Chapter 5

My hand was on the door.

Willie's coat was still around my shoulders and there was a car waiting at the curb and the most reasonable version of this afternoon ended here, with me walking through this door and not looking back.

I am not, by any reasonable measure, a saint.

I stood there for a moment and thought about the sound the scissors had made cutting through the silk. The red record light blinking in my face. The way Aaron had stood across the room with his arms folded and watched all of it — not anger, not conflict, just the mild patience of a man waiting for something mildly unpleasant to finish.

I let go of the door handle.

Willie was watching me. He had the particular quality of stillness that meant he was waiting to see what I decided, and when I turned to face him he held my gaze without speaking. He had been doing this my entire life — giving me the room to arrive at my own conclusions, never pushing, always completely present.

I looked at him. He looked at me.

Then he looked at Saira, and back at me, and his expression shifted by almost nothing — barely a degree, barely readable — but I had known him for twenty-four years and I knew what it meant.

"Go ahead," he said, quietly. "Let them know that our family doesn't accept this. Not today. Not from anyone."

I walked back into the room.

Saira was positioned between two of Willie's security team, her options very clearly limited, and she had been watching the door with the transparent hope of someone counting on a window to open. When she registered that I was coming toward her instead of leaving, something moved behind her eyes that she didn't fully manage to conceal.

"You should go," she said. The certainty that had been in her voice all afternoon was thinner now, stretched over something less solid. "You've made your point. Aaron's father called. The contract is cancelled. You can — "

"I know," I said.

I reached down and picked up her phone from the floor where it had landed after she'd thrown mine. The screen was intact. The camera app was still open.

I turned the camera around to face her.

She was not, at this particular moment, presenting the image she was accustomed to presenting. The gold hair was tangled and half-collapsed. The mascara had tracked further down both cheeks. The designer dress that had cost more than most people's monthly income was already smudged from where she'd hit the mirror. She looked, in the unforgiving lens of her own phone camera, like someone who had spent the past hour trying to humiliate a stranger and had not emerged from the experience the way she'd planned.

"You wanted to film someone being humiliated," I said. "Here we are."

Her face went through several things at once. Then she lunged forward.

One of Willie's security team had her by the arm before she got anywhere near me, and the momentum she'd put into the lunge became a stumble, and she came down hard on one knee with a crack that made several people nearby wince.

I was already moving toward the stylist's workstation, where Saira's own scissors were still lying where she had set them down. I picked them up.

Saira saw them from the floor. She tried to get to her feet and the security team's grip on her arm kept her from managing it cleanly, and the look she turned on me had finally dropped all of its performance and was simply, genuinely frightened.

"Don't," she said. "Don't you dare — "

She had stood over me not forty minutes ago with those same scissors in her hand. She had worked through the silk slowly, deliberately, making certain I understood every second of what was happening.

I crouched down in front of her so we were at the same level.

"I remember exactly what you did," I said. "I want you to know that I remember it very specifically."

Then I took a section of her designer dress in my hand and I cut through it.

She screamed. It was a full, genuine sound, and it echoed off the atelier walls and the high ceiling. I kept going, unhurried, the scissors making the same clean and consistent sound they had made when she had used them on me. The fabric fell away in sections. The careful, expensive, calculated image she had constructed for herself that afternoon began to come apart in exactly the same way she had dismantled mine.

"My dress — " she kept saying, her voice cycling between fury and disbelief. "My dress, you — my dress — "

When I was finished I stood up and stepped back.

I held her phone steady and let the camera capture what was left of her composure — the ruined dress, the mascara tracks, the gold hair that had stopped being perfect some time ago — and I let the record light blink for one long, unhurried moment.

"There," I said. "Now we both have footage."

I set the phone down on the workstation.

Then I turned to the senior stylist, who had gone very still behind the consultation table.

"The gown," I said. "The ivory silk one. I'll be purchasing it. In its current condition." I looked at Saira, who was still on the floor, and then back at the stylist. "Miss Stein will be covering the full retail price. Arrange the invoice accordingly."

The stylist looked at me. Then at Saira. Then at the card I placed on the table beside him — the matte white one with no logo.

He reached for his phone to process the transaction without another word.

I became aware, gradually, that the room around me had shifted. The clients who had been watching were watching differently now, with an entirely different quality of attention. Saira on the floor and Willie's coat on my shoulders and the whole afternoon's momentum finally running in one direction.

From the other side of the room, Aaron's voice arrived. Some of the control had come loose, ground down by the last twenty minutes into something rawer underneath.

"You think this ends here?" He was still at the doorframe, one hand at his jaw, posture pulled back into something combative. "I have relationships in this city that your family has never touched. I can make the next two years very complicated for the Lune Group."

Willie regarded him with the expression of someone watching a minor weather event pass.

Aaron's jaw tightened. He pushed himself upright and stood at his full height.

"Everything you walked in here with," Aaron said, his voice dropping into something harder, "the cars outside, the security, the way everyone in this room stepped back when you walked through the door — none of that is you. You didn't build anything. You inherited a name and you've been cashing it in ever since." His dark eyes held Willie's with the expression of someone throwing something they know will land. "Take away the Lune name and what are you? What did you actually build? What did you actually earn?"

The room went very quiet.

Not the quiet of before, when the silence had come from awe or shock. This was a different quality of quiet entirely — the held breath of a room that had just felt the temperature drop several degrees without understanding why.

I knew why.

I had watched my brother's face through everything that had happened this afternoon. Through all of it, his expression had been the same: present, contained, deliberate.

It changed now.

Not dramatically. Not visibly to anyone who didn't know how to read him. But the composure that Willie wore like a second skin had gone still in a way that was different from his normal stillness, the way deep water looks different from shallow water even when the surface appears the same. His eyes settled on Aaron and something behind them went very quiet and very focused.

He didn't answer immediately.

When he did speak, his voice was exactly as level as it had been all afternoon, and that, somehow, was the most frightening thing in the room.

"Finish what you were saying," he said.