Liv
The reception room hits me like a wall of heat and noise when I step back through the doorway, candlelight and crystal and sixty conversations happening at once, and for a second, I almost turn around and go straight back to the cloakroom bench.
Instead, I find a quiet stretch of wall near a column, close enough to the room to look like I belong in it, far enough back that nobody's likely to walk up and try to sell me a marriage proposal in the next thirty seconds. I cross my arms and breathe and remind myself that Katriona is somewhere in this crowd too, that I'm not actually alone in here even if it feels that way.
That's when I hear him.
A laugh booms out from somewhere near the entrance, big and unselfconscious. The kind of laugh that makes three or four other people start smiling before they even know what the joke was. I follow the sound and find a man taller than anyone else in the room, broad through the shoulders in a way his suit clearly isn't trying to hide, with dark hair pushed back like he ran a hand through it once and decided that was good enough. He's got a woman in blue laughing on one arm and a blonde wearing the latest Versace on the other, both incredibly beautiful.
He doesn't look like the other men here. They move through the room like they're closing deals, careful and contained, eyes weighing business behind polite smiles. He moves likehe already owns the place and finds the whole arrangement hilarious.
He steers both women toward the dining hall with an easy hand at each of their backs, and for one unfair second, I find myself almost jealous of how simple it looks, being swept along by someone who seems entirely without the capacity for cruelty. Then I catch myself being jealous ofthat, of all things, and I have to press my lips together to keep from laughing at my own ridiculous heart.
Dinner gets called not long after. A small, sharp-faced man with a clipboard reads names off in pairs and trios, assigning seats the way you'd assign cattle to pens, and I end up near the middle, sandwiched between another beautiful woman who smells like gardenias and a man who is simply terrifying.
The man who had the two women on his arms is four seats down and across, directly in my line of sight whether I want him there or not.
I tell myself I'm not watching him. I'm watching the room, generally, the way Katriona told me to, taking inventory the way she clearly already had. It just so happens that my eyes keep landing on the loudest part of it.
He's telling some story with his hands, big sweeping gestures that nearly take out a candelabra, and the whole end of the table is laughing, even a stone-faced man two seats over who looks like he hasn't smiled since the Cold War.
Then he looks up, and he catches me watching him.
I intend look away immediately. That's the socially correct thing to do, the thing a sensible, dignified woman does when she's caught staring at a stranger across a dinner table. Instead I just sit there, frozen, heat climbing up my neck, while he holds my gaze for one long, unhurried second.
He doesn't smirk or do the thing men do when they catch you looking, that smug little tilt of the chin that saysI know.He just smiles, easy and real, like he's genuinely glad I exist, and goes right back to his story.
My heart does something stupid and traitorous in my chest.
The food comes in courses I barely taste. Gardenia woman tells me at length about her late husband's yacht. The man next to me seems enraptured by Katriona. I push food around my plate and try not to look down the table again, and fail, more than once. Every single time I look back up, he's either already looking at me or he turns to look a half second after I do, like we're caught in some ridiculous, silent game of tag neither of us agreed to play.
The third time it happens, he raises his wine glass an inch off the table, just for me, just enough that I understand it's a private joke between the two of us and nobody else at this table is in on it.
I bite down on a smile and look at my plate.
By the time dessert arrives, he's somehow gotten loose from his dinner companions and is making a slow, unbothered circuit of the room, stopping to talk to people like he's got nowhere else on earth to be. I watch him charm an elderly man into actually laughing out loud, and then say something to Rita, the hostess who handed me my file and my fate, that makes her swat his arm. Somewhere in the middle of watching him be effortlessly, infuriatingly likable, he ends up beside me.
"You," he says, like we're already mid-conversation, "have been staring at me all night."
My face goes hot instantly. "I have not."
"You have. I counted four separate occasions. I'm flattered, genuinely, but I have to ask. Is it the suit? Everyone says it's the suit."
I smile despite myself. Then shake my head, more at my own embarrassment than his humor. "It's not the suit."
"Devastating. I had Rita compliment it twice tonight specifically to build my confidence before this conversation." Up close he's even bigger, broad enough that the chair looks almost comically small underneath him, and there's something in his eyes, quick and warm and a little wicked, that makes it very hard to remember I'm supposed to be terrified of every man in this room.
"I'm Volody," he says.
"Liv."
"Liv." He says it like he's testing the weight of it, the same way Katriona did in the cloakroom, except his mouth curves around it like he likes what he finds. "Short for something?"
"Alivia."
"Alivia." He says that too, slower, and something in my stomach flips over without permission. "That's a name someone thought hard about. Family name?"
"My mother liked it. Said it sounded like it belonged to someone who'd do something with her life."
