The Billionaire Contracted Heart

Chapter Nine: Selene Makes Her Entrance

I had been warned about Selene Voss.

Not by name, not at first. In Cassian's briefing folder, she appeared on the third page of the social network section under a heading that said simply: Prior Associations, Handle With Care. Half a page. Precise, economical, the way Cassian wrote everything, like a man who understood that the most dangerous information should take up the least space. Former close acquaintance of Lucien Drax. Longstanding presence in the family's social orbit. Nature of relationship: unspecified. Status: ongoing contact, intermittent.

I had read that half page four times. I had decided unspecified was doing significant work in that sentence and filed it accordingly.

I was not, it turned out, adequately prepared.

The charity auction was held on a Thursday evening at a venue that looked like someone had taken a nineteenth century ballroom and convinced it to have a quiet word with the twenty-first century. High ceilings, low lighting, the particular hum of money being moved around in the name of something that wasn't money. Lucien stood beside me near the auction display, his hand at my back in that way it had, steady and deliberate and present, and I was in the middle of saying something to a woman who ran a foundation I actually admired when I felt it.

The shift.

Not in Lucien. In the room. A small collective adjustment, the way air moves before weather arrives, and I stopped mid-sentence because my body understood before my brain did, and I turned.

She was stunning. That was the first thing, and I am not a person who gives that word away carelessly. Stunning in white, which was either brave or calculated or both, the kind of dress that announces itself without trying because the person inside it is doing all the announcing. Dark hair, pale skin, a mouth that looked like it had been designed to say things that couldn't be unsaid. She moved through the room the way Lucien moved through rooms, like she had decided to be here and the room had adjusted accordingly.

She came directly to us.

"Lucien." The way she said his name had history in it. Old, specific history, the kind that accumulates over years of proximity. Not a greeting. A reclamation.

I felt Lucien go very still beside me. Not noticeably, not to anyone watching. But I was close enough to feel it, the particular quality of stillness that meant something was being managed.

"Selene," he said.

Her eyes moved to me. She looked at me the way certain women look at other women in certain rooms, the full appraisal compressed into a single second and delivered without any visible effort. Then she smiled, and the smile was warm and completely impenetrable.

"You must be Aria." She extended her hand. Her grip was firm, brief, the grip of a woman who knows exactly how long to hold on. "I've heard about you."

"Lovely to meet you," I said. My voice was even. I was proud of my voice.

"Selene Voss." She said it the way people say names when they expect to be recognised. Then, to Lucien, with one hand resting lightly on his lapel, proprietorial and casual at once, like a hand that had rested there before and remembered the way: "You should have told me you were coming tonight. I would have saved you a better table."

"We're fine where we are," Lucien said.

"Of course you are." She smiled again. "You always are."

She stayed for eleven minutes. I counted, the way I had learned to count things when they mattered. Eleven minutes of anecdotes that assumed shared memory, of references to places and people I had no anchor to, of the subtle but surgical work of a woman demonstrating, to every person in earshot, that she knew Lucien Drax in rooms and in contexts that I had not yet reached and might never.

Old nicknames. I caught two. Deployed lightly, briefly, just long enough to land.

Shared memories. A trip somewhere. A dinner where something had happened that made both of them, apparently, laugh, though Lucien's version of laughing was so restrained it was mostly a tightening at the corners of his eyes.

And underneath all of it, directed at me with the precision of a woman who had practised this, the continuous, unbroken implication that my presence beside Lucien was new and hers was not, and one of those things mattered more than the other.

When she finally turned to go, she pressed her cheek briefly against Lucien's in that European way that is either affection or performance depending entirely on context, and she said to me, "We should have lunch, Aria. Properly." Then she walked back into the room and the air redistributed around her absence.

I picked up my champagne.

"Old friend?" I asked. My tone was light. Appropriate. The tone of a woman who is not rattled.

Lucien was quiet for a moment. "A past mistake," he said.

Three words. Flat and final, designed to close the subject. But his jaw had tightened in a way I had not seen before, a way that said there was considerably more than three words' worth of history in that direction, and the jaw didn't lie even when the voice did.

I nodded. I looked back at the room. I did not push.

The auction continued. I bid on something for charity that I did not need and could not afford, because the woman running the lot had dedicated twenty years of her life to something I believed in, and because I wanted to do one thing tonight that was entirely mine and had nothing to do with the performance.

I won the lot. Lucien looked at me with something that was almost amusement.

"You didn't need that," he said.

"No," I agreed. "But I wanted it."

We went to the restroom at separate times, as people do at events, and I was washing my hands at the marble sink when I opened my clutch for my lipstick and found something I had not put there.

A card. Small, cream, expensive. Selene Voss on the front. A handwritten number on the back.

And below the number, in the same precise hand:

He's been lying to you since the beginning. Call me when you're ready to know the truth.

I stood at the sink for a long time. The water was still running. The restroom was empty and quiet and the marble was cold under my hands and I read the card twice and then a third time and thought: she put this in my clutch during those eleven minutes. While she was laughing and remembering and pressing her cheek to his. She put this in my bag and kept smiling and walked away.

Which meant one of two things. Either Selene Voss was a woman scorned running a well-dressed campaign of destruction.

Or she was telling the truth.

The problem was that both things could be true at once. I knew that. I had learned that in the years before Damon left, when the people who tried to warn me had their own reasons for warning me and the warnings were real anyway.

I dried my hands. I put the card in the inner pocket of my clutch, behind my phone, where it wouldn't be visible if the clutch fell open. I reapplied my lipstick. I looked at myself in the mirror the way I had looked at myself in the bar on the night everything started, and I thought: you already know the shape of what's coming. You just don't have all the corners yet.

I went back out to the room.

Lucien was where I had left him, standing near the window with that particular stillness, his profile clean against the low light, and when he saw me coming back he looked at me the way he always looked at me, direct and complete, and for one moment, one unguarded second, something moved behind his eyes that I had no name for yet.

I smiled at him. He didn't smile back, not exactly, but something shifted in his face that was in the same direction as a smile.

I thought about the card in my clutch.

He's been lying to you since the beginning.

I thought about Cassian's note in my dresser drawer at home. There are things in this family that don't survive being known.

I thought about Victor at dinner, that warm and calculating smile, and my father's name sitting unspoken in the space between us like a debt that hadn't been called in yet.

I reached Lucien. I stood beside him. The auction continued, and the room hummed, and New York did its enormous glittering thing outside the windows.

"Everything all right?" he asked. Low, for me only.

I looked up at him. "Yes," I said.

It was the first lie I had told him deliberately.

It would not, I suspected, be the last.