I sighed at him.
He was here because Kieran's little speech had lit him up like a fuse, and he needed somewhere to put the fire. Fine. I'd been putting out Hugo's fires for three years. One more, and then never again.
"Aria. Answer me."
So I did something better than answering. I let my shoulders soften, let my chin drop, and when I looked up at him through my lashes, I made sure he saw only what he'd spent three years teaching himself to see: a woman coming back where she belonged.
"I couldn't help it," I murmured. "I missed you. Isn't that pathetic? I kept telling myself I hated you, and then I heard your voice tonight, and…"
I drifted closer, close enough that I could smell the champagne on him, and let one fingertip travel up his jaw, over his cheek, and draw a slow, idle circle on his chest. Under my nail, his heart was going like a drum.
"You—" His breath had gone shallow. His hand came up toward my waist.
"I thought about you every day this week," I whispered, letting my voice drop into the register that used to end arguments. "Every single night. Tonight I'll apologize properly. Let me make it up to you…"
His pupils had blown wide. "You know you're the only one who—"
He reached for my waist.
I stepped back.
His hands closed on air. He blinked, unbalanced, and I was already lifting the vase off the console beside us, the tall one with the expedited lilies, and upending the entire thing over his head.
The water hit him like a wave—hair, face, jacket, the works. Somewhere in the corridor a passing waiter made a sound like a kettle. Hugo stood there dripping, lily petals sliding down his nose, mouth working around nothing.
"You—" He came up out of the wreckage, soaked and apoplectic. "You played me?! Have you lost your mind?!"
"Played you?" I tilted my head, wide-eyed. "Whatever are you talking about?"
He took a step toward me, hands curling, and that was my cue. I raked both hands through my own hair, tore it loose from its pins, and screamed.
"HELP! Somebody help—!"
Then I turned and bolted around the corner, straight into the crowd spilling out of the ballroom, and pitched myself against the first hard chest available, shoulders heaving, eyes brimming on command.
"There's a man—he—he tried to force himself on me—"
Hugo came storming around the corner half a second later, drenched, dragging a lily off his shoulder—and stopped dead in front of forty witnesses.
"That's a lie!" he roared. "She came on to me! I have witnesses—"
"You have nothing," I said, and the tears were there now, real ones, courtesy of adrenaline. Three years of practice at reading him had taught me exactly how loud I needed to be. "I said no, and he grabbed me—everyone heard me scream—"
"You little—!"
A cool hand closed over my wrist. Then the world tilted, and I was pressed back against a chest that smelled of cedar and cold night air, and an arm came around me like a gate closing.
Kieran.
He looked past my shoulder at Hugo the way a man looks at something on his shoe. Then, unhurried, he lifted his hands and tucked my ruined hair behind my ears, one side, then the other, in front of God and everyone.
"Assaulting you," Kieran said quietly. "Is that what happened, Hugo?"
I found my mark instantly. I seized his arm with both hands, trembling on cue. "Ari—Ari, I'm so sorry, I only went to fix my makeup, I didn't know he'd be there—I was so scared—"
Wait. Had I just called him Ari?
Apparently I had, because the corner of Kieran's mouth moved—the first expression I'd ever seen on that carved face that wasn't stillness—and he shrugged off his dinner jacket and settled it over my shoulders like it was the most natural thing in the world.
"I told you not to wander off," he said.
The corridor went from silent to silence.
Because everyone here knew Kieran Vale's face. And everyone here had heard—through the normal channels, the gossip channels, the channels that ran this city's supernatural underworld—that Kieran Vale did not touch people. Did not smile. Did not, as far as anyone could prove, have a heartbeat where other men kept their appetites.
And he was standing in the Grand Meridian's main corridor, jacketing a disgraced secretary like she was made of the last warm thing in the world.
"Oh my Goddess," someone breathed. "The night of the club—the kiss—were they already—"
"Since before the engagement?"
"Then Hugo Vaughn's been wearing horns this whole time—"
I'm sorry, I mouthed up at Kieran, this is my fault.
He looked down at me, and for a moment the crowd, the scandal, the soaked Alpha all of it fell away, and there was just the strange gravity of being looked at like that. Like something set down carefully on a high shelf.
"I told you not to wander off," he said.
