Page 122 of A Vicious Love

My teeth locked.

At ballet, he had sat front row. Now he had been invited to stand beside her at a public event under some bullshit friendship label while Sienna still thought she would sit with us.

“She doesn’t know.” Emmie looked at the floor. “She thinks she’ll be sitting at our table this weekend. Me. Marcel. Harrison. You. The same as always. But she won’t, her family is moving her to Weston’s table.”

Sienna removed carefully from my side and placed beside another Crow so Harlan could become accustomed to the sight.

So she could become accustomed to it too.

“She doesn’t know,” Emmie repeated, voice breaking. “We all know, and she doesn’t. I hate that.”

Marcel’s hand moved along her back.

“Then tell her,” Harrison said.

Emmie looked at Marcel.

Marcel looked at me.

Of course.

Because Sienna was still technically attached to me until the review settled. Dynasty information moved through men before it reached the women whose lives it dismantled.

I hated that fact tonight. Usually, it made business efficient. Tonight, it made my chest tighten.

“No,” I said.

“She should know.” Emmie stared at me.

“It isn’t formal.”

“She is going to arrive thinking she belongs beside us.”

“She’ll survive a seating change.”

The cruelty came easily. A habit.

Emmie’s face changed again. “She is going to be humiliated.”

I looked away. Staring outside, at the graveyard of herbs Marcel pretended had a future.

Sienna walking into a harbour luncheon and finding Weston waiting beside her place card. Trying to smile through it because she would assume she had done something wrong.

I took another drink from a glass that was no longer intact. Whiskey leaked cold over my fingers. I set it down.

“I don’t care,” I said.

Nobody spoke.

“They should move her,” I continued. “Good. Let Weston deal with the endless ballet stories and the hand thing. St. Cross can babysit her. Maybe all of you can finally stop acting like she needs a fucking escort through life.”

Emmie stared at me with tears on her cheeks. Harrison’s expression went flat. Marcel’s arm tightened around his wife.

I had gone too far.

I knew it.

Still, anger carried me forward because stopping would mean feeling whatever sat beneath it.