His jaw sets and he doesn't answer, which is its own kind of answer. His hand tightens at my waist by a fraction, and the bond flares in response, and I feel heat move up my spine that has nothing to do with the room temperature.
"Ryder." I pitch it low enough that only he hears it. "You're doing the same thing he was doing."
"I'm dancing. It's protocol."
"You're holding me differently than you were thirty seconds ago."
He exhales through his nose. "The bond makes proximity difficult to manage neutrally. You know that."
"I do know that." I keep my voice level. "It doesn't make watching you and Thane both react to each other while I'm standing between you any less exhausting."
"I'm not reacting to Valorix."
"You've checked his position in this room four times since we started dancing."
A pause. "Three times."
"I stand corrected." I look up at him. This close, with the bond running between us like a live current, his face is different than it is across a classroom or a corridor. More of it visible, somehow, the things he keeps locked down sitting closer to the surface. "What did Caspian mean? When he apologized to me."
Something shifts. "When did he say that?"
"Our dance. He said he was sorry for what was coming tonight and that he couldn't stop it." I watch Ryder's face carefully. "You know something."
"I know several things. You need to be specific."
"Tonight. Whatever Caspian was warning me about."
His expression closes in a way I recognize, the shutting of a door that was briefly open. "Don't let it catch you off guard. Whatever happens, stay on your feet and don't let them see it land."
"That's not an explanation."
"It's the best advice I have."
"Ryder—"
"Eveline is here," he says quietly. "She arrived an hour ago. She's been speaking with Seraphina Vale since she got here, and that combination has not historically produced anything good for you."
The bond gives a sharp pull, as if responding to his tension rather than mine. My hand tightens in his involuntarily.
"I see," I say.
"I can't intercede without making the political situation worse. The engagement still stands publicly, and if I step between her and you tonight, it becomes a council issue rather than a social one." His voice is flat in the way it gets when he's furious and won't let himself show it directly. "I'm telling you so you can prepare."
"Very thoughtful."
"Angel." It comes out low, just barely audible over the music, and something about the way he says it makes the bond go quiet, like the thing between us took a slow breath. He doesn't say anything else after it. He just holds me through the remaining measures of the song with more care than protocol requires, and I let him, because the information he just handed me is cold and heavy and the warmth of the bond is, for this one moment, easier to hold onto than the alternative.
The music ends.
He releases me and steps back with the formal courtesy of the House protocol, and his face is locked down again, and we go back to being what we are in public, which is complicated and unresolved and nothing anyone watching can quite name.
I find a spot near the far wall and breathe.
Eveline is across the room. I spot her without trying, because she is designed to be spotted, tall and impeccably dressed in ivory, moving through the gathered guests with the ease of someone who considers every room she enters as already belonging to her. She finds Ryder within minutes of my locating her, and she puts her hand on his arm, and he allows it with the careful stillness of someone performing a role, and I watch exactly none of this because I am looking at the ceiling and cataloguing the architecture.
Seraphina materializes at my left.
I don't startle. I've been expecting this since Ryder's warning.
