Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
“You’re not even going to peek?” Ronna murmurs, amused, turning us. “She’s right there. Suffering beautifully, I might add. The girl has a gift for it.”
“Don’t talk about my wife.”
“There’s the husband.” She laughs softly. “He does still live in there. Good to kn—”
And then I feel her hand leave my shoulder and rise to the back of my neck and I have one half of one second of what the— before she’s pulled my head down and put her mouth on mine in front of the orchestra and the cameras and the entire watching room.
I get my hands on her shoulders and I push her off me, hard, fast, a full pace of cold air opening between us, but I already know from the heat climbing the back of my own neck and the particular new pitch the room has taken that the half-second was enough. A half-second is always enough. It’s the whole principle the folder in my desk is built on. Everyone saw. Three hundred people and every camera Ronna so carefully arranged, and not one of them caught the shove, only the kiss, only the picture, time-stamped and high-resolution and worth a fortune to exactly the kind of people who deal in such things.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I bite out.
“I’m sorry.” She doesn’t look sorry. She looks like a woman who has just been handed something enormous. “I couldn’t resist it, can you just imagine what this will do for my—”
I don’t hear the end of the sentence. I’m already turning, already leaving her standing alone in the middle of the floor with her career and her camera angles, because the only thought left in my head is a single hard imperative that has burned everything else out of it. I need to find my wife. I need to get to her before the picture does, before the whisper does, before she watches the thing the room just watched and adds it to the two months of evidence I’ve been so careful to build against myself. I need to find Camilla—
Someone screams.
And I am running before I have decided to run.
I have not run in years. I have not needed to. I am a man who arrives at a walk and waits for the room to come to him, and I am running now, full out, through a crowd of the most expensive people in the city in their gowns and their black tie, and I am shoving them out of my way with both hands and I do not care, because I know. That is the thing I will never afterward be able to explain to anyone, least of all myself. I know before I’ve reached her, before I can see anything past the wall of backs and bare shoulders closing in around a point on the floor, before a single person has said a single word to me. I know the way you know your own name. Something has happened to her. Something has happened to Camilla, and I damned her ten minutes ago across a ballroom and danced with another woman to prove I didn’t care, and now I am running and the knowing is the worst thing I have ever carried and I carry it straight through the crowd, I know, I know, I know.
I push through the last of them, and there she is.
On the floor, in a ring of horrified faces, my wife is unconscious in Barrymore’s arms.
He’s gone down to one knee with her gathered against him, her head fallen back over the crook of his elbow, her face the wrong color entirely, no color, the careful blush standing out against a paleness that stops my heart in my chest as cold as hers looks stopped in hers. His hand is at her throat, two fingers under her jaw, and his face when he lifts it to mine is white and savage and afraid.
“You—” The word comes out of me with nothing behind it, because there is nothing behind it, there is no arithmetic left anywhere in me, the entire cold machine has gone over the side at once. I drop down across from him. I get my hand against her cheek and it is cool, too cool, and her chest under the red of her dress is doing something shallow and wrong and uneven.
“If anything happens to Camilla,” I hear myself say, and I do not recognize the voice as mine, it has come up out of the part of me I locked away in a room full of another man’s trophies and swore never to open again, “I’ll kill you.”
Barrymore doesn’t even waste breath answering me. That’s the first thing that’s wrong with the picture I’ve been carrying, the very first crack in it, though I’m in no condition to see the crack for what it is, that the man I’ve spent two months hating is not looking at me with guilt or triumph or anything but a fear that matches my own.