead of away. Roman, on the other hand, would get exactly what Vivienne said he would get from a woman like Margot if he approached too early: shutters. Distance. A frightened little tightening of the room around the truth.

So he took the assignment she gave him without argument.

Wetherby.

Fine.

Wetherby was the easier species anyway. Men like that had been walking up to Roman his whole life thinking they were the only ones in the room who understood value.

Still, he let her finish.

Let her call Pembroke cuff links with a trust fund and the conversational range of decorative plaster—which, Christ, was generous—and listened with his face arranged into something almost neutral while a deeply unhelpful part of him enjoyed her more than was operationally wise.

Then she told him to tighten up.

That one landed.

Not because it was unfair.

Because it wasn’t.

Roman’s eyes held hers as she said it, and if anyone had glanced their way in that moment they would have seen nothing more scandalous than a daughter of the house correcting some minor logistical detail with a staff member she expected to understand quickly.

Only up close, there was enough current in it to light a smaller city.

You keep telling me how convincing I look.

At this point I assume that’s less an observation and more an attempt to persuade yourself of something else.

Roman’s expression didn’t change.

Didn’t need to.

But behind it, something in him gave a short, sharp acknowledgment of the hit.

Because there it was again—Vivienne Blackwell reaching directly for the live wire and touching it like she’d been doing it for years.

He let the silence after it breathe just long enough to feel deliberate.

Then, low enough that only she would hear it—

“You should be flattered,” he murmured. “I’m usually much better at lying to myself.”

The line came dry. Unbothered. Almost lazy.

Which was exactly why it carried.

Then he shifted back into strategy with the kind of smoothness that would have looked like indifference to anyone else and felt, to her, like something else entirely.

He listened while she laid out the separation. The speeches. Charles’s attention turning outward instead of inward. The risk not being scandal, but recognition.

That was the real thing, wasn’t it.

Not being caught.

Being understood.

Roman knew enough about men like Charles to know that underestimation was one of the few gifts they ever gave without realizing it.

And he had no intention of helping the man correct that tonight.

When she told him not to appear heartbroken by their parting, the corner of his mouth finally did move.

Small.
Controlled.
Brief enough to survive museum light and donor sightlines.

“Devastated,” he said quietly. “I’ll try to hold it together until dessert.”

There was no real smile attached to it.

Just that low, composed edge she had become far too good at reading.

Then she gave him Henry again—maternal recalibration, aesthetically promising, all of it wrapped in that razor-thin layer of social poison she wore so beautifully—and Roman’s gaze dipped once to the champagne flute still in her hand before coming back to her face.

“I’ll survive the loss,” he said. “But if he starts discussing yacht varnish or family office philosophy, I’m putting him in the river.”

A beat.

His eyes flicked once toward the room tightening near the donor wall, the subtle repositioning of staff, the first shift of bodies toward the coming speeches.

Then back to her.

And for one second—just one—the room, the museum, the donors, Charles, the whole expensive theater of the evening seemed to pull slightly out of focus around the two of them.

Because she’d stepped back, yes.

But not far enough.

Not in the way that mattered.

Roman took in the catalog at her side, the champagne in her hand, the sapphires at her throat that Charles had almost certainly selected because men like him liked to imagine they could make symbols out of their daughters and call it elegance. He took in the way the velvet darkened where the light hit the curve of her shoulder, the way her face had already begun returning itself to the version the room required, and the much more interesting fact that he now knew what sat beneath it.

It made her look almost unreal.

It also made something mean and protective in him want to ruin the entire floor plan.

He didn’t.

He kept his voice exactly where it belonged.

“If Margot starts improvising,” he said quietly, “don’t follow her into a closed room alone.”

No flourish.

No heavy-handed warning.

Just the clean placement of a fact between them.

“If she feels the ground shift, she’ll stop being tidy about it. Tidy people get ugly fast when they run out of elegant options.”

His eyes held hers for one more beat.

“And if Charles moves before the speeches,” he added, even lower now, “don’t try to manage him and the paper trail at the same time. Pick one.”

He could have said I’ll take the other.

He didn’t.

Didn’t need to.

The promise sat there anyway, in the shape of the sentence and the steadiness of his face.

Then he did what he had become irritatingly good at doing with her.

He let the dangerous thing exist for exactly one second too long—

and then covered it with something crooked.

His gaze dropped, briefly, to the slit of her gown where it shifted when she turned.

Then back up.

“And for the record,” he said in that same maddeningly even tone, “if you’re going to move through a room like a threat in velvet, you can’t really blame anyone for circling.”

It was random enough to pass as nothing.

Specific enough to absolutely not be nothing.

And because he knew better than to let her recover too quickly, he added, softer—

“Though I’m trying very hard to behave.”

That one he left hanging.

No grin.

Not yet.

Just the faintest trace of something in his eyes that made it clear he was enjoying himself more than either of them should have allowed.

Then the moment was over.

Roman stepped back first.

Only half a pace. Only enough.

Enough to give the room its preferred version of the distance between them again.

