Chapter 6: The Whitmore Gala

"Sophia," Damian had said two days ago, as the name cost him something to hand over. He hadn't said anything else about her since, and I hadn't pushed... not because I'd stopped wanting to know, but because I'd learned by now that pushing only ever bought me silence dressed up as an answer.

Tonight, I had a different plan.

I was done waiting for a stranger's texts to hand me the story one fragment at a time. If there were answers in this world, I was going to find them myself.

The Whitmore ballroom looked exactly like Genevieve had described it: chandeliers, marble, a string quartet playing something that sounded expensive.

The car had barely stopped moving before the flashes started, a wall of light through the tinted glass that made my pulse spike despite four days of practice standing still for exactly this.

Damian's hand found mine before the door even opened.

"Chin level," he said quietly. "Not for them. For me."

"That's not what Genevieve told me."

"Genevieve's not the one who has to live with how this looks in the morning papers."

The door opened, and the noise hit us both at once... shouted questions, camera shutters, a wall of sound I hadn't fully braced for even after a week of warnings.

His hand settled at the small of my back as we crossed toward the entrance, steady, warm, more real than I expected it to feel after a week of rehearsing it.

"You're doing well," he murmured, close to my ear, the words meant only for me. "Almost convincing."

"Almost?"

"I said almost for a reason. Don't get used to compliments."

I laughed, a real one, not performed, and caught the flash of a camera three feet away, capturing exactly the moment Genevieve had told me to fake.

It didn't feel fake.

That unsettled me more than anything else that had happened all week.

We made it through the photo line, eleven minutes exactly, the way Genevieve had promised, though it felt longer standing inside it, through a dozen handshakes with people whose names I forgot the second they let go of my hand.

Board members. Old money. A woman who introduced herself as an old friend of Damian's mother and studied my face a beat too long before smiling and moving on.

I kept my shoulders back the way I'd been drilled, kept my chin level, kept the smile in place even when my feet started aching inside Genevieve's architectural heels.

Evelyn appeared at Damian's elbow like she'd been standing there the whole time, waiting for a gap to fill.

"You clean up well," she said to me, in a tone that made it sound like an accusation. "Damian. The board wants a word before dinner."

"It can wait."

"It can't."

Her eyes flicked to me, unreadable.

"Do you mind, dear? Five minutes."

He hesitated, and for a second I thought he'd refuse, but the look Evelyn gave him wasn't a request, and we both knew it.

He squeezed my hand once, quick, and let Evelyn lead him toward a side room, leaving me alone in a ballroom full of strangers for the first time all night.

I didn't waste it.

I'd noticed the side room the moment we walked in: a narrow hallway behind the bar, staff moving in and out with trays, half-hidden by a folding screen.

It was the kind of place people went when they didn't want to be seen going anywhere at all.

I'd clocked it out of old habit, the same instinct that used to tell me which exit to take in a building I'd never been in before.

Tonight, for the first time, that instinct felt useful instead of paranoid.

I slipped past the screen while a waiter's back was turned and found myself in a service corridor, quieter, the party's noise dulled to a hum behind me.

Exposed pipes ran along the ceiling. A stack of folded linens sat against one wall, waiting for someone to carry them out.

I kept close to the shadows, moving slower than I wanted to, every step feeling louder than it probably was.

Voices came from a half-open door further down.

I recognized one of them before I'd even reached it... the Whitmore aunt Marcus had shown me in the photograph, her voice pitched low but not low enough.

"...can't keep paying her to stay quiet forever. Sophia's getting braver every month."

"She won't talk. She knows what happens if she does."

Evelyn's voice, unmistakable, colder than I'd heard it yet.

"The same thing that happened to the last one who thought about it."

My whole body went still against the wall.

I pressed closer to the gap in the door, heart hammering hard enough I was sure they'd hear it.

"And the new girl?" the aunt asked. "The Calloway girl."

The name landed like a slap.

Not the fiancée. Not Mira.

My last name, spoken like it already meant something to both of them.

"Calloway's useful exactly as long as Damian believes she's harmless," Evelyn said. "The moment she starts asking the wrong questions about her father, that changes."

I didn't breathe.

I didn't move.

Every instinct I had said to back away slowly, get back behind the screen, disappear into the crowd before anyone knew I'd heard a word of it...

But my feet wouldn't cooperate, rooted to the floor by the sound of my own name in Evelyn's mouth, tangled up with my father's, tangled up with whatever had happened to Sophia.

A tray clattered somewhere behind me.

I spun around, and a waiter gave me an apologetic look, already crouching to pick up the fallen glasses... but the noise had done its damage.

The voices inside the room went silent.

I didn't wait to find out who'd step out first.

I turned and walked, fast, back through the screen, back into the noise and light of the ballroom, my pulse roaring in my ears loud enough to drown out the quartet.

I made it three steps into the crowd before the room changed.

It started at the entrance: a ripple of turned heads, a murmur spreading faster than I could track its source.

I followed the direction of every stare and found a woman standing in the ballroom doorway, dark-eyed, in a dress that didn't match the room's formality, security already converging on her from two directions.

I knew her face.

I'd seen it stamped in red ink, seen it slide across a table two days ago with a single word attached.

Sophia had come to the gala herself.

"Where is he?"

Her voice carried across the marble floor, sharp enough to cut through the music.

"Where's Damian? I want everyone in this room to hear what he did to me."

The quartet stopped playing.

Two hundred conversations died at once.

I watched Damian emerge from the side hallway, Evelyn a step behind him, his face going pale in a way I'd never seen from him before...

Not composed.

Not calculating.

Just afraid, in front of every camera in the room.

"Sophia..."

"Don't."

She held up a hand, shaking, security still closing in around her.

"You let them tell everyone I left. You let them believe I just walked away, like I was some girl who got cold feet, instead of..."

Her voice broke, but she pushed through it, louder, aimed at the room instead of just him now.

"Instead of what actually happened."

A murmur ran through the crowd, phones already rising, the same instinct I'd watched turn my own face into a headline nine days ago now turning on someone else.

Damian took a step toward her, hands raised, his composure cracking in a way I'd only seen once before, in his office, when Marcus's phone had buzzed with news about Lena.

"Sophia, whatever you think happened..."

"I don't think, Damian. I know."

Her eyes found mine across the room, and something in her expression cracked open...

Not anger.

Not at me.

Recognition.

Pity, maybe, the same look Evelyn had given me on the first day.

"You're the new one. Aren't you? God. You have no idea what you signed up for."

I couldn't answer.

My throat had closed around every question I wanted to ask her, and the eavesdropped conversation was still ringing in my ears.

The same thing that happened to the last one who thought about it.

Close enough now that I understood, with a cold, sinking certainty, that I might be looking at exactly what that sentence had meant.

Security reached her before she could say anything else, hands closing around her arms, gentle but final, already turning her toward the exit.

She didn't fight them.

She just kept her eyes on me the whole way, like she was trying to hand me something with a look alone.

"Ask him about the fire," Sophia said, loud enough for the whole room to hear it, right before the doors swallowed her.

"Ask him what his father really did to your father, Mira."