His mate came hurrying through the crowd in pearl white, alarm arranged becomingly on her face. "Hugo? Hugo, are you all right?"
"Fine." Hugo's voice came out strangled. "I'm going to change."
He left. The audience dispersed in twos and threes, each one carrying tonight's story home like contraband. I stood in the emptied corridor wearing a Lycan King's—wearing Kieran Vale's—jacket, and tried, delicately, to reclaim my arm.
It didn't move.
I tugged again. Nothing. The man had a grip like a mooring line, and now he was looking down at me again, thoughtful, unhurried.
"That…" I coughed. "Sorry. About all of that."
"That's what you want to say?"
I considered. There was a question I'd been carrying since the club, and tonight had doubled its interest. "Why do you keep helping me?"
He was quiet for a moment. "Hugo bores me," he said, which was the least believable sentence anyone had said to me all year. The man had bent over backward for Hugo's partnership; half the city said they were friends. Men didn't torch their friends' reputations out of boredom.
"Fine." I straightened as best I could with my arm still captive. "Then consider it a debt. You've helped me twice now—whatever you need someday, if it's in my power, it's yours."
"A debt." Something moved through his eyes, slow and dark, like a shape under ice. His grip shifted—not tighter, just present—and a small step backward on my part turned into two steps directly into him.
"Then repay it now," he said.
"Excuse me?"
He nodded past my shoulder. I turned my head.
Hugo and Vivian were descending the grand staircase, him freshly changed into a spare jacket, her hand resting on his arm, the evening's hosts in recovery formation. They hadn't seen us yet. But they would. Everyone would.
I understood immediately. One performance deserved another; that was our whole arrangement, unspoken but twice ratified now.
So I leaned in. Let all my weight go soft against his side, the way a woman does when she stopped worrying about appearances a long time ago. And as Hugo's gaze swept the corridor and found us, I rose on my toes and pressed a slow kiss to Kieran Vale's cheek.
"Theatrical enough for you?" I murmured. "Satisfied, Mr. Vale?"
"Mediocre," he said.
I was still processing that—mediocre, the audacity—when his fingers caught my chin and turned my face back to his, and he kissed me.
Not like the club. Nothing desperate in it, nothing to prove. This one was slow and cool and unbearably precise, a sentence delivered in a language I didn't speak yet, and it lasted exactly long enough for my heart to lose its dignity entirely.
Then it was over, and he was watching me from two inches away.
"Better," he said, "if we're selling it."
I stared at him. Somewhere behind my sternum, my ridiculous, brand-new wolf was rolling over with all four paws in the air, shameless, ecstatic, whining again, again, again like the world's most expensive dog.
Absolutely not, I told her, and my face, apparently, decided to agree with her instead, because I had to look away first. Heat to my ears. Great. Wonderful. Thirty years of composure, spent in one week.
He caught my chin again—gently—and tipped it back toward him.
"Don't pull away," Kieran said quietly, eyes flicking once toward the staircase. "Hugo's watching. If we stop now, he'll start wondering what this really is."
So I didn't pull away. I stood in the corridor of the Grand Meridian Hotel in a borrowed dinner jacket, cheek against the shoulder of a stranger the whole city feared, and let my heartbeat do whatever it wanted.
We made a picture. I knew we did. The light was good and the scandal was fresh and anyone looking at us would have said well-matched, would have said a pair, would have said the Goddess herself arranged that.
Across the atrium, Hugo stood with a champagne flute halfway to his mouth, staring, jaw working like he was chewing glass.
"Hugo?" Vivian touched his arm, soft with concern. "What's wrong? You look pale."
"Mm." He surfaced slowly, dragged his gaze off us by main force, and bent to kiss her forehead with something like desperate tenderness. "Nothing. Nothing at all."
She smiled at him, radiant, forgiving.
Underneath the smile, behind the fan of her lashes, her eyes were still on the corridor across the atrium—on the girl in the borrowed jacket, on Hugo's face as he watched her—photographing every frame of it for later.
He was looking at her, Vivian thought, and the pearl in her chest went from warm to molten. He is supposed to be mating ME in one month. And he was looking at HER.
She slipped her arm through Hugo's and steered him toward the car.
The game, she decided, had just changed rules. Time to remind everyone in this city exactly who the Moonridge heiress was.
Whichever one of us it turned out to be.