Chapter 1
The clasp was still warm from the jeweler’s hands when Marcus fastened it around her throat.
“Forty thousand dollars,” he said, close enough that his breath moved the hair at her ear. “Smile, Elena. Everyone is watching.”
She smiled. That was the job.
The Grand Meridian’s ballroom had been transformed for his forty-second birthday — eight hundred white roses, a twelve-piece orchestra, ice sculptures shaped like the skyline he owned pieces of. Two hundred guests. The mayor at table one. Three city councilmen at table two. Elena had spent six weeks planning it, down to the napkin fold, because that was also the job.
An hour ago, a waiter had touched her elbow and murmured that Mr. Martinez needed her by the kitchen.
She had gone. Of course she had gone.
He was waiting between the coat racks, in that narrow room that smelled of cedar and other people’s perfume. He didn’t look at her when she came in. He was checking his cuffs.
“You want to know what you are to me, Elena?”
She had thought, for one absurd second, that he was going to say something kind. It had been that kind of evening — the necklace, the kiss for the photographers, his hand warm on the small of her back.
“You’re a placeholder.” He said it the way a man reads a number off a contract. “A beautiful, expensive placeholder. Until I find someone worthy of the Martinez name.”
The coat room had a brass hook on the wall and a mirror above it, and Elena watched herself in it. She watched her own face not move. Twelve years of practice.
“You’ve been a good little wife,” Marcus said. He straightened his tie. “Don’t spoil it now.”
Then he walked out, and the door swung shut, and she stood alone among the coats.
She counted to forty before she followed him. She had learned to count, over the years. Counting was how you kept your face still.
Back in the ballroom, the orchestra had moved into something slow. Marcus stood at the head of the room with his arm around Veronica Hale from his office — his invaluable partner, he called her at dinners, the words sliding over Elena’s head like water off stone. Veronica was laughing at something. Marcus lifted his glass.
“To the people who make life worth living,” he said.
He looked directly at Elena when he said it. He held her eyes while two hundred people drank.
She was standing near the mayor’s table with a glass of champagne she hadn’t touched, and a waiter passed too close and the glass tipped and cold wine ran over her hand and onto the floor and she felt it soak the silk of her gown, and she thought, very clearly:
I am thirty-four years old. I have no money. I have no job. I have no friends. My mother is dead. My father sold me for a debt. And I am standing here in wet shoes, smiling.
Her hand moved to her throat.
The necklace was a choker — a river of small stones, heavy enough that she felt it every time she swallowed. She had worn it for one hour.
Her fingers closed around the clasp and pulled.
It gave. The clasp burst open and the diamonds went everywhere — across the marble, under the tables, into the champagne, a hundred tiny fires scattered across the floor. Someone gasped. Someone else laughed, nervously, thinking it was a joke, some party trick. The orchestra faltered, then stopped. Two hundred faces turned toward her like a single sunflower.
Marcus’s face contorted. She watched it happen in stages — confusion, then disbelief, then a rage so pure it was almost beautiful. His mouth opened.
Elena was already walking.
Her heels had come off somewhere near the dance floor; she didn’t remember deciding to take them off. Her bare feet left wet prints on the marble, small dark commas trailing behind her, the champagne from the spilled glass smeared into strange shapes. Nobody moved to stop her. That was the thing about a room full of powerful people — they were all terrified of doing the wrong thing in front of each other.
The doors were heavy. She put her shoulder into them.
Rain hit her face like needles.
Behind her, the Grand Meridian blazed. Somewhere in there, Marcus was already rebuilding the night — she knew him well enough to know that by now he had already decided she was drunk, or unwell, or having some kind of episode. He would have his story before the valet brought his car.
She didn’t care. She stood on the top step with rain running down her neck and thought: there is nothing behind me but a cage, and the door is open, and I am the only one who ever had the key.
Then she heard the door open again behind her.
For one terrible second she thought it was him.
May you like
It wasn’t. A man in a dark suit stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the light — no coat, no umbrella, drink still in hand. He didn’t call out to her. He didn’t move to stop her. He just stood there and watched her with an expression she couldn’t read, and then he set the glass down on the step.
Elena turned and went down into the rain.
