CHAPTER 5: The Woman Beside Rossi

Albert's POV

★The Metropolitan Gala★

Noise fills the hall as guests dressed in high-end silks and tailored suits move through the main gallery, champagne glasses balanced in their hands. Near the Temple of Dendur, a string quartet tunes their instruments, notes rising and falling beneath the conversations.

Everything is where it should be.

I hold a champagne flute without drinking from it, rotating the stem between my fingers while a man beside me explains an investment I've already rejected twice.

“Rossi, you haven't given your say on the port exchange.” Anderson's eldest son smiles as though persistence makes him intelligent. “It's a really good deal to invest in.”

“Yes,” another man quickly adds. I glance at him and recognize Mr. Anderson, a potbelly straining against his tuxedo while one hand holds a champagne glass and the other rests possessively around the waist of a young woman who looks barely interested in being there.

“It's an excellent investment,” he continues. “I assure you.”

My gaze drops to the champagne turning slowly inside my glass.

Assurance. That's what men offer when numbers aren't enough. The port they're trying to sell me is already partially under Rossi control. They don't know that.

I raise my eyes. “What makes you think I'll invest?”

The question lands harder than my voice does. The younger Anderson's smile falters and his father swallows.

Nobody answers. That's what I thought.

I look around the group. Men in expensive tuxedos. Women in dresses worth more than some people's homes. Everyone holding something. A glass. A purse. An arm. A smile.

Most of the women beside these men aren't part of the conversation. They're decoration, a showcase of wealth and youth.

The young woman beside Mr. Anderson catches my attention. She looks up at me through lowered lashes. Her fingers slide through her hair, tucking a strand behind her ear.

Is this what they were taught makes them alluring?

She smiles. “Mr. Rossi.” Her voice comes out with a tiny sound. “It's a pleasure meeting you.”

I take another slow turn of my champagne.

“But not to overstep,” she continues, “I noticed you came alone.”

Someone beside her clears his throat. “That's how he is.”

A few nervous laughs break through the group. I don't smile, and the laughter dies almost immediately.

The woman doesn't seem to notice. “I was actually thinking about introducing you to a friend.” She gestures, and another woman in blue satin appears beside her with a smile that suggests she's been waiting for her cue.

I look at her, then at Mr. Anderson, whose arm is still around her waist, and finally back at the woman.

“He’s married.”

The color drains from Mr. Anderson's face. She blinks. “I…”

“And you're here in her place. That's rich.”

The group falls silent. She looks toward Mr. Anderson beside her, and he immediately releases her waist.

“I'm so sorry, Mr. Rossi.”

I take a sip of my champagne. “Teach your mistress when to hold her tongue.”

His jaw tightens. “My apologies.”

“See that they remain apologies.”

Nobody speaks after that. The younger Anderson suddenly finds his champagne fascinating.

My phone vibrates against my pocket. I ignore it.

It vibrates again.

Matteo.

I glance at the screen.

Matteo: Car arrives in 2 minutes.

I check my watch for the third time since 6pm. She signs the contract. She attends six events. We both move on.

It was a simple arrangement. I seem to have misplaced the simple part.

Outside, cameras surge at the entrance. A car door opens. Adeline steps out, and every lens turns toward her at once. Her fingers press into her clutch, knuckles pale for exactly as long as it takes her to decide not to let it show. Then she raises her chin and gives the cameras level eyes.

She moves through the entrance. I watch the room recalibrate around her, and I watch how it does it. A hush settles that isn't curiosity but caution, the kind that travels through a crowd when people are deciding how much interest is safe to show. Whispers stay low.

"Who is she?"

"I've never seen her before."

"Is she with Rossi?”

Mrs. Ashford leans toward her husband, diamonds catching every available light, voice pitched exactly loud enough to be overheard and quiet enough to deny it later. "Well. This should be interesting."

Adeline reaches my side. Her hand finds my arm. Smile unwavering.

"Hi."

Just that. Like we're meeting in a quiet café and not standing in front of a room that's already decided she's either a joke or a threat and hasn't settled on which.

I guide her deeper into the room, hand at the small of her back. Her spine draws upright under my palm, and I catalog, without meaning to, how many people notice the contact and immediately look somewhere else.

"They're all staring," she says under her breath.

"Yes."

"Good or bad?"

"Depends what they see."

Mrs. Ashford intercepts us near the Monet. "Well. This is unexpected, Albert."Her eyes sweep Adeline, inventorying flaws to discuss later over brunch. "And who is this lovely creature?”

"Adeline Carter."

"How refreshing. And where is your family from, dear?"

The question carries a familiar edge.

I do not intervene. This is the part of the evening I actually need to see.

Adeline tilts her head. "Queens. My mother's a librarian." A faint smile. "She always said I was too curious for my own good." Before Mrs. Ashford can recalibrate, Adeline gestures at the canvas behind her. "Is this from the Water Lilies series? He painted these nearly blind. The way he found light when he couldn't see it anymore."

