006: The Man Who Forgot My Face

Camille's POV

The washroom mirror gave me back a woman I still wasn't fully used to — steady hands, red lipstick reapplied without a smudge, not a single hair out of place from the two slaps I'd just delivered in front of three hundred witnesses. I touched up nothing that needed touching up. I just needed thirty seconds where nobody was watching me breathe.

When I stepped out, he was there. KYRIAN.

Leaning against the marble wall across from the door like he'd been waiting there his whole life and just hadn't noticed the years passing. Hands in his pocket, the easy posture of a man who'd never once had to wonder if a room wanted him in it.

I didn't stop. I let my eyes graze past him the way you'd glance past a stranger's dog — mildly, briefly, gone.

"You're not going to say anything?"

I kept walking.

"You slap my wife twice in front of half the city and then you're just going to walk past me?"

That got a smile out of me. Small. Private. I turned it into a shrug and kept my pace exactly the same.

"Wait." He pushed off the wall, closing the distance in three long strides, and stepped in front of me — not touching, just enough to make stopping the polite option. "I need to say something, and it's going to sound insane."

"Try me."

"You look like someone I used to know." His eyes moved over my face the way you'd study a word on the tip of your tongue. "Someone I—" He stopped himself, shook his head like he was annoyed at his own sentence. "It's the eyes. Maybe the mouth. I can't place it."

"People have doubles," I said. "It's a big planet."

"It's not that." He said it too fast, too sure, and something in his jaw tightened like the thought physically bothered him. "I don't forget faces, Miss—" He waited. I didn't fill it in. "I don't even know your name."

"You don't need it."

"Everyone needs a name."

"Not everyone needs yours attached to theirs." I let that sit a beat, watching it not land the way I wanted it to, watching him file it under intriguing instead of insulting, because that was the exact kind of man he'd always been — allergic to being told no, addicted to anything that made him work for it.

"You're cruel," he said, and he was smiling when he said it, like cruelty was a flavor he'd missed.

"I'm accurate." I stepped around him. "There's a difference. You'd know that if you'd ever bothered learning it."

"That's an oddly specific thing to say to a stranger."

I didn't answer that one. I let the silence do what silence does best.

"Have dinner with me," he said, to my back now, since I'd already started walking. "Tomorrow. I'll clear my whole week if I have to."

I glanced over my shoulder. Just once.

"You couldn't afford tomorrow, Mr. Voss." I let his own name sit in the air a second longer than necessary — long enough that I saw the flicker of *wait, how does she* cross his face before I turned forward again. "Not the version of you sitting across from me tonight."

I didn't wait to watch that land either.

Walking away, I let out a breath I'd been holding since the washroom mirror, and somewhere under my ribs a laugh tried to surface — ugly and real, the kind you can't explain to anyone who wasn't there for the five years it took to build. He'd stood two feet from the mother of his children and asked her to dinner like she was a stranger worth collecting. Five years ago that would have gutted me. Tonight it was almost funny. Almost.

I didn't get thirty more steps before the ballroom exploded into noise.

Not applause. Not music. Something sharper, uglier — a scream that cracked through the string quartet and killed it mid-note, chairs scraping, glass shattering somewhere close to the floor.

"Mr. Vance! Someone get help — Mr. Vance, can you hear me?"

I turned the corner into chaos.

A crowd had already formed a loose, useless ring around something on the floor, the kind of ring people make when they want to see without being asked to do anything. An elderly man lay on his back near the champagne table, one arm bent wrong beneath him, his face gone the color of wet ash. A woman knelt over him in a beaded gown that was already ruined at the knees, both hands pressed flat against his chest, pumping in a rhythm that was close but not quite right.

"Rowan — Rowan, don't you dare. Don't you dare do this to me tonight." Her voice cracked wide open on his name. "Someone call an ambulance! Why is nobody calling an ambulance!"

"I already did, Mrs. Vance, they're eleven minutes out," a man's voice answered, unhelpful in the specific way people are when they've done the one thing they know how to do and have nothing left to offer.

Eleven minutes. I did the math without meaning to. Eleven minutes was a lifetime for a man that color.

Kyrian reached them before I did, crouching down, one hand on the woman's shoulder, saying something low and useless about staying calm, about Rowan being strong, about everything being fine — the same tone he'd used on me once, that didn't matter to him anymore. He straightened and barked at someone near the doors. "Get Lucas. Tell him to bring Dr. Whitfield now, he's two floors up."

I was already moving.

"Move aside." I didn't raise my voice. I didn't need to — something in it cut through the noise anyway, and the ring of useless spectators parted like water. I dropped to my knees beside the old man, ruining a gown that cost more than most people's rent, and pressed two fingers under his jaw.

Thready. Fast. Wrong.

"How is he?" someone asked above me, uselessly, the way people always ask when they want to feel involved without doing anything that might get their hands dirty.

"Medical kit. Now." I didn't look up to see who moved. Someone always moves when a voice sounds certain enough. "And back up — he needs air, not an audience."

Mrs. Vance stared at me through a wall of tears, something between hope and suspicion crossing her face — the specific look of a woman deciding, in real time, whether a stranger kneeling over her husband was a lifeline or a threat.

A servant skidded to a stop beside me with the kit already open, and my hands moved before my mind fully caught up to them — steady, sure, five years of training myself aside my acting career because of what happened to Nancy, folding into muscle memory faster than fear could interrupt it. I found what I needed. I uncapped it.

And I wasn't going to sit back to let someone die at my watch.

"Wait!"

The voice cut through the room like a blade dragged across glass, and every head turned at once — mine included, my hand frozen an inch from Rowan Vance's arm, the syringe still glinting under the chandelier light, waiting for whatever came next.