CHAPTER TWO- The Night That Ruined Everything.

We stepped out of the elevator and his mouth found mine before the doors had even finished closing. 

The kiss was rough and hungry, no warm-up to it. I wrapped my legs around him while he carried me down the hall, still kissing me, and I couldn't have told which door was ours if my life depended on it.

By the time he kicked the suite door shut, my lips were swollen and I was gasping into his mouth. He tasted like scotch. One hand gripped my hip hard enough to leave a mark, the other fisted in my hair, tilting my head so he could kiss me deeper.

He carried me to the bed and dropped me on my back. Before I'd even caught my breath he shoved my dress up to my waist and pushed my knees apart.

"There's no going back now," he said against my ear.

Then his fingers were inside me, no warning, and I moaned. He groaned, low, like that was exactly what he wanted. "Let me hear that." His fingers curled, they found the spot that made my hips jerk on their own. "You don't even know my name."

I bit down on my lip to stay quiet. It didn't work for long. When I came the first time it was almost embarrassing, how fast I had come, how loud I sounded and he didn't stop, he kept going until I was shaking and telling him to wait, wait, and he didn't.

"Good girl." He pulled his fingers out. Flipped me onto my stomach. I heard his belt.

He pushed in hard, one stroke, and I cried out into the pillow. It hurt for half a second before it didn't. His hand found my hair again.

"Mine tonight," he said, and there was something almost bored in the way he said it, which somehow made it worse, in a good way, if that made any sense.

He didn't say much after that. Just my name once, wrong, called me little one instead, and I didn't correct him because I didn't know if he even remembered asking. 

The room got hot. My knees kept sliding on the sheets and he kept pulling me back into place like it annoyed him.

He flipped me onto my back at some point. I don't remember him doing it, just that I was suddenly looking up at him instead of the pillow. He pinned my wrists above my head, more out of habit than force, and looked down at me.

"Look at me," he said.

I did. My eyes were wet, I don't know when that started, and he noticed and didn't do anything about it except keep going, slower now, which was somehow worse than fast.

I came again. It knocked the breath out of me in a way that felt embarrassingly close to laughing. He finished a minute after, quiet about it, he whispered my name again, against my throat.

Afterward he didn't say much. He got a cloth from the bathroom and cleaned me up without making it weird, which I appreciated more than I expected to. He pulled me against his chest and I let him.

"You did well," he said, which was a strange thing to say, and also exactly the right thing.

I don't remember falling asleep. I remember thinking, distantly, that I hadn't thought about Kieran once. That felt like it should have meant something. I was too tired to figure out what.

When I woke up, the other side of the bed was cold. I lay there for a while. I didn't move. The city made its morning noises outside, I heard the garbage truck, someone's alarm, and I waited to feel something specific. Regret, maybe or shame. 

What I felt instead was quiet. Not good, not bad. Just quiet, in a way I didn't remember feeling in a long time.

His glass was still on the nightstand. I reached over and touched the rim of it with one finger for no reason at all.

I didn't know his name. I'd followed a stranger into a hotel room and let him do all of that and I didn't even know what to call him. It should have horrified me. It mostly just felt like a fact. I did all of this to get back at my so-called fiancèe.

I stayed like that for a while. Long enough that the light in the room changed a little. I thought about nothing in particular, or several things at once, hard to say which. 

At some point I noticed my phone had slid off the bed sometime in the night and was face-down on the carpet.

When I picked it up, the screen was a wall of missed calls from mom, dad, mom again, my aunt, my mother's assistant, which meant my mother had escalated to involving staff.

I put the phone down without reading past the names.

I showered first and I didn't rush it. I stood under the water longer than I needed to and let myself have a few minutes of nothing before I went back to being Evangeline Nightmoor, arranged daughter, perfect fiancée, good girl on a very short leash.

Then I called my mother and funny enough, she didn't ask how I was.

"You need to come home today," was the first sentence that slipped out from her lips. "Kieran has been trying to reach you and his father called your father this morning and this whole situation is getting out of hand."

