Chapter 8 8

Wren's pov

"One last night," Zara announced on Thursday evening, sweeping into the guest room with a garment bag and the grin of a general planning an invasion.

"Tomorrow I fly to Paris, and tonight we go out and dance like nobody is ever going to see us again."

"Somebody is always going to see us," I pointed out, sitting cross-legged on the bed with a book. "It is a city of eight million people."

"Then we will dance like they are all very kind and very drunk." She unzipped the bag and held up a pair of black jeans. "I found these in your suitcase. They are acceptable."

"They are my best jeans."

"They are acceptable. With the silver top, and the lip stain, and the eyeliner I am about to apply by force."

"Where are we going?"

"A club called Velvet Room. A travel blogger called it the most glamorous place in the Village." She waggled her eyebrows. "Also, I have been told they have a chocolate fountain."

"That sounds like a trap."

"That sounds like heaven."

I sighed and closed my book, and twenty minutes later I was standing in the hallway in the silver top again with my eyes ringed in black and my heart pounding, while Zara fussed with my hair and hummed.

Kai passed through on his way to the kitchen, glanced at us both, and stopped. His nose was still taped, though the bruises around his eyes had faded to a sickly yellow green, and he looked a good deal less like a raccoon and a good deal more like himself, which was somehow worse.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"Out," Zara replied.

"Where, specifically?"

"Velvet Room."

"No."

"Excuse me?"

"It is a terrible place," he told her. "It is crowded, and expensive, and full of men who go there to prey on girls who do not know better."

"I am a woman of twenty," Zara replied sweetly, "and I know a great deal better. Also, I have Wren, who has a left hook and a limited sense of humor."

"I do not have a left hook," I protested. "I have a right hook."

"A right hook," Zara corrected, delighted. "Even better."

Kai looked at me, and I held his gaze with my chin up, because I refused to be the girl who dropped her eyes. For three days we had circled each other in that house like wary animals, speaking only in short polite sentences, and I had begun to notice things I had no business noticing. The way he drank his coffee standing up. The way he left the light on in the hallway at night. The way his eyes followed me from the doorway when he thought I was reading.

"Fine," he offered at last, rubbing the back of his neck. "But text me when you arrive, and text me when you leave. Zara, I mean it."

"You are not my father."

"No. If I were, you would be grounded until you were forty." He took a long, uneven breath. "Please be careful."

"We will," I promised, and I meant it, and he nodded once and disappeared into the kitchen.

Velvet Room was dark and glittering and loud, a long cavern of mirrors and violet light with a bar that curved like a snake.

The bass came up through the floor into the soles of my boots, and the air smelled like perfume and spilled sugar.

Zara vanished almost at once with a drink in each hand, shrieking that she would be right back, and I found a gap at the end of the bar and tried very hard not to look like I was hiding, which is exactly what hiding looks like.

"You look lost," a voice drawled at my elbow.

I turned, and a tall man in an expensive shirt had materialized beside me, with slicked hair, white teeth and a smile that was just slightly too wide. He held out a glass of something pink and sweet-smelling.

"I did not order that."

"It is on me." He pushed it across the bar. "I am Chad."

"Of course you are," I murmured.

"What was that?"

"Nothing. Thank you, but I am fine."

"Come on, one drink. I have a boat, you know. A thirty-two footer. I take it out to the Hamptons every weekend." He leaned an elbow on the counter. "Do you like boats?"

"I like land."

"Land is boring."

"I like boring," I told him. "It has never once let me down."

His smile flickered, and then it returned, a fraction tighter. "You have a cute accent. Where are you from?"

"London."

"Oh, so you are fancy."

"No, I am the opposite of fancy. I am a scholarship student whose mother is a cook."

I do not know why I blurted it. The words simply tumbled out, a small defiant act of honesty in a room full of glitter, and I watched Chad's face do something odd. His eyebrows lifted, and the smile settled into a different shape, a colder one.

"A cook," he repeated.

"A chef, technically."

"Ah." He glanced over his shoulder, and two of his friends detached from the crowd and drifted toward us, one tall and one stocky, both wearing the same loose, pleased expression. "Boys, this is Wren. Her mother is a cook."

"No kidding," declared the tall one.

"A chef," I corrected.

"What is the difference?" the stocky one asked, and the three of them laughed.

"A great deal," I replied, and I picked up my bag. "Excuse me, I am going to find my friend."

"Hey, hey, do not run off." Chad stepped smoothly into my path. "We were only having fun. You should be flattered. Girls like you do not get a lot of offers."

I stopped in my tracks. The words slid under my ribs like a splinter. "Girls like me?"

"You know." He gestured vaguely. "Girls from, you know."

"From where?"

"From the kitchens," the tall one finished, and he did a squeaky little imitation of my accent, high and posh and ridiculous. "Oh, I am a scholarship student. Oh, my mother is a chef."

The stocky one wheezed with laughter and slapped the bar. "Is she the maid?"

"What?"

"The maid." He turned to the room with a grin. "I think she is the maid. That outfit says maid."

I felt every garden party I had ever worked, all at once. The smell of cut roses and champagne, and the sound of a woman's voice calling across a lawn, Is that the girl who carries the trays? The long gray years of being talked over, looked through and politely dismissed.

My hands began to shake, and I gripped the strap of my bag so hard that the leather bit into my palm.

"That is not funny," I whispered.

"Come on, it is a little funny."

"Excuse me." I tried to push past him.