His posture shifted with it—shoulders looser, expression flattening back into event-readiness, a man once again absorbed by the moving machinery of the evening rather than the woman who had just handed him an operation and a warning in the same breath.

He glanced once toward Wetherby, already recalibrating his path.

“Take the corridor clean and don’t look rushed,” he said, voice now fully in its professional register. “Margot will smell urgency before she sees it.”

A pause.

Then his eyes found hers one last time, and the composure in him stayed exactly where it had been all evening—steady, grounded, impossible to rattle cleanly even now.

Only the last line came with just enough of that dry, infuriating edge to belong to her as much as to him.

“Try not to miss me while you’re stealing state secrets.”

And then he was gone.

Not abruptly.

Just efficiently.

Roman peeled away from the column and let the room swallow him the way men like him had learned to let rooms do—becoming part of the architecture without ever quite disappearing inside it. He moved past a trustee, behind a donor couple, across the marble reflection of the rotunda with the smooth, unhurried pace of someone who belonged anywhere he decided to stand.

By the time he reached the east donor wall, he had already become someone else again.

Not Roman with her.

Roman in the room.

Still watchful.
Still composed.
Still carrying the private, dangerous warmth of her last look somewhere under all that black and calm where no one else could see it.

Wetherby was laughing too loudly at something Sloane had said.

Roman arrived just inside the edge of the conversation, quiet as a shadow and twice as deliberate, and let the older men notice him the way men like that always eventually noticed a stillness they hadn’t accounted for.

Across the rotunda, he could feel rather than see Vivienne slipping back into the machinery.

And God help him, he trusted her in it.

That was the part he probably should’ve been more worried about.

By the time Roman peeled away from her side and let the room absorb him again, Vivienne had already arranged her face back into something composed enough to survive being looked at.

That did not make the looking easier.

The rotunda had begun its slow, elegant turn toward speeches. Staff moved with that particular hunted smoothness peculiar to institutional evenings just before someone important started thanking other important people for believing in history. Donors drifted inward by degrees. Trustees reassembled themselves into visible relevance. The quartet softened into something more ceremonial. Across the room, Charles was still exactly where he was meant to be—occupied, visible, controlled.

Vivienne let the room believe she was doing what it expected of her. She crossed the marble at an unhurried pace, finished the last of the champagne she had taken from Roman’s hand, and set the empty flute on the edge of a silver tray just as a waiter passed. Then she turned lightly toward the side corridor leading back toward the print room and found Margot there before the woman could disappear fully into staff territory.

Margot looked worse up close.

Not ruined. Not openly panicked. She was too practiced for that. But the neatness of her had begun to fray around the edges. Her smile was late. Her hands were too tight around a slim sheaf of papers. Her attention kept splitting between Vivienne’s face and the open line of corridor behind her, as if she had become very aware that doors existed and no longer trusted any of them.

Vivienne approached her with the exact register Margot would mistake for safety: polished concern, private feminine discretion, just enough warmth to feel selective.

It worked.

Margot did what frightened institutional women often did when someone elegant gave them permission to appear burdened—she overexplained while pretending not to. Within moments, Vivienne had the shape of it. The blue portfolio in the print room had already been moved. A corrected private lender addendum tied to the Saint Agnes material still needed to be reconciled with the donor packet before circulation resumed after the speeches. Margot had sent it off the floor to conservation prep through the registrar route because she no longer trusted the room. There was another copy downstairs, and if the wrong version surfaced when the floor reopened, the evening would stop being merely inconvenient.

That was the word Margot used without saying it: wrong.

Vivienne left her with a sympathetic look, a measured touch to the woman’s forearm, and the distinct impression that the matter had been received by someone who understood how delicate such things were.

Then she turned back toward the rotunda and found Eleanor waiting near the floral arrangement at the edge of the donor wall, as though she had always been standing there and the room had simply failed to notice her until now.

For one suspended second, Vivienne saw her not as Charles’s wife or the pale, luminous center of so many carefully staged evenings, but as something quieter and more formidable than that. Eleanor did not ask what Vivienne had found. She did not ask where she had been. Her gaze touched her daughter’s face once, took the measure of what had changed there, and went directly to the only question that mattered.

“How much time do you need?”

Vivienne had not realized how badly she needed someone to ask it that way until the words were already between them.

“Ten minutes.”

Eleanor’s expression did not move, but something in it deepened.

“Take twelve.”

Vivienne looked at her then—properly, not as daughter to mother under donor light, but as one woman trying to understand the exact shape of another.

Eleanor held her gaze.

“I have mistaken silence for protection before,” she said quietly. “I won’t do it again tonight.”

Something tightened in Vivienne’s throat so quickly she almost resented it.

“Mother—”

“Go,” Eleanor said, and for all the softness in her voice there was not a single fragile thing in it.

What happened next was done in the open and so perfectly that it almost qualified as beautiful.