"Good," I said. "Let it be out of hand."

"Evangeline."

"I'm not forgiving him, Mom."

Her exhale had a manager's patience to it. "Come on Eva, don't overreact! It doesn't mean anything. Get that into your head."

"He said he was going to end things after he slept with me."

"You were eavesdropping. You don't have the full context."

I almost laughed. "I have to go. I'll be on a flight by noon."

I hung up and booked the ticket before I could think better of it. I sat on the bed and looked at the empty glass one more time, which felt stupid even as I was doing it. 

Then I packed and left. The flight home was three hours of my mother texting me logistics and my father sending two-sentence messages that were directives dressed up as check-ins.

 By the time we landed I already had a full week scheduled, ending with a dinner party at the Greymark estate on Friday. I was already expected to attend. Nobody had asked if I wanted to come.

I'd said no three times on the flight. By the time I walked through my front door it had been quietly reclassified as final.

"Our decision is what stands," my mother said. "You will attend the dinner. You will behave normally. You will give people nothing to talk about. That's all we're asking."

"You're asking me to stand in a room with a man who said he's using me and pretend nothing happened."

"I'm asking you to protect this family." Her voice didn't move. "You can fall apart privately but in public you hold it together."

I went to bed without eating. Later, I went to the party. 

I don't know what I expected. Some part of me, still foolish apparently, thought Kieran might look different somehow but he looked exactly the same.

He greeted me at the door with his hand on the small of my back and a smile that stopped somewhere around his teeth, and for a second I felt the old pull, not desire, just muscle memory, the habit of performing beside him. I let it happen. 

I smiled back and said the right thing.

The room was loud and expensive. His friends were clustered near the bar, I heard some of the same voices I'd heard through that door in Harrowfield, and I moved through the space with my shoulders a little too stiff.

One of the women near Kieran's group looked me up and down slowly, with the kind of cruelty that thinks it's subtle. She leaned toward her friend, said something, they both laughed, and then louder, for my benefit: "Is this what people wear when they're engaged now? I thought that look went out years ago."

I kept my face still.

Leo, Kieran's closest friend, grinned the way he always did right before saying something he thought was charming. 

"Don't be harsh. She's got a nice figure under all that." He looked me over. "You should wear clothes that fit you sometime. Seriously."

I looked at Kieran. He said nothing. He didn't shift, his reaction was the same. He reached for his drink instead.

That was the part that actually settled it. Not the women, not Leo. Kieran defending me would have been one thing, and I'd already given up on that. But Kieran not even looking up was different. I wasn't an embarrassment worth addressing. I was furniture.

"Kieran." My voice came out steadier than I expected. "Can I talk to you for a second?"

He turned,giving me that patient, slightly put-upon look I'd apparently been mistaking for maturity this whole time. 

"What is it?"

"I want to end the engagement."

Someone nearby went quiet. Kieran looked at me for a moment, then smiled like I'd said something mildly funny. "Your family would never allow it."

"I'm not asking my family."

"You'll be my wife next month, Evangeline. That's already decided."

"I'm serious."

"So am I." He stepped closer and dropped his voice. "If you were actually serious, you wouldn't have come tonight. The fact that you're here means part of you already knows how this ends."

I opened my mouth to answer him and never got the chance.

Kieran's eyes moved past my shoulder. The ease dropped off his face, replaced by something younger, something close to fear.

"Dad."

I turned around.

The man in the doorway was broad-shouldered, surveying the room like a man who'd never once in his life felt out of place anywhere. 

He had dark hair, silver at the temples. A face that wore its age the way good buildings do. Alpha Leviathan.

He looked at Kieran first. Then, almost like he'd been pulled, his eyes moved to me.

The second they landed I felt recognition that moved through me before my brain could catch up to what it was recognizing.

I suddenly remembered the glass on the nightstand, the voice that whispered against my ear in the dark and the mouth that devoured me. 

The world tilted very slightly and I understood, that I had made a catastrophic mistake.