One dance. The board doesn't move in one dance.I put my hand in his.
He pulls me into the middle of it before I can change my mind, and the band shifts into something slow and low, all brass and brushed drums. His hand settles flat against the small of my back and presses, just enough, so there's no polite gap between us. None. My whole front is against his, and I can feel him breathe.
“This isn't dancing,” I tell his collar. “This is you holding me up and turning in a circle.”
“You're following fine.”
“I'm being dragged.”
“Same thing, with you.” His mouth is at my temple now, and when he turns us, his thigh slides between mine for half a beat, and my breath does something embarrassing. He notices. Of course, he notices. “There it is,” he says.
“Don't.”
“Don't what? I'm dancing.”
His thumb is moving on my spine, slow, a small dragging circle that I feel everywhere it isn't. I'm very aware of the dress, of how little of it there is, of the heat coming off him through two thin layers of fabric. He turns us again and dips his head, and his lips graze the shell of my ear.
“When this is over,” he says against my skin, “I'm taking you home and taking my time. Hours. I've been thinking about it all night instead of the trap, which is a problem you're going to answer for.”
“You're impossible,” I manage.
“I'm motivated.”
I look up at him, and for one stupid second the whole room drops away — the doors, the guns, the man we came here to kill. It's just his hand on my back and his eyes on my mouth and the want sitting low in me like a coal.This is the worst possible time to feel this.I feel it anyway.
Then his hand on my back goes still.
It's nothing anyone else would catch. The thumb stops. The arm under my hand turns into a different kind of solid. I've spent three months learning this body, and I know its tells, yet the change in him moves through me before my head catches up.
“Lorcan?”
“Don't turn your head.” His voice hasn't changed at all, which is so much worse. “Keep dancing. Smile.”
So I look past his shoulder instead, and I read the room the way he taught me to. And I see it.
The men move first. Echo, by the east doors, drifts off the wall and turns his back to the room to murmur into his cuff. Two of the catering staff set their trays down on the same beat and don't pick anything up. By the terrace, a guard I clocked an hour ago changes the foot he's leaning on. It should look like nothing. It looks like a closing fist.
“It's early,” I breathe. “He's not supposed to be here for another hour. We planned for the second wave —”
“I know what we planned.”
The crowd by the main entrance does the thing crowds do when something walks in that they're afraid of — it parts without anyone deciding to part it. And then the floor opens up, and I see him.
Silas.
I've only ever seen the photo, grainy and ten years old. The real one is worse. He's lean and unhurried and dressed better than anyone in the room, and he's smiling like he's arriving at a party that's already going his way. Two men at each shoulder. More behind.Too many. That's too many men for a trap to be ours.
“Lorcan,” I say. “Count his guns.”
“I'm counting.” A muscle jumps in his jaw. “It's too many.”
That's the moment I understand we got it wrong. Not the layout — I'd have caught a flaw in the layout. We gothimwrong. He didn't walk into our trap. He let us build one so he'd know exactly where every one of our men would be standing when he sprang his.
Silas lifts one hand, lazy, like he's asking for a song.
The first shot doesn't sound like the movies. It's flat and small, and it punches one of Lorcan's men off his feet by the bar, and the back of him opens up across the white tablecloth in a spray ofdark red before the body even folds. For half a heartbeat, nobody moves. Then the screaming starts, and the room comes apart all at once.
Lorcan's arm clamps across me and drives me down and sideways, and we hit the floor behind an overturned banquet table as the air above it fills with rounds. Wood splinters. Glass comes down like rain. A woman near us goes over with a wet, surprised sound and doesn't get up, and the marble under my cheek is already going slick and warm, and I make myself not look at where it's coming from.
