The word was out of Aislinn before she could weigh it, which never happened, she weighed everything, she'd spent eight years weighing every word before it left her, but there were exactly two things in this world she couldn't do, and the first was to stand in a ballroom full of vultures and call her son a liar.
Louis had never lied in his life.
And the second thing, the thing beneath the first, the thing she couldn't look at directly even now...
"Well," Amybeth said, low and vicious. "Well. So the little scholarship saint admits it. Then you can explain to Mr. Le Sabre's lawyers why your son—"
"Leave my mama alone!"
He burst back into the ballroom at a dead run, navy blazer flying open, and planted himself between Aislinn and all of them with his arms flung wide, seven years old, shaking with fury, utterly unafraid, and Aislinn's heart split clean down the middle at the sight of him.
"Louis." She reached for his shoulder. "Sweetheart—"
"No, Mama." He didn't take his eyes off the women. "She didn't do anything. She never does anything. You've been horrible to her all day and she just kept smiling at you, because that's how she is, and I'm not letting you be horrible anymore. So leave her alone."
For one whole second, nobody in the knot seemed to remember how breathing worked. A seven-year-old in a thrift-store blazer had just told the most dangerous women in three zip codes to behave themselves, and he'd done it in the tone of someone entirely prepared to enforce it.
Then Amybeth's face went a deep, mottled red.
"Why, you insolent little..." Her hand rose, palm open, rings glittering. "Someone ought to teach you some manners—"
Aislinn moved.
She didn't think, didn't weigh, didn't smile. She was simply there, wrapped around her son with her back to the blow, Louis's heartbeat hammering against her ribs, her body between his body and the world the way it had been every single day for seven years, and she shut her eyes and waited for it.
The blow never came.
When she opened her eyes and looked back over her shoulder, Amybeth's hand was still in the air, and it was going nowhere, because a man's fingers had closed around her wrist and stopped it mid-swing the way a wall stops weather.
"Basta." The word came out low, foreign, and final, half a heartbeat before the English did. "I wouldn't do that if I were you."
The voice was quiet. Pleasant, even, in the manner of a blade being drawn slowly enough to be polite about it. Around them the whole knot of women had gone white and silent and still as an unplugged carousel.
But Aislinn heard none of it and saw none of them, because every drop of blood in her body had turned to ice at the sound of that voice.
Eight years. Eight years, and she would've known it anywhere, in the dark, in a crowd, in another life entirely.
It belonged to Louis's father.
Chapter Three
EIGHT YEARS AGO
Somewhere in this city, one man had been paid to dress four hundred grown men in identical tuxedos, and Valerio sincerely hoped, for that man's sake, that their paths never crossed.
"Twenty minutes, sir. Maybe thirty." His driver's eyes flicked up to the mirror, braced for consequences. "The convention's taken every street in a six-block radius. There's nothing I can do."
There rarely was, in traffic. It was one of the few opponents Valerio had ever met that couldn't be threatened, purchased, or persuaded, and he'd learned to treat it the way sensible sailors treated the sea. He set his papers down and looked out the window instead.
The sidewalk was wall-to-wall Bond.
Tall Bonds and short Bonds, Bonds fanning themselves with audition flyers, Bonds sweating through rented tuxedos in the afternoon heat, one enterprising Bond selling bottled water to the other Bonds at what appeared to be triple markup. A sandwich board outside the convention center read STUNT DOUBLES WANTED, INQUIRE WITHIN, and beneath it two men in matching dinner jackets were having a disagreement about queue position that was about to make one of them very unemployable.
In the front seat, his security man watched the crowd as he watched all crowds, as a list of problems in descending order. Valerio watched it like an aquarium.
That was when he saw the girl.
She stood out first because she was moving and no one else was, cutting through the tuxedos at a sprint with a canvas backpack bouncing on her shoulders and one shoelace flying loose, a college student late for something and running like the something mattered. Pretty, in the way that would cause her trouble someday. She clearly had no idea yet.
