Who's More Ruthless

Chapter Five: Who's More Ruthless

The room goes quiet before I've finished walking through the door.

I feel it happen in stages — conversation dying in clusters, glasses stopping halfway to mouths, a hundred heads turning like the air itself told them to look. The gown is custom, black, cut to move with me instead of against me. The diamond at my throat is pink, flawless, and the only one of its kind on this continent. Somewhere to my left a camera flashes. Then another.

A waiter puts champagne in my hand before I ask for it. I don't smile at him. I don't smile at any of them.

Five years ago these people watched me disappear into a corner of every room I entered, and not one of them noticed the leaving. Tonight they can't stop looking, and I let them look, because there's nothing left of the woman who used to shrink from it.

The women glare first. Then their husbands stop pretending not to stare, and the glares sharpen into something uglier. I walk past all of it like weather I've already priced into the evening.

Then I see her.

Rachel's face goes white the second our eyes meet, half a second of something close to fear before she remembers herself and reaches for the smirk instead. She crosses the floor toward me with her heels loud on the marble, loud enough to pull eyes, loud enough that I understand this was never going to stay private.

"Well, well." Her voice carries. She wants it to. "If it isn't the ex-Luna."

I sip my champagne.

"Look at you. Still trying to be big." Her eyes drag over the dress, deliberate, performing disgust for the audience gathering behind her. "How exactly did you afford this? Sleep with some sugar daddy?"

A ripple of laughter somewhere in the crowd. Phones are already up.

"Oops." She covers her mouth, mock-horrified, milking it. "My mistake. What man would ever sleep with you." A step closer, voice pitched to carry to the cameras behind her. "You can dress it up all you want. You're still the size of two cows."

Somewhere behind her, one of the wives laughs the loud, brittle laugh of a woman making sure she's seen laughing. I recognize her. Five years ago she used to slide me the smallest plate at every pack dinner with a smile that wanted witnesses. Tonight her husband isn't looking at Rachel at all.

I don't answer. I don't need to. I drink my champagne and watch her enjoy a performance nobody in this room is going to remember kindly by morning.

Derek arrives like a man walking into a fire he lit himself.

"Rachel. What the hell—" His hand closes on her arm, trying to pull her back, low and urgent. She twists free of him and kisses him instead, hard, in front of every lens in the room, then turns to face me with his mouth still wet on her chin.

"See, baby? She only came to see if she still has a shot with you." She laughs, bright and cruel. "Pathetic. I bet she slept with someone just to afford that dress. Derek is mine. He's always going to be mine."

Her hand goes for my necklace.

I catch her wrist before it lands. My grip closes tight enough that her face changes, the performance cracking into something real for the first time tonight.

"Don't."

One word. That's all it costs me.

"How dare you—" she starts, and that's when Derek's face finally catches up to what's actually standing in front of him. I watch it happen — recognition landing late, landing hard, five years too late to matter.

"Do you have any idea who she is?" His voice cracks across the crowd, panic bleeding through every syllable. "She's Ghost. You just destroyed everything."

He shoves her off him. His hand connects with her cheek before I've even decided whether to enjoy it, a crack loud enough to silence the last conversations in the room, and Rachel goes down hard against the marble.

Five years I never once saw him raise a hand to her. It only happens now, in front of three hundred witnesses, because I'm the one watching.

I set my glass on a passing tray.

I cross the space between us at a pace that doesn't hurry for anyone, and I look at Derek the way you look at something you've already finished deciding about.

The first slap lands clean.

"That is for calling me Rose."

The second lands harder.

"And that is for failing to control the woman you traded me for."

He doesn't move. Doesn't raise a hand. Just stands there with a red print blooming across his face while two hundred phones record every second of it.

"Mr. Blackwood." My voice doesn't rise. It doesn't need to, not with this many people already holding their breath to hear it. "Learn to keep your wife on a leash."

I pick my champagne back up and pour what's left of it slowly over Rachel's head while she's still on the floor, still stunned, mascara running black down a face that used to smirk at mine in a training barn five years ago.

"Now ask yourself." I say it loud enough to carry to the back wall, to the cameras, to every woman in this room who once slid me the smallest plate at dinner and smiled while she did it. "Which one of us is actually the gold digger."

I walk away. I don't look back to see if she's crying.

Derek finds his voice somewhere behind me. "Ghost — please, we can talk about this—" Security has him by both arms before he clears three steps, and his voice chases me all the way to the terrace doors, thinner with every word, until the glass closes it out completely.

The night air is colder than the room. I stand at the railing and let it work on me, let my pulse come back down out of my throat.

"That was quite impressive."

I don't turn immediately. I know the voice before I see him.

"How may I help you, Mr. Moreau."

Kai steps into the light from the doorway, unhurried, hands in his pockets like a man who's never once needed to rush toward anything he wanted.

"You really aren't afraid of me, are you."

"Fear," I say, "is for people who have something left to lose."

"Then excuse me for wasting your evening." His mouth curves, not quite a smile. "I need your skills. Exclusively. I've heard exactly what the world's most famous hacker is capable of."

"I didn't become the world's most famous hacker to work for one man."

"Name your price." He says it like the number is irrelevant to him, which it probably is. "Blank check."

"My skills aren't for sale."

"What's the matter, Mr. Moreau." I turn the question back on him, unhurried. "Scared one of your rivals might pay me to hack your own system instead?"

He laughs — low, and it moves through me somewhere I don't examine too closely. "If I were scared of that, Mrs. Rose I wouldn't have become the head of the mafia world." He studies me another beat, something shifting behind his eyes. "I must say, you've picked my interest tonight in a way very few people manage."

"Then you'll survive being told no." I set my empty glass on the railing. "Now if you'll excuse me."

"Suit yourself."

I turn to leave. My heel catches on the stone edge of the terrace, snaps clean, and the floor tilts out from under me too fast to catch myself against.

I close my eyes for the fall.

It doesn't come.

A hand closes around my waist instead — one hand, no scramble, no hesitation, like he already knew exactly where I'd be before I knew it myself. Warmth floods through the fabric of my dress everywhere his palm touches, too much warmth, more than one hand has any right to produce, and my whole body goes rigid against it before I've decided to let it.

And then something inside my chest detonates without asking permission.

It isn't gentle. It isn't the soft click people describe in stories told to children. It tears through me like something has been forced open that I spent five years welding shut, a scream that isn't mine and is entirely mine at the same time, every nerve I own lighting up at once around a single word I never agreed to hear again.

Mate.

I open my eyes.

He hasn't let go of my waist. His hand is still there, still burning through silk, and I can't make myself pull away from it fast enough to matter. His eyes have stopped being dark. They're burning red now, locked on mine, pupils blown wide around a color that has no business existing in a human face. Below them his jaw has changed shape around teeth that weren't there a heartbeat ago.

He isn't smiling anymore. Whatever composure he walked onto this terrace with is gone, stripped off him as completely as it's been stripped off

me.

His voice comes out low, wrecked, barely his own.

"Mate."