“—and our audience demographic responds very positively to authenticity, especially if it’s framed aspirationally?—”
I turn my head.
Across the Solarium Hall, beyond the wash of light and moving bodies and drifting camera drones, there he is.
Bron.
Black suit. Open collar. Hair tied back. One hand wrapped around a champagne flute like he was born with crystal in his fingers. He’s laughing at something, head tipped slightly, broad shoulders loose and easy in a way that makes violence seem rude and consequences seem optional.
He looks older. Harder around the mouth. A little leaner in the face. But the damage is in the details, because the details are familiar enough to make my pulse turn traitor. The line of his jaw. The tattoos disappearing beneath the collar. The lazy, devastating shape of his smile.
For one blank, terrible second all I can think is:He looks exactly like memory with better tailoring.
Then he turns his head and sees me.
The expression that moves over his face is so nakedly astonished it would almost be funny if I weren’t suddenly trying not to black out from rage.
He stops smiling.
So do I.
The room keeps moving around us. Conversations glide by. Glassware chimes. Somebody near the sponsor wall laughs too loudly. A camera drone hums overhead like an insect. But all of it is background now, washed thin and irrelevant.
Bron stares at me.
I stare back.
My body is already doing infuriating things—heart kicking too hard, skin prickling, every nerve waking up like it got a personal invitation. I hate that. I hate him for that. I hate myself a little for still being made of chemicals and bad luck.
A contestant beside me—some woman from one of the northern colonies with a silver cuff climbing one ear—follows my line of sight.
“Oh,” she says softly. “That looks personal.”
I don’t look at her. “It isn’t.”
She makes a neutral little sound that meansliar,and drifts away before I can bite her.
I should leave.
The thought flashes bright and clean.
Just turn around. Walk out. Go back to my room. Lock the door. Skip the rest of the reception and let Bron stand there in his expensive suit wondering whether he imagined me.
God, I want to.
Every instinct I have is screaming for distance. For walls. For oxygen. For one night—just one—where I am not ambushed by the man who made wreckage look like romance and then left me to clean up both.
But the thought barely forms before the practical part of my brain takes it out back and shoots it.
If I leave a mandatory sponsor reception ten minutes after arrival, Brautigaum’s people will notice. Production will notice. Somebody will tag me as difficult before the games even start, and this machine runs on narratives. I cannot afford to become the brittle, unstable contestant who storms out of media events. Not when I need every advantage. Not when Jesse is upstairs asleep under reinforced rails in a crib I secured by sheer force of refusal.
So I stay.
I inhale once through my nose.
Then I set down the untouched glass in my hand, square my shoulders, and decide that if Bron comes over here smiling, I’m going to freeze him to death with eye contact alone.
Apparently he takes that as encouragement.
