THE PUBLIC DISPLAY

The dress had arrived that afternoon in a box lined with tissue paper so pale it was nearly translucent, no note attached, no explanation — just a single line from Ethan's assistant confirming a car would collect her at seven. Luna had stood in her closet holding the thing up to the light, a deep emerald silk that pooled like water over her arm, and thought, with a bitterness that surprised her by how tired it sounded even in her own head, *of course he dresses me too.*

She wore it anyway. There was no version of tonight where she walked into the Vance Media & Film gala looking anything less than flawless, and she refused to give either Ethan or the wolves circling this city's social pages the satisfaction of catching her underdressed for her own public unveiling.

Freya zipped her into it at six-forty, hands steady despite the worry that had lived behind her eyes since the men left Luna's office three days ago. "You look like you could burn the whole room down," Freya said, adjusting the drape at Luna's shoulder.

"That's the idea," Luna said, and did not mention that some nights she felt less like fire and more like the ash left after it.

The car that collected her was not a car so much as a small, silent room on wheels, black-windowed and driven by a man who didn't speak beyond confirming her name. Luna spent the ride watching the city slide past in smears of gold and white, rehearsing the version of herself she needed to be for the next four hours — poised, unbothered, radiant with the particular brightness of a woman genuinely thrilled about her engagement to one of the city's most eligible and terrifying men. She had done harder performances. She told herself that until she almost believed it.

The Axis Grand — Zayn Vance's chosen venue, a converted opera house Vance Media & Film had rented out entirely for the evening's charity premiere — glowed at the end of a red carpet so saturated with camera flashes that the whole block looked lit from within. Luna's car pulled up behind three others exactly as sleek, and through the tinted glass she watched socialites and minor celebrities pick their way across the carpet in a parade of sequins and practiced smiles.

Ethan was already waiting at the base of the steps when her door opened.

He'd worn black — a tuxedo cut so precisely to his frame that it looked less like clothing and more like a second, more dangerous skin, dark hair combed back, that pale gray gaze finding hers the instant she stepped out of the car as though he'd been tracking her arrival through some instinct sharper than sight. For one unguarded second, standing there in the flash and noise with the whole watching world holding its breath, Luna forgot to remember that this was a performance.

Then his hand found the small of her back, warm even through silk, and the moment snapped back into focus.

"Smile," he murmured, close to her ear, his breath stirring the loose curl at her temple. "You look like you're walking to your own execution."

"Close enough," Luna said through a smile so bright it ached.

"Try again. The cameras can smell fear from a hundred feet."

She laughed — a real laugh, startled out of her by the dryness in his voice, and the sound of it seemed to catch him off guard too, something flickering behind his eyes before he smoothed it away and guided her up the steps into the roar of shutters and shouted questions.

*Ethan! Over here! Miss Sterling, congratulations on the engagement — when's the wedding?* The questions came in a wall of noise, camera flashes strobing white across her vision until the world narrowed to the warmth of his hand at her back and the practiced, dazzling smile she'd built her whole life learning how to wear. Ethan answered two questions with the smooth, clipped efficiency of a man who'd spent a decade mastering the press, his free hand finding hers at the top of the steps and lacing their fingers together in a gesture that read, to every lens pointed at them, as tender.

It didn't feel like tenderness. It felt like being anchored to something enormous and immovable in the middle of a storm, and Luna hated how steadying she found it.

Inside, the Axis Grand had been transformed into something out of an old-world fever dream — gold light pooling from chandeliers the size of small cars, champagne towers three stories of glass, a string quartet playing something moody and cinematic beneath the roar of four hundred conversations. The air smelled of candle wax, expensive perfume, and the particular ozone tang of too many diamonds catching too much light.

"Vance." A voice cut through the crowd before they'd made it ten feet from the entrance, warm and performatively delighted. "And the infamous Miss Sterling. I was starting to think my own cousin was hiding you from me."

Zayn Vance moved through the crowd the way certain men moved through rooms they considered permanently theirs — loose-limbed, grinning, dressed in a tux that managed to look deliberately less formal than everyone else's despite costing exactly as much. He was handsome in a way that photographed better than it felt in person, all cheekbones and camera-ready charm, and his eyes, when they landed on Luna, held an assessing quality that reminded her uncomfortably of Ethan's, though wrapped in far more charisma.

"Zayn." Ethan's voice had cooled several degrees. "Congratulations on the premiere."

"Thank you, thank you. Couldn't have picked a better week to remind the board I still know how to fill a room." Zayn's gaze slid back to Luna, lingering a beat too long on the emerald silk, the curve of her waist, before returning politely to her face. "Miss Sterling. I have to say, the whole city's talking about how fast this happened. Ethan doesn't usually move quickly on anything that isn't a hostile acquisition." A pause, sharp enough to draw blood. "Is that what this is, by the way? Should I be sending a wedding gift or a condolence card?"

"Careful," Ethan said, mild as poison.

"Just making conversation, cousin." Zayn's grin widened, unbothered, and he leaned toward Luna with the easy confidentiality of a man used to being liked. "Watch yourself with this one, Miss Sterling. He collects things. Companies, board seats, women who used to matter to him." His eyes flicked, deliberately, toward the far side of the ballroom. "Speaking of which — looks like tonight's guest list got interesting."

Luna followed his gaze and felt something in her chest go cold before she even understood why.

Zara Dubois moved through the crowd like she'd been poured into the room rather than walked into it — a column of ruby-red silk, dark hair swept into an architecture of curls, every line of her body engineered for exactly this kind of entrance. She was, Luna registered with the clinical detachment of a woman cataloguing a threat, extraordinarily beautiful, the kind of beauty that photographed as effortless and required, Luna suspected, several hours and several assistants to achieve.

