Total pages in book: 30
Estimated words: 28104 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 141(@200wpm)___ 112(@250wpm)___ 94(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 28104 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 141(@200wpm)___ 112(@250wpm)___ 94(@300wpm)
He kissed her the way he'd wanted to since the library, without an audience and without a speech, and she came up on her toes and answered it, and the radiator sang, and neither of them heard.
He undressed her slowly, carefully, like she might vanish if he moved too fast. She laughed once, nervous, wobbling, "I've never, um, with a stuntman," and then his mouth found her throat and the joke and the nerves went wherever words go, and when he finally laid her down on a bed that was too small for him by a foot and a half, she reached up and put her hand over his heart, the exact way she'd stood in an intersection once, no self-preservation anywhere in her.
"You're shaking," she whispered, wondering.
"I know."
"You saved my life. You're not scared of anything."
"I know," he said, and kissed her palm, and let her see it anyway, all of it, everything he'd rehearsed away twice, and when he made her his at last, slow and thorough and reverent in that terrible singing radiator heat, she cried out, and clung to him, and said his name like she'd known it forever.
Mine, he thought, consumed, final, a man signing something. Mine.
Afterward she lay tangled across his chest in the dark, tracing shapes on his skin, one shoelace of a girl who'd rearranged his entire existence in five weeks, and he stared at her water-stained ceiling and did the only math that mattered now. He would tell her the truth soon. Not tonight. Soon. He'd find a way to make his world safe enough to hand her, and then he'd give her his real name, all of it, and she would do that thing her face did. She'd open the door.
"Stay for breakfast," she mumbled into his chest, already half asleep. "I make legendary rice."
"For breakfast?"
"Legendary," she insisted, and was gone, asleep between one breath and the next, safe in the one place in the world he occupied.
Valerio held her in the dark and made plans.
He had, though neither of them knew it, seven weeks left.
Chapter Five
THE MEN IN BLACK SUITS poured into the ballroom like weather through a broken window.
There were at least a dozen of them, and they didn't run and didn't push; they simply filled the room the way rising water fills a cellar, fanning out along the walls with their hands folded and their eyes moving, and the party guests who'd been edging toward the exits discovered that the exits now had opinions.
Valerio Le Sabre released Amybeth Schnapp's wrist as though setting down something he'd finished reading.
And the ballroom, being a ballroom full of society parents who could sense power the way sharks sense distress, immediately tried to reach him. A hedge-fund father was already extending his hand and his firm's name. Two mothers had begun the complicated work of turning up at his elbow by apparent coincidence. Someone, somewhere, said the word golf.
Valerio crooked one finger.
That was all. One finger, without even looking, and a man in hotel livery appeared out of the crowd at a speed that suggested he'd been waiting his entire career for that finger. The hedge-fund father found himself smoothly intercepted. The coincidence mothers were re-coincidenced toward the buffet. And the hotel manager planted himself before Amybeth Schnapp, gray and glistening, a man performing surgery on his own retirement.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Schnapp, but please refrain from making a scene, or you'll have to be escorted out by security."
For a moment Amybeth simply stared at him, and Aislinn, who was still holding her son and her breath, watched the woman's face perform its whole repertoire, disbelief, calculation, rage, in the time it took the quartet to abandon ship entirely.
"This is my son's party," Amybeth said, at a volume that sent the nearest waiter fleeing, "and I'm the one you're asking to leave? Are you insane? You're clearly stupid. Who's your boss? Who owns—"
The manager looked at Valerio.
Valerio nodded, once.
"Mr. Le Sabre," the manager said apologetically, "is the owner of this hotel."
The ink on that particular fact, Aislinn would learn later, was approximately forty minutes old, which meant the man had bought the entire building faster than most people bought umbrellas in the rain. At the moment, all she knew was that the sentence moved through the ballroom like a cold current, and the knot of women who had, one hour ago, been so very brave about single mothers and blank school forms began, delicately, to back away from Amybeth Schnapp. Not far. Just far enough to be out of the photograph.
Amybeth saw it. Aislinn watched her see it, and watched the seeing make everything worse.
"You think you can fix this with money?" Her voice cracked upward. "Then I'll sue you—"
Valerio crooked another finger.
This time what stepped forward was a woman, and Aislinn's first, unworthy, entirely human thought was oh, come on, because the woman was tall in the way of people who are paid to walk toward cameras, ash-blonde, thirtyish, and beautiful with such casual efficiency that two of the retreating mothers stopped retreating just to stare at her. She wore a suit the color of bone and carried a slim leather folder, and she looked at Amybeth Schnapp the way a cat looks at a wounded and self-important bird.