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A man with her responded. “Good old Robert got her out just in time for the cameras.”
Evie was alone and looked bone thin. Her black dress made her look ghostly pale. She seemed to shrink into herself when a waitress offered her a drink. She took the champagne, but there was something off about her.
When she walked closer to us, the gossip increased.
“Poor Robert, to have a daughter like that. After everything he did for her.”
“I heard she was on suicide watch.”
“She must take after her mother. The lush.”
The sneers and biting remarks increased.
I clasped my hands to Kristoff’s. “I can’t believe they are tearing her down like that.”
“That’s the life of the elite,” he said grimly. “They laud you for being on top of the world, but the second you stumble, they’re right there to kick you to the curb.”
It looked as if Evie was walking down a gauntlet. I wondered how she could stand being here, near all these horrible people. There was no way that she hadn’t picked up on any of the talk. It wasn’t like people were keeping their voices down.
When she passed us, I noticed what was off about her. It was her eyes. They were dark pools of…nothing.
“She seems…drugged,” I whispered.
I felt Kristoff shrug behind me. “Looks like it.”
There was no empathy in his voice. To him, Evie seemed to be just an extension of his father. How I wished I was wrong.
“Maybe you should go help her.”
He stiffened. “No.” A single word in a tone that brokered no argument.
“She’s your sister,” I whispered.
“No. She is nothing to me.”
Frustration coursed through me. I realized that I’d never personally dealt with this side of Kristoff before; cold, calculating, unmoving, blasé to a fault.
“What if it were Yuri?” I asked. “What if he was down on his luck, fighting with addiction? Would you just let him flounder?”
His breath was hot on my ear when he whispered, “I would level anyone who hurt him. Skin them alive and throw their carcass to the dogs. Do not compare this woman, or anyone related to that asshole, to one of mine.”
Evie stumbled and a thin crash sounded through the room. She’d dropped her champagne flute and the glass had shattered into a thousand pieces.
For a second she stood frozen. Then, mortified she hurried off to what I assume was the bathroom. I could no longer stand it. I pushed away from Kristoff and went after Evie. I remembered the times I had withdrawn to the bathroom myself, after chemotherapy. How had I wished that someone would come after me, aside from my mom. Just a hand to hold, a sympathetic face, would have meant the world to me.
The bathroom was as opulent as the rest of the venue—white marble floors and a high ceiling with a row of mirrors across wooden stall doors. There was only one other woman in the room, washing her hands at a gold-rimmed faucet. I walked past her and played with my hair in front of the mirror until she left. Soon after, one of the stall doors opened and Evie came out.
She looked white as a sheet.
“You okay?” I asked.
She blinked as if surprised someone was talking to her. “I’m fine.”
She clearly wasn’t, but I didn’t know how to go about this. It wasn’t like I could introduce myself to her.
Hi, I’m your half-brother’s wife. What half-brother, you ask? Well, the one your father sired and then had his mother murdered. Yeah, that one. Let’s have coffee some time.
No, that wouldn’t go over well.
