The Gala

Lena's POV

The dress was hanging on the wardrobe door when I woke up.

Black. Floor length. The kind of thing that doesn't announce itself loudly because it doesn't need to — the cut did all the talking, clean and precise and expensive in the way that never displays a price tag. Beside it on the dresser, a small box. Inside the box, a pair of earrings. Simple, dark stones set in gold.

A note beneath the box, in handwriting I hadn't seen before but recognised immediately — controlled, minimal, exactly as you'd expect.

Tonight. Seven o'clock. Wear this.

I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the dress for a long time.

No explanation. No context. Just the dress and the earrings and the time, the way you'd brief someone on an assignment rather than invite them somewhere.

I found Mara at breakfast.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

She looked up from the counter. "He hasn't told you?"

"He left a note with a dress."

She made that small sound — not quite a laugh, something gentler. "A charity gala. In the city. He attends every year — it's one of his public appearances. Important for the image he maintains." She paused. "He wants you with him."

"Why?"

She chose her words carefully, the way she always did. "Because appearing alone at this particular event, given the current climate — given Victor — would communicate something he doesn't want communicated."

"He wants to look untouchable."

"He wants to look unaffected," she said. "There's a difference."

Mara helped me with the dress at six.

I wasn't going to ask for help — had fully intended to manage alone — but she appeared at my door with a small bag of things and a look that said she'd already decided, so I stepped aside and let her in.

She was efficient and quiet, doing what needed doing without fuss. When she finished and stepped back, she looked at me for a moment with an expression I couldn't entirely read.

"Well," she said simply.

I turned to the mirror.

The dress fit as though it had been made for me, which perhaps it had. The earrings were exactly right. I barely recognized the person looking back — not because she looked unlike me, but because she looked like a version of me that had been drawn with more confidence than I currently felt.

"I don't know how to do this," I said quietly. To the mirror, more than to Mara.

"You already do," she said. "You've been doing it since the night you arrived. Just on a smaller stage."

Damian was waiting in the main hall at seven precisely.

Dark suit, white shirt, no tie — the kind of deliberate almost-formality that worked better than formality itself. He looked up when I came down the stairs and something shifted in his expression, there and gone before I could name it.

He said nothing about the dress. Nothing about how I looked.

Just: "Ready?"

"No," I said honestly.

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "Good enough."

The gala was everything I'd expected and nothing I was prepared for.

A grand hall in the heart of the city, lit with the kind of warm, amber light that makes everything look like a painting. Hundreds of people — men in suits, women in gowns, the particular hum of a room full of wealth and the careful performances that accompany it.

We entered together and the room shifted. Not dramatically — just a slight recalibration, heads turning, conversations pausing for a fraction of a second. I felt it move through the space like a current.

Damian moved through it all with absolute ease, hand finding the small of my back as we navigated the room — light, barely there, but present. Anchoring.

I matched his pace and kept my face composed and reminded myself what Mara had said.

Just a smaller stage.

People approached. Damian introduced me simply, by name, with no elaboration — and the absence of elaboration was its own statement. I shook hands and smiled and said the right things and felt the whole time like I was walking a tightrope above something I couldn't see the bottom of.

An hour in, Damian was pulled into a conversation with two men near the bar — the kind of conversation that had weight behind the pleasantries, I could tell from his posture.

I found a quiet spot near the edge of the room and breathed.

"You look like someone who's very good at pretending to be comfortable."

The voice came from my left.

I turned.

He was tall, well-dressed, with dark eyes and a smile that had been calibrated to put people at ease. I recognized him before the name fully formed in my mind — from Sophia's house, from the doorway, from the way Damian's entire body had changed when he'd walked in.

Victor Moretti.

Standing beside me at a charity gala, holding a glass of champagne, looking for all the world like a man making pleasant conversation.

"Lena," he said, as though we were old friends. "We haven't been properly introduced."

My heart was hammering. My face gave nothing.

"I know who you are," I said.

He smiled — genuinely, it seemed, or a very good imitation of genuine. "Of course you do. He's told you I'm the villain." He tilted his head slightly. "Has he told you anything else? About himself, about how you came to be here, about what he actually intends to do with you?"

I said nothing.

"Thought not." He took a measured sip of champagne, unhurried. "I'm not your enemy, Lena. Whatever he's told you—"

"He hasn't told me you're the villain," I said quietly. "I worked that out myself."

Something flickered in his eyes — surprise, quickly contained.

"You should ask him," Victor said, his voice dropping lower, "about the real reason he didn't refuse your uncle's arrangement. Ask him what he was actually looking for. What he found." He held my gaze. "And then decide for yourself who the villain is."

He stepped back, smile returning to its polished setting.

"Enjoy the evening," he said pleasantly.

And walked away into the crowd, leaving me standing at the edge of a glittering room with champagne I hadn't touched and a question detonating slowly in my chest.

Ask him what he was actually looking for.

I looked across the room to where Damian stood, laughing at something one of the men had said — easy, controlled, performing effortlessly.

And I thought about the file with my name on it.

The photographs.

The research.

The thing he'd said he wasn't ready to tell me yet.

My hand tightened around the champagne glass.

Whatever Victor knew — whatever Damian had been looking for when he'd chosen not to refuse — it was something significant enough that his enemy was using it as a weapon.

And I was standing in a room full of strangers, wearing a dress chosen for me, realising I might be the last person in this entire building to know the truth.