Eleanor moved back into the machinery of the room with the same grace she wore everywhere, but now Vivienne could see the force underneath it. A word to the deputy director. A glance to the board chair. A low, calm note to one of the museum women overseeing donor circulation. Then, with exquisite timing, she turned Charles toward the obligation waiting for him at the front of the room just as the first introduction was being prepared. In the same sweep, she established—publicly, elegantly—that there was a discrepancy in a private lender packet tied to the Saint Agnes material, that Vivienne would see it handled personally before the room reopened after the remarks, and that Mr. Kessler would take her through the staff route because he knew the movement schedule and the public floor was already too congested for delay.

Charles had no room to object.

Not without objecting to competence. Not without objecting to donor care. Not without objecting to his wife in front of the very people whose confidence he was about to stand and flatter.

So he did what powerful men always did when outmaneuvered gracefully in public.

He accepted the version of events most flattering to himself and stepped toward the podium.

Vivienne felt the opening before she used it.

The speeches began in a wash of applause and lowered lights. The room shifted its gaze forward. Chairs and shoulders angled toward the front. Staff pinned themselves to the walls. The first warm note of Charles’s public voice moved out through the rotunda, cultivated and resonant and designed to make stewardship sound holy.

Vivienne slipped sideways through the edge of that sound and into the staff route at exactly the moment Roman arrived to fall into step beside her.

He said nothing.

She was almost grateful. Words from him right then might have disturbed the precarious neatness with which she was holding herself together.

The corridor beyond the public floor was narrower, dimmer, lined with framed prints and half-open service doors. The museum changed quickly once one left the donor light behind. The air cooled. The polish thinned. Work replaced atmosphere. Their footsteps softened against runner carpet and then sharpened briefly on stone as they turned another corner.

Vivienne kept moving.

“Margot moved the blue portfolio off the floor,” she said under her breath, her voice low and fast now that they were clear of the room. “There’s a corrected private lender addendum tied to the Saint Agnes material. She was rattled enough to tell me she no longer trusted the print room, which means whatever she’s protecting has already outgrown elegance.”

Roman stayed at her shoulder, close enough to hear, silent enough not to break her pace.

“She sent the active copy through the registrar route to conservation prep,” Vivienne continued. “Not because it’s safer—because it’s less visible and more deniable. That means she expects the wrong version to matter if it reenters circulation after the speeches.”

She took the turn toward the lower service hall without looking back.

“The packet is supposed to be reconciled before donors start drifting again. Which tells us two things. First, this is not only about storage. It’s about sequence. Second, somebody upstairs is still trying to make tonight look administratively clean even while they’re moving evidence through back channels.”

The muffled sound of applause pulsed faintly behind the walls as Charles reached some opening line the room had been trained to appreciate.

Vivienne’s mouth tightened.

“Margot gave me just enough to know she’s frightened and trying to stay useful. She did not give me names freely, but she did flinch when I mentioned Saint Agnes and the donor packet in the same breath.” Her eyes flicked once toward the junction ahead. “So the corrected material matters, the timing matters, and whatever version is downstairs is the one someone still thinks can be managed.”

They passed an open prep bay where rolling crates sat under muslin and a lone work lamp burned over a covered pedestal. The museum below the museum looked less like legacy and more like labor.

“If it’s reconciled before I get there, we lose the cleanest version of whatever she’s still trying to correct. If it’s not, then I want to see what was wrong enough to move in the first place.”

Another corner. Another dimmer corridor. The building seemed to be folding around them, farther and farther from the speeches and the public fiction of the evening.

“She said it like a donor issue,” Vivienne said. “That was the tell. Women like Margot only call something a donor issue when it is actually a liability issue with better posture.”

At that, she glanced at him for the first time since they had left the floor.

The look was brief. Alert. Entirely serious.

“If she arrives while we’re there, let me handle her first.”

Not a request.

“She’ll expect authority if it comes from a man in the back corridor. She’ll expect discretion if it comes from me. Right now discretion is more useful.”

They descended the short service stair to the lower level. The speech overhead faded into a warm blur of indistinct words and audience response. Down here, the museum felt almost illicit in its quiet.

Vivienne lowered her voice further.

“Eleanor bought us twelve minutes,” she said, and something about saying it aloud made it more real. “Possibly more, depending on how long she can keep my father smiling in public.”

She did not elaborate.

There wasn’t time, and she wasn’t entirely sure she trusted herself to.

Instead she tipped her chin toward the end of the corridor where a frosted pane of glass glowed faintly beside a dark-painted door.

“That’s where she sent it. Conservation prep. Registrar access through the side station.”

She slowed only enough to make the final approach look deliberate rather than rushed.

“When we get inside, I want the lender file first, then any corrected addendum, then whatever they used to cross-reference it. If there’s a second copy, it’ll be near the worktable, not in the flat files. Margot hoards vertically when she’s nervous.”

It was such a specific observation that under any other circumstances it might have amused her.

Tonight it only made her sharper.

“And if the room has already been touched,” she said, reaching the door, “then we’ll know by how tidy they tried to make the lie.”

Her fingers closed around the handle.

She could feel Roman at her shoulder, silent and steady and ready.

Vivienne drew one breath, turned the latch, and led them inside.