I peeled myself off the floor and called the one person who'd never graded me.
"Blaire here. Talk fast, I'm mid-sketch."
"Blaire. Hugo and I are done."
There was a beat of silence, then a thwack of a pencil hitting a desk. "DONE done? Swear it. Because I will book a venue and I will invite everyone we've ever met."
"Done done." I leaned my head against the door. "I also quit."
"QUIT? Aria—oh, thank the Goddess, I could kiss you. Do you know I've been sitting on my hands for three years? He didn't like us hanging out, remember, so little Aria faded out every friend who told her the truth—" She caught herself. "You know what, we'll do the autopsy later. Why are you really calling? You never call before noon unless you need my dad's lawyer."
"I want to start a studio."
That stopped her. "A studio. You—interior design degree Aria—the one you threw away to be his secretary?"
I had. Top of my cohort, a graduation project two firms had tried to poach, and I'd shelved all of it because Hugo once said, fondly, over breakfast, that he'd rather his girl be available.
"I'm serious, Blaire."
"Then I'm serious back: there's a gala tomorrow night. Half the city's money will be in one room, and I'm taking you to go harvest some." A pause, then, sharply suspicious: "Wait. Is this a wobble? Are we wobbling? Because if I introduce you to investors and you crawl back to that walking red flag—"
"I'm not wobbling."
What I didn't say: I didn't need investors. Sitting in my nightstand drawer, under a filed paternity confirmation, was a card from my grandfather with a number on it I'd never once let myself look at directly. Three hundred million, he'd said, for the childhood I lost. Compensation, he'd called it, and I could hear in his voice how much he hated that the word was so small.
Blaire didn't need to know that part yet. If she knew, she'd treat me differently, and this week I'd already lost one identity. I wanted to keep the one where I was just a girl starting over.
---
Friday night, the Grand Meridian Hotel.
It looked like a gala. It functioned like a marketplace—champagne in one hand, leverage in the other, everyone charming everyone with a price list in their eyes. Perfect for Blaire's purposes. I'd claimed a corner with a glass of something pink and was rehearsing how to tell her about the card when the crowd at the far side of the ballroom shifted, the way crowds do around a lit window in winter.
Vivian, at the center of it, in pearl white again.
"—Miss Moonridge, the mating is next month, isn't it? Congratulations! Does that mean Moonridge's operations will be moving to our city?"
"Oh, absolutely. I hear the Alpha's planning to relocate the family headquarters here." A gala guest, flushed with insider joy: "Well, the old Alpha has only the one daughter, after all. Naturally everything goes to her!"
Vivian lowered her lashes against the applause of attention. "Those are Grandfather's decisions. I don't involve myself in business." She leaned into Hugo's shoulder, a study in soft modesty, and the room sighed at the sight of them.
I looked away after one glance. I really did.
"Isn't this the little secretary?"
Her voice arrived at my shoulder a half-second before her hand did. I turned. Vivian had detached from her admirers and was regarding me with artfully widened eyes—how surprising, how awkward—while Hugo, a step behind her, frowned his displeasure down at me like I'd brought mud onto his carpet.
"For the last time," I said, "I resigned. You can drop the act."
"Resigned." He said the word like it tasted bad. "And you weren't invited here."
"I was invited. Just not by you."
I turned to leave. Fingers closed on my arm—Vivian's, light as a bracelet, and her smile went full wattage for the audience she'd gathered. "Oh, come now, don't rush off! We're practically family. Let's have a little chat—"
"There's nothing you and I have to discuss."
I pulled my arm free. Barely any force at all—nothing, compared to what Sharon's slaps had taught me to measure. But Vivian, who had never once in her life been touched by weather, staggered back two full steps, caught herself against a cocktail table, and looked up at me with brimming eyes.
"Miss—Miss Aria." Her voice trembled on cue. "I know you don't like me. But we're all adults here, aren't we? You don't need to put your hands on me."