Mrs. Ashford blinks. "I. Yes. Quite right." She retreats, uncertain whether she's been charmed or dismissed. Not uncertain enough to say anything else with me standing here.

That's the part that matters. Not whether Adeline can hold a room. Whether the room holds its tongue around her the way it holds its tongue around me.

It does. Every time, for the next hour. A senator's wife circles a question about her education and Adeline answers without flinching. An art dealer tries to corner her in technical vocabulary and she admits what she doesn't know instead of performing what she doesn't have. She learns the waitstaff's names off their badges and uses them, same tone she uses on the people paying for the party.

I've watched people perform authenticity for a living. They crack in forty minutes. She's two hours in and I haven't found the seam.

What I have found is this: nobody insults her to her face. Not one comment sharp enough to leave a mark, not one word that doesn't stop itself half a sentence short. In this room, that's not manners. That's fear wearing manners as a costume, and it's mine, borrowed and standing next to her whether she knows it or not.

Vivian finds us near eleven. Fifteen years, four continents of shared interests, a fortune she built through a kind of ruthlessness even I respect, which isn't a compliment I hand out socially.

"Interesting choice." Her eyes move across Adeline the way she moves across a company before acquisition. "You work in fashion?"

Adeline shakes her head. “No. I'm planning to start a business. I'm still working on it.”

“Everyone starts somewhere. What makes yours different?”

No safe exit from that question. Confidence reads as arrogance. Deflection reads as weakness.

Adeline takes a beat, a small lift at the corner of her mouth. "I don't know yet. Ask me in a year, if you remember me by then."

Vivian's eyebrow lifts. A smile crosses her face and disappears just as fast. She turns to me and drops into Russian. “She's either genuinely clever or genuinely herself. Either way, she's dangerous."

Then she's gone, dissolving back into the crowd.

Adeline looks up at me. "What did she say?”

"That you surprised her."

"Is that good?"

"With Vivian, yes."

The orchestra shifts into a waltz. I haven't danced at one of these in years, and I extend my hand anyway, because every eye in the room is already deciding what this means and I'd rather they decide it watching me choose it.

"Dance with me."

Her eyes go wide. "I've never waltzed."

"You've never done a lot of things tonight."

I bring her onto the floor before she can talk herself out of it. She stumbles twice in the first bars. I adjust my grip, hold her through it. "Follow my lead.”

“I'm trying with these heels.” She huffs.

Soon tension drains out of her shoulders somewhere in the second turn, and she stops fighting the rhythm and starts moving with it. Her hand closes around mine.

We spin past watching couples, past deliberate glances, past the low ongoing commentary that never stops in rooms like this.

Her hazel eyes stay on mine. Bottom lip pressed together in concentration. Chandelier light moves across her face as we rotate. She's near enough now that I catch the scent Colette chose for her, understated against the wall of heavier perfume in the room. My thumb shifts at her waist without my permission.

She draws a breath. The space between us narrows, degree by degree, further than a waltz requires.

I should have stepped back when the music slowed. I don't.

"You're doing well," I say.

"Liar." But she's smiling. Not the performance smile she's used all night. The real one, if it's real.

The music ends. Neither of us moves right away.

An hour before we leave, Matteo finds me at the edge of the gallery, near the balcony doors, his voice low enough that it doesn't carry past the two of us.

"The Falcone table wants a word."

I glance past him. Five men at a private table near the balcony, drinks untouched, watching the room the way men watch a room when they're deciding who in it might be useful. Falcone runs shipping out of three ports I need cooperation from by the end of the quarter. I could sit at that table myself. I have, before. And every one of those five men would fold their hands, agree to whatever I asked, and tell me nothing they actually think, because they're too careful of me to slip.

That's the problem with being the most dangerous man in a room. Nobody makes a mistake in front of you.

They might, in front of someone they don't believe matters.

Half this room already suspects Adeline is an arrangement, not a romance. Falcone's table will suspect it hardest of all, because men like that don't believe in anything they can't leverage. If one of them says something careless in front of a woman he assumes is decoration, I'll know exactly what he thinks he can get away with once he decides I'm not watching closely.

I find her by the terrace doors, still catching her breath from the dance.

"I need something from you," I say.

She searches my face for any information. "What kind of something?"

"That table with five men. Get familiar and let them talk."

"About what?"

"Whatever they want to. I'm not asking you to extract information. I'm asking you to be underestimated in a room where that's usually useful to me."

Her brow lifts like I'm speaking another language. "And if one of them says something he shouldn't?"

"Then I'll know something I didn't an hour ago."

A beat. Then she nods, chin lifting the way it did for the cameras outside.

"Okay."

She asks no other questions. Just, "Okay," like she's already decided the answer doesn't change what she's about to do.

I watch her cross the room toward the balcony, midnight blue against marble. The five men notice her immediately. One straightens. Another looks her over. A third leans toward the man beside him and whispers something.

I take a glass of wine from a passing tray and watch.