"Ethan," Zara said, arriving at their small circle with a smile that didn't reach eyes the deep, cold blue of glacier water. "Darling. I heard the news, of course, but I had to see it for myself." Her gaze swept Luna from crown to hem with the precision of an appraiser deciding how much a piece was worth before deciding to insult it. "How sudden. How very unlike you."

"Zara." Ethan's voice gave away nothing, but Luna felt his hand tighten fractionally at her back. "You remember Luna Sterling."

"Of course. Sterling Auto." Zara's smile sharpened. "Such a shame about your father, chérie. I heard the accident left him quite — diminished. And now this fire at your warehouse. You Sterlings really are having a season, aren't you?" She turned back to Ethan before Luna could summon a response sharp enough to match, her hand landing on his forearm with an intimacy Luna felt in her own teeth. "I do hope you know what you're doing, marrying into all that instability. Vance Global can't afford another scandal this year. Neither can you."

"Vance Global's affairs aren't your concern anymore, Zara," Ethan said, and removed her hand from his arm with a courtesy so precise it functioned as an insult in itself.

Zara's smile didn't waver, but something flickered behind her eyes — a crack in the porcelain, quickly papered over. "No," she agreed softly. "I suppose they're not. Not anymore." Her gaze slid back to Luna, and this time the venom came without disguise. "Enjoy him while the contract lasts, Miss Sterling. Men like Ethan don't stay bought. I should know."

She turned and glided away before Luna could answer, trailing a wake of perfume and whispered conversations that would, Luna knew with grim certainty, be all over the city's gossip pages by morning.

"Sorry about that," Zayn said, not sounding sorry at all, already backing away with the pleased expression of a man who'd gotten exactly the show he'd come for. "Enjoy the party, you two. Try not to kill each other before the wedding — bad for the brand." He vanished into the crowd, and Luna became abruptly, painfully aware of how many eyes in the ballroom had watched the entire exchange, phones angled just enough to catch it.

"Come with me," Ethan said quietly, and steered her toward the terrace doors before she could argue.

The night air outside hit her like something clean after the perfume-thick heat of the ballroom, cool and faintly salted with the ocean smell that seemed to cling to Ethan wherever he went. The terrace overlooked the city's glittering financial district, all glass towers and distant traffic, and for a moment neither of them spoke, the party's noise muffled behind glass doors, the quartet's music reduced to a faint, ghostly murmur.

"That woman is unbearable," Luna said finally, gripping the stone balustrade to steady the tremor still working through her hands.

"She's efficient at being unbearable. It's practically a professional skill." Ethan came to stand beside her, close enough that she felt the warmth radiating off him despite the cold air, his jaw tight in a way that suggested Zara's appearance had unsettled him more than his flat tone let on. "I should have anticipated she'd come tonight. Zayn likely invited her specifically to see this happen."

"Your family," Luna said, "is exhausting."

"You have no idea." A ghost of something — not quite a smile — passed over his mouth. "For what it's worth, she's wrong about one thing."

"Which thing? She said several."

"That I don't stay bought." He turned to face her fully now, and the city lights behind him threw half his face into shadow, sharpening the line of his jaw, the pale unsettling gray of his eyes. "I don't get bought at all, Luna. I buy. There's a difference, and it matters, because it means when I decide something is mine, I don't let it go quietly. Not to my uncle's threats. Not to Zara's jealousy. Not to a board that thinks it can strip your family bare while I'm not looking."

"Am I something you bought, then?" The question came out sharper than she'd intended, three days of fear and fury finally finding a target that wasn't a stranger with a scarred eyebrow. "Is that what I am to you? An asset with a signature clause requiring an heir?"

Something shifted in his expression — not guilt, exactly, but a flicker of something rawer than the careful control he wore like armor. "You're the only person in this city who's looked me in the eye since your father's accident and called me exactly what I am instead of what my money makes me look like." He stepped closer, and Luna's breath caught at the sudden, dizzying proximity of him, cedar and salt and the warmth radiating off his skin through the thin barrier of the night air. "That's not nothing, Luna. Whatever else this is."

"Ethan—"

"They're watching," he said quietly, and she followed his gaze to the terrace doors, where a knot of photographers had drifted close enough to angle their lenses through the glass, drawn by whatever gossip had already begun rippling through the ballroom about the scene with Zara. "Every camera in that building is aimed at this doorway right now, waiting to see whether the story tonight is a happy engagement or a public humiliation. Zara just handed them the second option on a silver platter."

Luna's stomach dropped. "So we give them the first."

"So we give them the first," he agreed, and something in his voice had changed — lower, rougher at the edges, less like a man executing a strategy and more like a man who'd stopped entirely pretending it was only strategy. His hand rose to cup her jaw, thumb tracing the line of her cheekbone with a tenderness that felt entirely at odds with the cold calculation she'd catalogued in him since the moment they'd met. "Trust me."

"I don't trust you at all," Luna breathed, and meant it, and still didn't step back.

"Good instinct," Ethan murmured, close enough now that she could feel his breath ghost across her lips. "Doesn't mean you get to stop what happens next."

And then his hand slid from her jaw to the small of her back, and he pulled her flush against the hard, unyielding line of his chest, and the cameras beyond the glass erupted into a blinding storm of flashes as Ethan Vance kissed Luna Sterling like he meant it — fierce, possessive, devastating in its intensity, one hand fisting gently in the silk at her waist as though he could anchor her to him through sheer force of will, and for one terrifying, electric moment, with the whole watching world exploding in white light around them, Luna forgot completely that any of this was supposed to be pretend.