Chapter Seven: The Performance We Didn't Rehearse

I call Petra at seven the next morning.

She picks up on the first ring, which means she was already awake, which means she already knows something. Petra has a network of information that operates faster than any news outlet and twice as accurately.

"The gossip blog," she says, before I open my mouth.

"You saw it."

"Gio sent it to me at midnight. Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. I need your honest opinion about something."

I walk her through option two. The controlled narrative. The public appearances. The careful, managed version of a situation that is anything but careful or managed. Petra listens without interrupting, which is how I know she's taking it seriously.

"Do you trust him?" she asks when I finish.

"I don't know him well enough to trust him."

"That's not a no."

I look out my kitchen window quietly. The street is quiet. The lock on my building's front door, I noticed this morning, has already been replaced. New hardware, clean installation, done sometime between midnight and six a.m.

"He fixed the lock," I say.

"The front door lock you've been complaining about for two months?"

"Yes."

Silence. Then, "Ella."

"Don't."

"I'm just saying—"

"Petra. Don't."

She doesn't. But I can hear her thinking it from two miles away.

I call Dominic at eight-thirty.

He answers on the second ring. No greeting, just, "What's your answer?" How direct he can be.

"Option two," I say. "But I have conditions."

"Of course you do."

There's something in his voice that isn't quite amusement. Close to it. I keep going before I can think too much about that.

"I set my own schedule. You work around my shifts. I don't cancel work for appearances."

"Agreed."

"Nothing is staged without me approving it first. No photographer I haven't consented to. No statement I haven't read."

"Agreed."

"And when this is over, when the baby comes and we reassess, we do it together. No unilateral decisions about how we present ourselves publicly."

A pause. Shorter than I expect. "Agreed."

"Okay," I say.

"There's an event Friday night," he says. "A foundation dinner. Low press presence, controlled environment. That'll make a good first appearance."

"What do I wear to a billionaire foundation dinner?"

"Whatever you want."

"That's not helpful."

"It's honest," he says. "Wear what you'd wear if you weren't trying to impress anyone."

Wow.

I think about my closet. The navy dress I bought for Petra's wedding two years ago. The black wrap dress I wear when I need to feel like I have my life together.

"Fine," I say. "Send me the details.

I hang up.

Then I open my closet and stare at it for ten minutes.

Friday comes faster than I'm ready for.

Dominic's car picks me up at seven, because I negotiated that much. Not his showing up at my door, not him choosing the car, just the car arriving so I can leave on my own terms. Small distinction. Still matters.

The driver doesn't talk, which I appreciate. I sit in the back and look out the window and run through the things I know about Dominic Sinclair. The Forbes profile. The four years of no personal life. Nadia Voss, whose name I have not said out loud to anyone. The way he signed my clause without arguing. The lock, replaced by six a.m.

The car stops in front of a hotel that has the particular quiet of places that don't need to announce themselves.

Dominic is waiting outside.

He's in a dark suit, no tie, and he's looking at his phone when the car pulls up. He puts it away before the driver opens my door, and when I step out he looks at me the way he looked at me in the clinic the first time. Total. Assessing. Except this time there's something else underneath it that he doesn't quite manage to put away before I see it.

"You look—" he starts.

"Don't," I say pleasantly. "Let's just go in."

The corner of his mouth moves. "I was going to say you look like yourself."

I don't know what to do with that so I walk toward the entrance and he falls into step beside me, close enough that our arms almost touch, and the scent of him hits me the same way it did in the clinic. That dark, wild, impossible thing that has no business coming off a man in a twelve-hundred-dollar suit.

I breathe through it. I keep walking.

The dinner is fifty people in a room that fits a hundred. Old money mostly, the kind that's been old for generations. I know nobody. Dominic knows everyone, or everyone knows him, which isn't the same thing but looks identical from the outside.

He introduces me three times in the first twenty minutes. Each time he says my name and nothing else, no label, no explanation, just my name and then a slight shift in his stance that puts him half a step closer to me than strictly necessary. I notice people noticing it.

A woman named Constance, silver-haired and sharp-eyed, takes my hand and holds it a beat too long. "We've heard about you," she says.

"Good things, I hope," I say.

"Interesting things," she says, and smiles at Dominic in a way that means something I don't have context for yet.

He touches the small of my back briefly to steer me toward the table. His hand is warm through the fabric of my dress and I keep my face completely neutral and count to four in my head.

Dinner is fine. I eat everything on my plate because I'm growing a person and I refuse to be precious about food at a fancy dinner. Dominic notices. He says nothing. I catch him watching me eat with an expression I can only describe as privately relieved, like a man who expected a problem that didn't arrive.

We don't talk much. We don't need to. We are apparently, without rehearsing it, very convincing.

Too convincing.

Because after dinner a man approaches our table. Broad, silver-templed, with the kind of smile that knows exactly what it's doing. He looks at me and then at Dominic and his smile sharpens at the edges in a way that puts every nerve I have on alert.

"Sinclair," he says. "Didn't expect to see you here. And with company." His eyes move to my stomach, just for a second. Just long enough. "How unexpected."

Dominic goes very still beside me.

Not the controlled stillness I've come to recognize. Something different. Something that feels less like composure and more like the thing that lives underneath it.

"Aldric," he says. One word. Flat as concrete.

The man called Aldric looks at me with a smile that doesn't reach anywhere near his eyes.

"You must be the human," he says.