Chapter 2: Poison & Champagne (2)

This is the first patron of her career, won by accident, in borrowed silk, with one sentence.

Nobody sees it coming. Least of all her.

Later that night, Lila is at the coat check, retrieving a coat that isn't hers, when Cyrus Hale appears at her elbow. Up close he's older than the room makes him seem, and his eyes are sharp enough to cut glass.

"That thing with the wine," he says. "That was an accident, right?"

"One hundred percent," Lila says.

"Good. Because if it was strategy, I'd have to hire you on the spot, and I'm not ready for a person smarter than me." He hands her a card, worn at the corners, with a phone number on it. "Tomorrow. Ten a.m. Come in through the service entrance so nobody sees you take a meeting with a man you insulted with a Château Margaux."

"Sir, I don't have a Château Margaux's worth of anything to discuss—"

"We'll see. You've got a spine. Those are rare. The girl with the cream-colored smile in there? Serena Blythe? She's from one of the old families. Very old. Very patient. She smiled at you like she wanted to be your friend." His eyes are flat. "In my experience, women like that don't make friends. They make collections."

He leaves her standing at the coat check holding his card, and Lila thinks about the way Serena's smile had flickered, and something cold walks down her spine.

She tells herself it's nothing. She's wrong.

⁂

Serena Blythe appears at that same gala, halfway through the second hour, when Lila is standing alone by a window trying to remember the names of the seven people she's just been introduced to.

"Hi, darling."

Serena Blythe is cream-colored everything. Cream suit, cream smile, hair that costs more than Lila's rent. She walks over carrying two glasses like she and Lila have known each other for ten years, and presses one into Lila's hand before she can refuse.

You're too good for him, darling. He'll eat you alive.

"Thanks," Lila says. "I'll fatten him up first."

Serena's smile falters for exactly one second—Lila catches it, the way you catch a fish's flash under dark water—and then it comes back sweeter. She leans in like she's sharing a secret between women who understand each other.

"Do you know the rule of our world, Lila? Bloodline decides your seat at the table. A girl with your background..." She waves a hand, apologetic, kind, devastating. "You're a dessert, not the main course."

Lila's glass stops halfway to her lips. She's spent the whole night being measured by people with more money and better tailoring, and she's handled all of it with borrowed-Valmont grace. But something about the way Serena says it—the certainty, the casualness, the way it's aimed like a scalpel—gets through.

"What's your background?" she asks pleasantly.

Serena's eyes flicker. Just for a moment, something old and cold looks out from behind the cream-colored mask. "Oh, I'm from a very old family. Very, very old. We don't talk about it at parties. It would make people uncomfortable."

"Then we have something in common," Lila says. "My background makes people uncomfortable too. I came from nothing. I'm planning to make it something. Excuse me."

She walks away with her heart hammering, furious at herself for letting it get to her, and misses the way Serena watches her go—the way a fox watches a henhouse.

She also misses the other thing: that Serena said her name. Lila. They'd never been introduced. Lila had assumed the cream-colored woman knew her because she was Kane's date, the way you know the garnish.

Serena Blythe had said her name like she'd been waiting to say it.

The thought surfaces, sinks, and drowns under the noise of the gala. Lila files it in the drawer with the other things that don't quite add up, and goes to find Kane.

It's the first time Lila has ever heard the word bloodline used that way. She assumes Serena means class. She assumes it's snobbery with a pretty face.

She's wrong. Serena means it literally.

⁂

Kane gets busier.

That's the polite way to say it. The true way is: Kane disappears into a version of himself Lila doesn't recognize yet. Custom suits. New vocabulary—the right rooms, ratings, resource swaps. He's still soft with her in the evenings, still curls around her in the dark like he's afraid she'll evaporate, but he's stopped telling her the bad parts.

The bad parts are these: the Elders have come to see him three times.

The first time was the week after the term sheet. They appeared at his office, two men in quiet suits with no appointments and no names, and they smiled at him the way you smile at a child who doesn't know what's coming. They asked about his health. His fortune. His company.

The second time, they asked about the human girl.

The third time, they stopped asking and started telling: When are you going to deal with the human, Kane?

He doesn't tell Lila any of this. He tells himself it's because she shouldn't have to carry it. He tells himself he'll handle it. He tells himself a lot of things, in those months, that he will spend the next six years paying for.

Lila counts the silences instead. The calls he takes in the other room now. The way he looks at her sometimes, in the middle of a laugh, like he's memorizing her. The way he says her name now—carefully, like he's checking to make sure it's still his to say.