Chapter 3
"Lucian—"
"Stay on your feet," he cut in, his grip tightening imperceptibly against the back of my neck, holding my gaze captive with an intensity that terrified me more than Tate's threats. "Keep your heels low. Keep your breath steady. And whatever you do... when the primary lights go down, do not run for the stairs."
"What are you doing?" I choked out, my mind spinning into freefall. "What have you done?"
"I'm keeping a promise I never made to your father," he said grimly.
He let go.
The sudden absence of his touch felt like falling off a cliff into freezing water.
Before I could speak, Tate’s heavy hand clamped down on Lucian’s shoulder from behind.
"Vance," Tate said, his voice dripping with venomous amusement. "I didn't realize Pendelton had an open plus-one on his invitation. I certainly didn't expect you to spend it hovering around my wife."
Lucian turned slowly, looking down at Tate’s hand on his shoulder as if it were an irritating speck of soot. He didn't knock it off; he simply stood at his full height, radiating an aura of cold, aristocratic menace that made Tate’s performative arrogance look like cheap theater.
"Your wife was just telling me about the merger documents, Greystone," Lucian said smoothly, his face a mask of polite indifference. "I wanted to offer my congratulations. It’s rare to see a man risk so much on a single asset."
Tate’s jaw tightened, his fingers digging into Lucian’s shoulder before he dropped his hand. "When you hold all the leverage, Vance, there is no risk. Blythe understands the value of stability. Don't you, darling?"
Tate pulled me against his side, his arm locking around my waist like a vice.
I didn't answer immediately. My eyes were locked on Lucian.
There was something in the shipping magnate's posture—not triumph, not greed, but the taut, lethal readiness of a captain watching a torpedo wake in the dark.
Behind Tate, across the vast, glittering expanse of the ballroom, I saw Lady Eleanor staring at us, her hands clutching her throat. Next to her, Pendelton checked his vintage Patek Philippe watch, his knuckles shaking so hard he could barely read the face.
*Ten past nine.*
Two hours and fifty minutes until midnight.
"Of course," I said softly, my voice barely audible over the roaring of the Atlantic outside the glass. "I understand completely."
Tate didn’t keep his hand on my waist for more than three minutes.
To a man like him, possession didn’t require constant touch; it required surveillance. When Vance Keller, his pet notary, appeared at the arched entrance of the salon carrying a slim, black leather folio, Tate offered me a thin, proprietary smile, tapped my cheek with two fingers, and dissolved into the cluster of hedge fund principals waiting by the champagne pyramid.
“Don’t wander beyond the glass, Blythe,” he murmured before walking away. “The open sea makes women dramatic.”
The moment his back cleared, the ballroom’s air seemed to thin out, turning brittle and cold.
I took three slow, measured breaths, pressing the flat of my palms against the chilled silk of my skirt. Every nerve along my collarbone still burned where Lucian’s thumb had rested.
*Stay on your feet. Keep your heels low. Do not run for the stairs.*
His voice echoed behind my ribs like an electric charge. But Lucian Vance was a man who traded in hostile leveraged buyouts and distressed assets. Two years ago, when we tore through each other’s lives in Monaco, he told me that in high-stakes maritime logistics, the quickest way to sink an enemy was to convince them you were throwing them a life preserver.
*They think you are already dead.*
Why would Lucian warn me unless the trap had already closed around my ankles?
I turned away from the gilded center of the salon, my eyes sweeping past the waitstaff in their gold-braided livery. Two of Tate’s security contractors—former military contractors from an outfit based in Virginia, recognizable by their thick necks, buzz cuts, and the subtle bulge under their left armpits—stood flanking the glass doors to the promenade deck. One of them, a man with a jagged scar through his left eyebrow who went by the name Miller, had his eyes pinned squarely on me.
I couldn’t run. Not with two hundred miles of open ocean between *The Aethelgard* and the Carolina coast.
If I wanted to survive past midnight, I needed leverage. And leverage began with whatever had terrified Arthur Pendelton and his wife into near-hysteria.
I moved with calculated leisure toward the perimeter of the room. I kept my posture fluid, my chin angled toward the crystal chandeliers, the picture of an heiress merely admiring the four-million-dollar floral installations flown in from Colombia.
Near the east mezzanine, where an imposing arrangement of black calla lilies and white orchids cascaded out of an antique marble urn, Beatrice Pendelton had been lingering just moments before. She had since fled toward the powder rooms, but when she left, she had fumbled with her beaded clutch, knocking several stems askew.
I drifted to the urn.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Miller shift his weight, stepping five paces closer along the parquet floor. He was watching my hands.
I reached out, pretending to adjust a fallen orchid bloom. My fingertips skimmed the moist oasis foam packed inside the marble basin.
Something hard and sharp bit into the pad of my index finger.
Not a thorn. Plastic.
I kept my expression serene, smiling softly as if adjusting my reflection in the mirror-polished brass sconce beside the urn. With my thumb and forefinger, I pinched the foreign object and worked it free from the damp moss.
It was a waterproof micro-capsule, no larger than a cigarette filter, wrapped tightly in matte black electrical tape.
I slipped it into the pleated fold of my lace cuff in a single, practiced motion my father had taught me when I was sixteen—the old parlor trick of the trading floor, where physical slips of paper used to mean fortunes won or lost in seconds.
Miller stepped into my peripheral vision. "Mrs. Greystone. Mr. Greystone prefers that you remain in the center salon for the toast."
His voice was flat, gravelly, devoid of deference.
I turned slowly, letting my gaze drift down to his scuffed leather shoes before meeting his eyes with all the icy, unyielding arrogance I could dredge from my bloodline.
"I am adjusting a flower, Mr. Miller," I said, my voice barely above a whisper, yet loud enough to make an elderly dowager three feet away glance over in embarrassment. "Unless Tate has put you in charge of botanical arrangements along with my escort service, I suggest you take three steps back before I explain to my husband why his head of personal security is hovering over my cleavage like a common voyeur."
Miller’s jaw clicked shut. The scar above his eye twitched, a flare of hot contempt flashing across his irises. But he couldn't cause a scene in front of eighty legacy investors.
He inclined his head an inch. "Just doing my job, ma’am."
He stepped back, though he didn't leave. He posted himself eight paces away, blocking the grand staircase.
