"Stay for breakfast," she mumbled into his chest, already half asleep. "I make legendary rice."
"For breakfast?"
"Legendary," she insisted, and was gone, asleep between one breath and the next, safe in the one place in the world he occupied.
Valerio held her in the dark and made plans.
He had, though neither of them knew it, seven weeks left.
Chapter Five
THE MEN IN BLACK SUITSpoured into the ballroom like weather through a broken window.
There were at least a dozen of them, and they didn't run and didn't push; they simply filled the room the way rising water fills a cellar, fanning out along the walls with their hands folded and their eyes moving, and the party guests who'd been edging toward the exits discovered that the exits now had opinions.
Valerio Le Sabre released Amybeth Schnapp's wrist as though setting down something he'd finished reading.
And the ballroom, being a ballroom full of society parents who could sense power the way sharks sense distress, immediately tried to reach him. A hedge-fund father was already extending his hand and his firm's name. Two mothers had begun the complicated work of turning up at his elbow by apparent coincidence. Someone, somewhere, said the wordgolf.
Valerio crooked one finger.
That was all. One finger, without even looking, and a man in hotel livery appeared out of the crowd at a speed that suggested he'd been waiting his entire career for that finger. The hedge-fund father found himself smoothly intercepted. The coincidence mothers were re-coincidenced toward the buffet. And the hotel manager planted himself before Amybeth Schnapp, gray and glistening, a man performing surgery on his own retirement.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Schnapp, but please refrain from making a scene, or you'll have to be escorted out by security."
For a moment Amybeth simply stared at him, and Aislinn, who was still holding her son and her breath, watched the woman's face perform its whole repertoire, disbelief, calculation, rage, in the time it took the quartet to abandon ship entirely.
"This is my son's party," Amybeth said, at a volume that sent the nearest waiter fleeing, "and I'm the one you're asking to leave? Are you insane? You're clearly stupid. Who's your boss? Who owns—"
The manager looked at Valerio.
Valerio nodded, once.
"Mr. Le Sabre," the manager said apologetically, "is the owner of this hotel."
The ink on that particular fact, Aislinn would learn later, was approximately forty minutes old, which meant the man had bought the entire building faster than most people bought umbrellas in the rain. At the moment, all she knew was that the sentence moved through the ballroom like a cold current, and the knot of women who had, one hour ago, been so very brave about single mothers and blank school forms began, delicately, to back away from Amybeth Schnapp. Not far. Just far enough to be out of the photograph.
Amybeth saw it. Aislinn watched her see it, and watched the seeing make everything worse.
"You think you can fix this with money?" Her voice cracked upward. "Then I'll sue you—"
Valerio crooked another finger.
This time what stepped forward was a woman, and Aislinn's first, unworthy, entirely human thought was oh, come on, because the woman was tall in the way of people who are paid to walk toward cameras, ash-blonde, thirtyish, and beautiful with such casual efficiency that two of the retreating mothers stopped retreating just to stare at her. She wore a suit the color of bone and carried a slim leather folder, and she looked at Amybeth Schnapp the way a cat looks at a wounded and self-important bird.
"Please do," the woman said gently, and produced a card between two fingers. "Here's my calling card."
She gave it to Amybeth, who took it the way people take things they've already lost.
"We've already built a case of bullying," the woman continued, in the same gentle voice, which somehow kept getting worse. "We welcome seeing you in court."
The backing-away became general. It was quite something to watch, a whole ballroom of the best families in the city discovering, individually and in waves, that they'd never really known the Schnapps at all, had barely spoken to them, had in fact only come today out of politeness. Nannies appeared. Children were gathered. Somewhere near the cake, Brooklyn Schnapp began to wail that it was his party and nobody was allowed to leave, and was evacuated mid-sentence by a woman in sensible shoes.
"In the meantime," the blonde woman said, closing her folder with a small, final click, "please refrain from disturbing my employer and his partner."
Partner.
The word settled somewhere under Aislinn's ribs and stayed there. Around her the exodus accelerated, mothers hurrying their children toward the doors with their eyes fixed carefully forward, and nobody, nobody at all, met Amybeth Schnapp's eyes on the way out, and Aislinn took all of it in dimly, from a great distance, because her entire mind had snagged on one word like a sleeve on a nail. Partner. She would need to say something about that word. She would need to say several things, in fact, just as soon as she remembered how sentences worked.