The nearest circle of guests went very still, in the particular way of people who smell a story.
And there it is. The porcelain doll routine, weaponized. I had to hand it to her—it was beautifully done. Two steps, a wobble, wet lashes. In front of this crowd, I was now the jealous ex-mistress who shoved the innocent future Luna.
"Apologize." Hugo's voice came down like a verdict. He had an arm around Vivian's waist, and his eyes on me had gone arctic. "Now."
I tipped my head at him. "Or what?"
"Or nothing, because you'll want to hear it anyway." Something almost gentle moved through his expression, the old, insulting gentleness. "Vivian's family is not one you can afford to offend, Aria. I'm telling you this for your own good."
The irony was so rich I nearly laughed out loud. For my own good. The whole city bending itself around the Moonridge name, and the man lecturing me about it had no idea—
You know what? He was right that I should be careful with Vivian's family.
Just not in the way he thought.
"Offend her family?" I let the smile arrive slowly. "You mean the family with only one daughter in this generation? The one everyone's so desperate to marry into?" I looked at Vivian, whose smile had begun to curdle at the edges. "Strange, then, that the famous Moonridge heiress is nothing but an adopted girl."
The music didn't stop, but the room did.
Vivian went white so fast it was almost a special effect. "How—how do you know that?!"
The Moonridge family guards its privacy like a fortress—no interviews, no society pages, nothing in eighteen years. The adopted daughter detail was a secret so buried even Hugo's intelligence budget had never surfaced it. Which meant her panic just confirmed it, in front of thirty of the city's most accomplished gossips.
"What?" I blinked at her, wide-eyed. "Is being adopted something shameful? I only ask because I hear the real daughter's been missing for eighteen years. Terrible thing. They say she's probably dead by now."
"The true heir has been gone for eighteen years with no word," Hugo cut in, cold and flat, a man stepping on a grenade to smother it. "Dead or worse. Vivian is the Moonridge heiress, legally and in every way that matters. The subject is closed."
"Who told you she was dead?"
The voice came from behind me, and every spine in the group straightened at once.
I turned, and there he was.
Kieran Vale, in black tie, looking like the temperature of the room had been negotiated with him personally. He crossed the distance without hurry, and when he stopped beside me, his gaze was pinned on Hugo with an intensity that had the Alpha's shoulders creeping down by a visible inch.
"How interesting," Kieran said softly, "that the man mated to a stand-in should be so invested in the true heir staying dead. Almost as if—her return would cost you something."
The silence went structural.
"Is it true?" someone whispered. "Is Vivian not—?"
"No, no—the family treats her as their own daughter, of course they'd—"
"But if she's not blood, then the mating contract with the Vaughns is worth—"
"Oh, do keep speculating," Kieran said pleasantly, to no one and everyone, and the whispers fell to a simmer.
Vivian clutched Hugo's sleeve, bile and panic warring under her pearls, and shot me a look that could have opened a vein. Then she dragged Hugo toward the far doors, and the crowd parted for them the way it had parted for her an hour ago.
I looked up at Kieran. "Thank you. Again."
"You keep owing me," he said. "I'm starting to think you do it on purpose."
"I don't even know who you are," I said. "Hugo's terrified of you, every investigator in the city is terrified of you. What exactly are you?"
For a moment, something flickered through those dark eyes—amusement, maybe, or appetite. "Later," he said. "You'll hear it better later."
I escaped to the powder room before my heart could file a report on what that voice did to it.
I was three steps from the door when a hand closed around my arm and spun me into the wall.
Hugo.
He'd come alone, through the service corridor, still in his dinner jacket and his fury. He smelled of champagne and something scorched.
"You followed me here," he said, low and vicious, "after everything, and now you're playing games with Kieran Vale in front of my guests? Playing hard to get? Is that it?"
"Let go of me."
"I warned you, Aria." His grip tightened. "I warned you what would happen if you made a scene in front of my future wife."