Chapter 3 — People Say He Has Terrible Taste

Thursday night. Sterling Tech's B-round roadshow gala, the Hilton penthouse ballroom, chandeliers blazing like a small indoor galaxy.

The company's finest had turned out. Investors cruised between champagne glasses like a school of trained sharks. Mila wore a new plunging red dress and hung off the arm of the marketing director, smiling like she was up for an Oscar. She spotted Irene in the corner, and her eyes lit up.

"Irene! What are you doing here?" Mila clasped her hands, shocked. "Oh my god. You're not… the caterer, are you? Or here to help set up?"

A few coworkers laughed.

"Mr. Black asked me to come," Irene said calmly. "For the materials handoff."

Mila's smile cracked for a heartbeat, then reassembled. "Oh—the materials. How sweet. Although this outfit…" She ran an appraising eye over Irene's neat black suit. "At a gala, it's a little… hmm. Understated. Want me to lend you a necklace? So you don't stand next to the investors looking like their nanny."

Irene opened her mouth. A voice spoke from behind her first: "She doesn't look like a nanny."

The ballroom went quiet.

Kalen Black had materialized at her side, a champagne glass in hand, a head taller than Mila, his gray eyes cold as a blade in the chandelier light. "She looks like my guest," he said.

Mila's smile petrified. The air froze for three seconds, and then everyone very pointedly went back to their conversations. But everyone had heard. Kalen Black—the man who never brought a date, who had refused heiresses by the hundreds, who despised performance of any kind—had publicly made an exception for an admin girl in a cheap black suit.

Halfway through the gala, the restroom. Irene was fixing her makeup. (She wasn't. She was hiding from the increasingly aggressive Mila.) On the counter sat an envelope she hadn't noticed arrive. Cream-colored. No markings. Only a wax seal: a six-pointed star cradling an eye.

House Aethel.

Her fingers went cold as she opened it. Inside, one line, typewritten, unsigned: "LAST WARNING. YOUR LITTLE GAME ENDS AT MIDNIGHT."

She folded the letter and slid it into her inner pocket. In the mirror, her eyes flashed to a very pale silver—one heartbeat, like a light flickering, then normal. Footsteps in the hall. She composed herself and pushed the door open—directly into Kalen Black.

"You look pale," he said, flat.

"Champagne. A little dizzy," she said, expressionless.

He looked at her for two seconds. Then he reached out, and very gently tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. His fingertip brushed the shell of her ear, as light as a feather landing on water, and Irene's breath stopped for one beat.

"Then don't drink," he said, withdrawing his hand as if nothing had happened, walking on. "I'm taking you home."

"I don't need—"

"New York isn't safe at night," he said without turning around. "I told you."

The black Bentley glided through Manhattan's night. The cabin was quiet except for the low hum of the AC. Irene watched the neon slide by, when he suddenly said: "You know what the investors said about me tonight?"

"What did they say?"

"They say I have terrible taste." He stared straight ahead, a faint curve at the corner of his mouth. "Turning down every top-tier heiress to look after an admin girl with 'nothing.' They say Kalen Black has finally lost his mind."

Irene said nothing. In the window's reflection, her lashes trembled once. "What do you think?" he asked.

"I think," she said, "they just haven't seen better."

Kalen Black was quiet for a long time. When the car stopped outside her old Brooklyn building, he didn't unlock the door immediately. He turned to face her, his gray eyes deep in the streetlight. "Irene," he said. "You're playing an ordinary person. Very well—really, very well. You could almost fool everyone."

Irene's heart skipped a beat.

"But I'd suggest," he leaned in, close enough that she could smell clean cedar on his collar, close enough to see her own composed, nearly perfect face in his pupils, "you play it a little more convincingly."

"Because," his voice dropped to a whisper, "I've already seen you."

He got out first, walked around, opened her door. Irene stood in the night wind and watched the man get back behind the wheel. The window rolled down. He nodded at her once, like a gentleman bidding a lady goodnight. The Bentley pulled away. Its taillights vanished around the corner.

Irene stood under the streetlight for a long time. She looked down. Her palms were slick with cold sweat.

She whispered to the world, and to the man who had tucked back her hair and seen through her and was already too far away: "Those who bully the quietest always fall the hardest."

At that same moment, back in the Hilton penthouse. Sterling's CFO clutched his phone, his face drained, bursting into the CEO's office. "We just got word—Aurum Capital pulled out."

"What?"

"Half an hour ago! 'Internal review'! The B round… is dead!"

The ballroom lights still blazed. No one knew that a capital storm was already taking shape, silently, at the fingertips of the admin girl everyone had mistaken for a nanny.