Chapter 6

Heir to Skyfall

Chapter 6 — Sanctuary

They didn't stay for the end of the gala.

Salvador had her out through the service exit before the orchestra finished its next number — his jacket around her shoulders, his hand firm at her back, moving her through the corridor with the quiet efficiency of a man who knew exactly which doors led where and which cameras covered what. Two of his security team flanked them to the car without being asked. That was how he operated. He didn't announce things. He just made them happen.

The car pulled away from the estate and she sat in the back seat and felt the night catch up with her all at once.

The gala. Martin in that doorway. Victor's smile from across the ballroom. The weight of seven hundred people watching her descend those stairs and forming conclusions she'd spend months correcting. Her father looking smaller than he should in a room he'd built. All of it landing at the same time, pressing down.

She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth and looked out the window at the city moving past and told herself not to fall apart in the car.

She fell apart anyway.

Not loudly. Just the kind of crying that comes when you've been holding something too long and your body decides without consulting you that it's done. Shoulders shaking, jaw tight, tears she hadn't planned on.

Salvador didn't say anything. He didn't offer a speech or a silver lining. He just reached over and put his hand over hers on the seat, and left it there, and let her cry.

His penthouse was nothing like the estate.

No staff. No portraits. No architecture designed to communicate power. Just floor-to-ceiling glass overlooking the river, clean lines, books stacked on every flat surface, a kitchen that looked like it had actually been cooked in. It felt like a person lived here rather than a position.

She stood at the window in his jacket and looked at the water below — dark and steady and indifferent to everything Skyfall-shaped — and let out a long breath.

He handed her a glass of water. She drank it. He leaned against the kitchen counter and watched her with the patience he seemed to have in unlimited supply.

"I keep waiting for it to feel real," she said. "Any of it."

"Which part?"

"All of it. Alexander. The estate. The board. The fact that a week ago I was getting fired by voicemail." She turned from the window. "Martin showing up tonight."

Something moved through Salvador's expression at the name. Controlled. Contained. "Why was he there?"

"I don't know. Someone's guest, maybe. Victor's, possibly — which would be exactly the kind of move Victor would make." She set the glass down. "He looked at me like I'd done something to him."

"You didn't."

"I know that." She looked at him directly. "I know that now. It took me most of this week to get there, but I know it." She paused. "He had nine years of a marriage he hid so well I never had a reason to look. I trusted him because he was careful. That's not the same as me being stupid."

"No," Salvador said. "It's not."

She crossed the room toward him. He straightened off the counter and watched her come, neither moving to close the gap nor stepping back from it.

"You said you ended things with her the night we met," she said.

"I did."

"Not because of me specifically."

"Because of you specifically." His voice was even, certain. "I walked into that bar to end a relationship I should have ended six months earlier, and then you sat down two stools away soaked in champagne and refused my jacket and looked at me like you'd rather be anywhere on earth than where you were—" The edge of his mouth moved. "And something shifted. I can't explain it better than that. It just did."

She stopped in front of him. Close. She could feel the warmth off his chest.

"I only feel safe with you," she said quietly. The words surprised her on the way out — truer than she'd meant to say, more than she'd planned to give. "In that whole house full of people this week, you're the only one I feel safe with."

He looked at her for a moment. Then he lifted his hand and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, slowly, like he was memorizing it.

"Then stay here tonight," he said.

She reached up and took the lapel of his jacket in her hand. "I wasn't planning on leaving."

He was unhurried about it. That was the thing that undid her most — after Martin's performance of romance, after a week of Drew's aggressive press and Victor's calculations, Salvador was simply unhurried. Like she was something worth taking time over.

His hands learned her slowly. Her shoulders, the curve of her waist, the line of her spine through the fabric of her dress. He kissed her like the night wasn't going anywhere and neither were they. When the dress finally fell away he looked at her in the low light from the city outside and didn't reach immediately — just looked, with an expression that made her feel like something precious rather than something available.

"You're beautiful," he said. Not a line. Just a fact, stated plainly, like the temperature or the time.

She pulled him down and stopped thinking about anything except him.

It was slow. It was thorough. There were moments that were almost unbearably tender and moments that were nothing like tender at all, and in between he said things against her skin that she knew she'd carry for years — I've wanted only you since the rain, only you, just you — his voice wrecked and honest and not performing anything.

She came apart twice before the end. The second time she was crying without meaning to and he kissed the tears off her jaw without making her feel anything except held.

Afterward they lay tangled in the sheets in the gray pre-dawn light, her back against his chest, his arm across her waist, the city glowing through the glass below them. She could feel his heartbeat slowing against her shoulder blade. Outside, somewhere far below, the first garbage truck of the morning made its rounds.

She had never felt this much like herself in someone else's arms.

She was almost asleep when her phone lit up on the nightstand.

Then his lit up.

Then the news notification banner stretched across the screen in block letters she could read from the pillow:

SKYFALL EMPIRE BOARD CALLS EMERGENCY VOTE — HEIR'S MORAL FITNESS QUESTIONED.

Below it, a still image — blurry, shot through glass, clearly taken from outside — of the two of them in the mezzanine lounge. Her bare shoulder. His hand on her back. Their mouths together.

Victor hadn't needed a remote control and a transparent mirror after all.

He'd just needed one person with a long lens and a media contact.

Salvador sat up beside her, jaw hard, eyes moving through the article fast. She sat up too and read it over his arm. The language was careful — not explicit, but constructed to imply everything it didn't say outright. Compromising behavior. Questions of judgment. Whether the newly announced heir represents the values Skyfall Empire was built on.

"He planned this," she said. Not a question.

"He's been planning it since the night Alexander announced you." Salvador set the phone down. He turned to look at her, and whatever he was feeling was locked down behind his eyes, but his voice was steady. "The board vote is at nine."

She looked at the time. It was four forty-seven in the morning.

She pushed the sheet back and stood up.

"Then I need to get dressed," she said.