She opens the door without enthusiasm. In her arms is a flat black box, the kind that doesn’t have a price tag, tied with ribbon the color of smoke.
“From Mr. Volkov,” she says. “There’s a note.” She sets it on the bed and leaves.
I look at the box for a moment. Then I open the note.
Council dinner. Tonight. Car at seven. Wear this.
That’s the entire note.
I set it down on the nightstand. I look at the box. I look at the note again.
I lift the lid.
Beneath a layer of tissue paper lies a dress—navy, floor-length, cut from the type of fabric that drapes instead of hangs. Heavy silk. Expensive enough that you feel the cost before you know the price. I slide the hanger free and hold it up.
The length is right. It’s exactly my size.
The realization settles unpleasantly.
I lower the dress back into the box, smooth the tissue paper over it, and replace the lid. Then I pick up the box and carry it down the corridor.
His office door is closed. I knock once and push it open before he can answer.
Zane sits behind his desk, jacket still on, a file open in front of him. Late-afternoon light spills through the windows and across the polished wood, but somehow the room seems arranged around him rather than the other way around, as though time itself waits for his permission before moving forward.
His gaze lifts to mine.
“No,” I say.
He looks at the box. Then at me. “The dinner is at eight.”
“I heard you. No.”
He leans back in his chair. “Celine.”
“You sent a dress to my room with a note that saidwear this.” I keep my voice level because raising it would feel like losing something. “You didn’t ask. You didn’t mention a dinner this morning or yesterday or at any point before four twenty this afternoon.”
“The dinner was confirmed an hour ago.”
“Then you should have come and told me an hour ago. Not sent a box with instructions.”
He looks at me with that steadiness he has, the kind that doesn’t ask permission or shift under pressure. “The council has been informed that the marriage exists. They have requested a formal introduction. Tonight is that introduction.”
I look at him.
“Your absence won’t read as independence,” he says. “It will read as instability. In my world, that is not a statement. It’s an invitation to people you don’t want paying attention to you.”
“Your world,” I say. “Not mine.”
“You live in my penthouse.”
“Because you invoked a clause you buried in a contract I didn’t fully read.”
“You signed it.”
I know better than to keep pulling on that thread. We’ve had that conversation, and it ends the same way every time. I look at the box on his desk, and I think about the council, men I have not met, men who already know my name, men who exist in a world I was filed into without my consent.
“Two hours notice,” I say. “That’s what you gave me.”
