CHAPTER SIX- The Performance of A Perfect Fiancée

Kieran didn't say a word until we were out of the parking lot.

He drove with one hand on the wheel, the other tapping his thigh. The tapping was the same rhythm he'd kept on my chair at lunch.

"My father looks at you a lot," he said.

My stomach dropped. "He looks at everyone."

"Not like that."

Say something Eva. Say anything. Don't let the silence do it for you.

"Kieran, he's the Alpha. People look at him, he looks back. That's the whole job."

He glanced at me for a second. Then he laughed. "I'm kidding, Eva. Relax. You're so jumpy lately."

He wasn't kidding. I knew his laugh well enough to tell when it was covering something, and I'd only learned that this week.

~Next Day~

The Silver Moon Charity Gala was held every year in the ballroom of the Council hotel, and every year my mother treated it like a coronation. 

This year she'd chosen my dress, my shoes, and the exact amount of lipstick. I stood in front of the mirror while she adjusted my shoulder strap and said nothing, which was the only way to survive her.

"Tonight you are the future Luna," she said. "Not a girl who had a bad week."

"I know what I am."

"Good."

Kieran met us at the entrance in a black suit, perfect as always. He kissed my cheek for the cameras and slid his arm around my waist, and I felt my body fold into the old routine like it had never left. Smile, tilt your head and laugh at the second joke, not the first.

He was brilliant, I'll give him that. He worked the room with a hand on my back and a story ready for every person. He introduced me to the wife of a Council member as "my future Luna," and said it so warmly the woman actually pressed her hand to her chest.

He remembered names. He remembered children's names. Every time someone told me how lucky I was, he squeezed my waist and said, "I'm the lucky one."

Listen to him. He sounds like he means it. How many times has he practiced that line?

"Evangeline, you look radiant," a woman said. Her husband nodded along, already looking over my shoulder at someone more important.

"Thank you. You're too kind."

I said it forty times. I stopped counting at forty.

Leo found us near the bar, grinning like a boy who'd broken a window and was waiting to be told it was funny.

"Eva. Look at you." He pressed a hand to his chest in a mock bow. "I owe you an apology about the other night. I was out of line. Just teasing, you know that."

I smiled. "Of course."

"No hard feelings?"

"None at all."

Kieran clapped him on the shoulder and laughed. I laughed too. My nails dug into my palm underneath the clutch, hard enough to leave marks.

Don't hit him. Don't hit anyone. Hold it together. You can fall apart privately.

I felt Leviathan before I saw him.

Maybe that sounds dramatic, but it's the only way I can say it. The back of my neck prickled and my wolf, that thing I'd been starving for ten years, lifted her head in a way she had no right to. I didn't turn around. I kept talking to the woman beside me about the silent auction and the centerpieces.

When I finally let myself look, he was across the ballroom with Hargrove and two other men, glass in hand, listening to something with a face that gave nothing away. He wasn't looking at me. He hadn't looked at me once since we walked in. He was being so careful about it that it was practically a statement.

Stop checking Eva. You're proving his point.

At nine the speeches began. Kieran's hand stayed on my waist the whole time. At some point his thumb started stroking my hip, slowly and possessively, a gesture meant for the audience rather than me. I stood there and let him and thought about nothing.

Around ten I said I needed the restroom.

"Want me to come?" Kieran said, and winked, like it was a joke between us.

"No thanks. I'll be five minutes."

I didn't go to the restroom. I turned down a side corridor behind the ballroom, the one the staff used, and walked until the music dulled into a thump through the wall. The hallway was empty and dim. I leaned against the wall and put my hands flat against the cold plaster and just breathed.

Three minutes. Give yourself three minutes of nothing.

"You're avoiding me."

I didn't jump. I'd been waiting for it, I think, since the car. I just closed my eyes.

"I'm not avoiding you," I said. "I'm at a party."

"You've walked into the one corridor in this hotel where nobody can see you."

"Maybe I wanted quiet."

"Maybe you wanted me to follow."

I opened my eyes. He was standing ten feet down the hall with one hand in his pocket, relaxed and unhurried, like he'd walked in off the street and not across a ballroom full of people who would die to know where he was going. He was looking dangerously handsome tonight.

"I didn't," I said.

"I know." He came a step closer. "I've been giving you space. Five days. I think that's generous."

"You think a lot of things."

"You still owe me time."

"I don't owe you anything."

"You didn't say no." He said it quietly. "At the door of the car. You said you wouldn't give me time. That's not the same."

Heat climbed my neck. "Your son is thirty feet from here."

"I'm aware of where my son is."

"Then act like it." My voice came out sharper than I meant it to. "Stay away from me, Alpha Greymark. I'm asking nicely. Whatever you think happened, whatever you think this is, it ends here."

He stopped moving.

For a moment I thought I'd won. That was the stupid part of me, the part that still believed things could end because I'd said so. He looked at me for a long, steady second, and then he crossed the last distance in two unhurried steps and stopped so close I had to tilt my chin up to hold his eyes.

He didn't touch me. He didn't need to. I could feel him anyway, all the way down my spine.

"You think the hotel was the dangerous part?" he asked, low and quiet.

My mouth opened but nothing came.

He held my gaze one second longer, then stepped around me and walked away. His footsteps faded down the corridor and the heavy door at the end swung shut behind him, and the music from the ballroom drifted back in.

I stood there. My heart was going so hard I could hear it.

What does that mean? What does he mean?

I replayed it. The hotel. The bar, the elevator, the room, the whole stupid reckless night. I'd spent a week calling it the worst mistake of my life. The thing that could ruin me if anyone found out. The danger.

And he'd just told me, calmly, like he was commenting on the weather, that I had it wrong.

Then what was it? What was he talking about?

I pressed my hands to my cheeks. They were burning. Behind my ribs my wolf was pacing again, restless and sure of something I wasn't.

I didn't know what the dangerous part was.