"Where are you going, maid?" Chad stepped in front of me again, grinning, his friends closing in on either side. "We have not finished our drink."

"Let me through."

"Say please."

"Let me through," I repeated, and my voice cracked, and I hated it. I scanned the room for Zara and found her on the dance floor with her arms in the air, spinning in the strobe light, oblivious. She was thirty feet away and might as well have been in Paris.

I thought, with a strange calm that frightened me, that I was about to cry in front of strangers.

"Oh, she is going to cry," the tall one crowed, delighted.

"Do not cry, maid," Chad purred, lifting a hand toward my face. "We are only joking."

A hand landed on his shoulder from behind.

It was a large hand, in a black jacket sleeve, and it closed with such quiet pressure that Chad's face went slack.

The whole bar seemed to lean away from it. I looked up past a broad chest and a clenched jaw and found Kai Ashworth-Vane standing there, with his nose still taped and his eyes blazing like a pair of lit fuses.

"Take your hand off her," he admitted.

"Buddy, we are only."

"I was not talking to her."

Chad turned very slowly, and for the first time his smile vanished entirely. "Who the hell are you?"

"Her ride," Kai replied, in a voice so low and pleasant that it made the hair rise on my arms.

"And you are standing very close to my ride."

"Kai," I whispered.

"Not now, Wren." He kept his eyes on Chad. "Which one of you touched her?"

"Nobody touched her, man, it was a joke."

"I will ask again. Which one of you laughed?"

"Look, we do not want any trouble," the stocky one muttered, taking a step back.

"Then do not make any." Kai leaned in and spoke four words into Chad's ear, quietly, and I did not catch them. I only saw Chad's face drain to the color of paper. He swallowed, nodded, and backed away with his hands raised, and his two friends followed him into the crowd like scolded puppies.

The space around us filled with noise again, and I realized I had stopped breathing.

Kai turned, and his face was furious in a way that had nothing to do with me. It was white around the mouth and tight across the cheekbones, and a muscle ticked in his jaw like a clock.

"Who touched you?" he asked. Angrily, I must confess. And it was hot under my navel!

"Nobody."

"Are you lying?"

"Nobody touched me. They only talked."

"I heard what they told you." His voice shook. "I heard every word from the door."

"How did you get here?" I managed.

"Zara texted me." He raked a hand through his hair. "She texted that she wanted me to collect you both at midnight because she was tipsy, and I came early because I did not like the look of the place."

"You were spying!!!."

"I was worried," he snapped, and the word seemed to surprise him. He took a breath. "Where is your coat?"

"On the chair."

"Wren."

"I am fine."

"You are shaking."

I looked down at my hands, and he was right. My whole body was trembling, and I could not seem to make it stop, and a hot tear slid down my cheek before I could catch it. I swiped at it furiously with the back of my hand. "I am not crying."

"I did not say you were."

"It is only the lights."

"I know."

He picked up my coat from the back of the bar stool and shook it out. Then, very carefully, as if I were something that might break, he draped it over my shoulders and pulled it closed under my chin.

I realized with a strange jolt that his hands were shaking too. They were big, rough, scarred hands that I had watched throw punches and hockey sticks and one expensive vase, and they were trembling like leaves.

"Come on," he answered, quietly. "We are leaving."

"Zara is still dancing."

"I will get her." He glanced at the dance floor, then back at me, and the fury in his face softened a fraction. "Stay right here. Do not talk to anyone. Do not move."

"I am not a dog."

"Not exactly. A dog would have bitten them." The corner of his mouth moved. "Please, Sokolov. Two minutes."

He crossed the floor in ten long strides, and I watched him lift Zara bodily over his shoulder to a chorus of shrieks and cheers. Seconds later he was steering her toward the exit with one hand and tugging my sleeve with the other, and we spilled out into the cold night air with the bass still thudding in our ears.

"You cannot kidnap me," Zara cried indignantly, thumping his back. "I was having the time of my life!"

"You were having the time of your life in a room full of vultures."

"They were lovely vultures."

"One of them called Wren a nobody, and said she looked like a housemaid."

Zara went silent at once, and her face crumpled. She slid down from his shoulder and turned and looked at me, and her face crumpled. "Oh, Wren. Oh no. I did not know. I am so sorry, I was not watching."

"It is fine," I told her, and I could not make my voice sound steady.

"It is not fine." Her eyes filled. "I am the worst friend in the world."

"You are the best friend in the world," I whispered, hugging her. "You were dancing. You were happy. Nobody could possibly be angry about that."

"I could be angry about it," Kai muttered, unlocking the car.

"Do not make it worse," Zara and I told him together.

He held up both hands in surrender and opened the back door, and we climbed in, and he drove us home through the quiet streets without another word.

Zara fell asleep against my shoulder before we reached the end of the block. I stared out of the window at the rain-bright city and tried to understand why my heart was still going so fast.

When we reached the townhouse he carried a sleeping Zara upstairs and tucked her into bed with a gentleness I had never seen. I stood in the hallway watching him smooth her blanket, and a strange, tender ache settled in my chest. He came out of her room, closed the door softly, and found me waiting.

"Thank you," I whispered.

"You do not have to thank me."

"I do. You did not have to come."

"I did." He studied me for a long moment under the dim hall light. His eyes were very dark in the dim hallway light. "Nobody gets to talk to you like that, Wren. Not them. Not anyone."

"You used to."

"I know," Kai insisted, very quietly. "That is exactly why I am saying it. Not even me."