CHAPTER ONE — THE SPILL (1)

LAYLA

The first rule of a Manhattan charity gala, I learned, is that nobody is there for the charity.

I was pressed against a pillar like a coat nobody claimed, wearing a dress I could not afford and did not own, watching five hundred people spend an island's GDP on being photographed. My painting—Ember and Dawn, a last-minute substitute when some senator's wife pulled her donation—hung in the silent auction next to a Rothko and a Damien Hirst, looking exactly like a girl who'd crashed a party where the art was worth more than her life.

That was me. Layla Hayes, twenty-four, Queens, indie artist, student-loan debt that could fund a small war, and a painting that had no business being in this room.

But no one was looking at my painting.

Everyone was looking at him.

Dorian Varga stood at the center of the room like a building had decided to attend a party. People orbited him the way moths orbit a flame—except he was the flame, and he was, spectacularly, not on fire. Heir to the largest fortune no one could name, owner of half of everything and the other half's landlord. No smile. No scandal. No photos of him looking anything other than carved from arctic marble. For ten years, every eligible woman in America had thrown herself at him like a wave at a cliff, and for ten years, the cliff had done nothing.

Rumors said he'd never touched anyone. Never dated. Never once looked at a woman twice.

People joked that he wasn't human.

People joked.

Around him, the orbit was a contact sport. Heiresses drifted past with choreographed laughs; tech widows angled their necklines like artillery; a duchess I'd seen on a cereal box once slid him a cocktail napkin with her room number on it. He didn't look at any of it. Not once. He stood in the middle of the wealthiest room in America and might as well have been alone on the moon.

And at the front of the orbit, circling closest, was Elinor Rose—dress the color of money, smile sharp enough to shave with. Elinor had been trying to land Dorian Varga for a decade. The tabloids called it "the longest courtship in American history." Dorian called it nothing, because he never spoke to her. I'd watched her close in on him three times tonight and get exactly zero degrees of success. Her eyes had been getting meaner with each pass.

"Relax," Max had said when he saw me clocking her. "She's not going to start a war at a charity gala."

Max, I would like to formally apologize. I should have listened to him. He knows these people. I know paint.

I was calculating the exit route when the champagne hit me.

Not my champagne—Elinor's. She glided past with a glass and a "terribly sorry" that landed like a knife, and the shove sent me stumbling forward, my own glass of red wine sailing out of my hand in a perfect, graceful, catastrophic arc.

Time did that thing where it slows down so your life can really marinate in the disaster.

The wine hit Dorian Varga's chest.

His white shirt—the kind of shirt that costs more than my annual rent and is probably named after the Italian man who hand-wove it while weeping—bloomed red. A waterfall of cheap cabernet down the front of the most untouchable man in America.

The room stopped. Five hundred people stopped. I think somewhere a harpist hit the wrong chord and also stopped.

Security moved. Two mountains in earpieces converged on me with the professional menace of men who had done this before and enjoyed it.

And then Dorian Varga raised one hand.

Not a wave. A command. The mountains stopped like they'd hit a wall. The whole room watched him look down at his ruined shirt, then raise his eyes to me.

His eyes were the color of cold water in winter. And they were looking at me like I was a door that shouldn't exist.

"—I'm so sorry—" I heard myself say, from very far away. "I'm so sorry, I didn't—someone pushed—I'm sorry, I'll pay—"

"You can't," he said.

His voice did something to the room. It was soft. Quiet. The kind of voice you use for a child who's scared, or a thing you don't want to break. The room had never heard it. The heiresses looked at each other like the laws of physics had just been repealed.

"You can't pay," he repeated, and then he did something no one in that room had ever seen him do.

He smiled.

It was a small smile. Barely a curve. But it rearranged his whole face—the carved marble went human, went warm, went somewhere none of these people had ever been allowed.

"It's only fabric," he said. "Fabric can be replaced."

He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket—real silk, monogrammed with a V—and pressed it against his own chest, blotting the wine himself. Himself. The most powerful man in the Western Hemisphere, dabbing his own shirt like a man who'd spilled his coffee, and then he said the part that broke the room:

"People can't."

The silence got deeper. I heard a woman somewhere whisper, "Did he just—"

"It's Miss Hayes, isn't it?" he said. "The artist."

I stared at him. "How do you know my—"

"Your painting," he said, and his eyes flicked across the room to Ember and Dawn—my little canvas of a girl made of fire at the edge of morning. "It's the only true thing in this room."

I think I forgot how to breathe. I think the harpist fainted. I know Elinor Rose's face did something complicated and ugly.

Then Dorian Varga held out his hand—palm up, patient, like I was something rare and he had all the time in the world.

Which, I would later learn, he did.

"May I walk you somewhere quieter?" he asked. "You look like you need air."

· · ·

DORIAN

I have been alive for nine hundred and seventy-four years.

Let me be precise about what that means. I have watched empires fall and cities rise and the same mistakes get made by the same species in different hats. I have owned more money than most countries and have felt less than most men feel on a Tuesday. There is a curse on my blood older than this nation, older than my name, older than the first stone of the first tower I ever raised. They call it the Unbound Fate. It means: nothing will ever move you. Nothing will ever matter. You will walk through eternity with a heart made of architecture.