Chapter 323

[ 1,395 words ]

Julian’s POV

I arrived early, which was not something I did often, but I had told myself the entire drive over that I wanted a few minutes alone with her before the rest of them filled the room with noise I would have to perform through.

The elevator opened directly into her private hall the way it always did, white marble underfoot, a path I could have walked blind by now. I knew which floorboard near the kitchen entrance gave slightly underfoot. I knew which side of the bed she slept on when the city lights outside kept her awake.

I knew this penthouse the way a man knows a place he has spent more nights inside than he has ever admitted to a single person in his life, and walking through that door tonight as a guest, announced and expected, felt almost obscene given everything else I knew about it.

She met me at the door herself.

“You’re early,” she said, something flickering behind her expression that I could not quite name before she smoothed it away.

“I wanted a few minutes before the room got crowded,” I said, which was not entirely a lie, though it was not the whole truth either.

She let me in, and I watched her shift the moment she turned back toward the room, the way her shoulders settled into a different posture entirely, the way her face arranged itself into something warmer and softer than the expression she had been wearing a moment before, when it had just been the two of us in the doorway.

I understood what I was watching. She was preparing for an audience.

The staff moved through the space, finishing the last details, candles being lit along the long table near the windows, glasses set out in careful rows that someone had clearly measured by hand. Sam stood near the kitchen entrance, going through something on her tablet, glancing up once to give me a brief nod before returning to whatever list she was working through.

The elevator opened again twenty minutes later, and the rest of them arrived in a single loose cluster, voices already filling the marble hallway before the doors had fully parted.

Martha came first, dressed in something deep green that I suspected cost more than most people’s monthly salary, her pearls already at her throat, her eyes sweeping the penthouse with the open, undisguised hunger of a woman calculating exactly how much everything in front of her was worth.

“Oh, Katia,” she said, stepping into the living room with both arms already extended, “this is absolutely stunning. I had no idea p>

“You’ve never asked to see it,” Katia said, accepting her mother’s embrace with an ease that, to anyone watching from across the room, would have looked entirely natural.

I knew her well enough to see the tension sitting just beneath it.

David followed behind Martha, offering a quiet greeting and immediately drifting toward whatever drink was being poured nearest the window. Delia came next, her arm looped through Jude’s, and I felt something in my chest tighten the moment I saw the two of them together, not because I cared in any way what Jude Wolfe did with his hand on a woman who was not actually his wife, but because the sight of the four of them together, framed against the city behind them, looked exactly like what it was meant to look like.

A family.

The one I had spent seven years quietly building a place inside of, without anyone in that room ever knowing my name belonged there at all.

Jude crossed the room toward Katia with the confidence of a man who had never once doubted his welcome anywhere, leaning down to kiss her cheek, his hand settling at the curve of her waist the way it always did now, practiced, comfortable, entirely too at home on a body that did not belong to him.

“You look beautiful tonight, my love,” he said, loud enough for the room to hear.

“Thank you,” Katia said, and smiled at him.

It was a good smile. Warm. Convincing. The kind of smile a woman gave a husband she actually wanted in the room with her.

I stood near the window with a glass of wine I had not touched and watched her perform it perfectly, watched her tilt her head the exact way a woman tilted her head when she was genuinely pleased to see someone, watched her laugh softly at something he murmured against her temple, and felt something cold and unreasonable settle into my chest that I had no right to feel and no intention of admitting to anyone in that room.

She is acting, I told myself. She has always been a better actress than anyone in this family understands.

But the longer I watched, the harder that explanation became to hold onto cleanly. There was an ease to the way she leaned into him now that had not been there the first week he arrived, an ease that looked less like performance and more like something settling, however reluctantly, into a rhythm neither of them had chosen but both of them had stopped fighting quite as hard.

I told myself I was imagining it.

I had told myself that more than once over the past several weeks, and each time the lie grew slightly thinner.

Martha drifted toward the seating area near the windows, already deep in conversation with Delia about something to do with the flowers on the table, and David found his way to the bar cart, and for a moment the room arranged itself into smaller conversations, the way rooms always did once the initial greetings had been exchanged.

Jude kept his hand at Katia’s waist a moment longer than necessary before finally releasing her to greet me directly, extending his hand with the same warmth he extended to everyone, as though the conversation at the Obsidian Lounge had never happened, as though I had not watched the color drain entirely from his face two nights earlier.

“Windsor,” he said. “Glad you could make it p>

“Wouldn’t miss it,” I said, and shook his hand without giving him a single thing more than that.

He moved on toward the bar, clapping David on the shoulder, already folding himself easily into the rhythm of the room, and I remained near the window, watching Katia move through her own home with the grace of a woman hosting a dinner she had built entirely around something none of the rest of them yet understood was coming.

She crossed toward me eventually, under the excuse of checking whether I had a fresh drink, close enough that no one else could hear what passed between us.

“You’re staring,” she said quietly.

“I am observant,” I said. “We’ve discussed this p>

“You’re jealous,” she said, and there was something in her voice that was not quite an accusation, something closer to a question she was not entirely sure she wanted answered.

I did not deny it. “I don’t like his hands on you; you are mine. Next time he places his filthy hands on you, I will knock him off.” I said.

“Easy, tiger,” she said.

I looked at her instead, really looked at her, at the careful composure she was holding together for a room full of people who had no idea what any of this actually cost her, and felt the same cold, unreasonable thing tighten further in my chest.

“Be careful tonight,” I said quietly, instead of answering her directly.

“Why?” she said.

“Because I know that look on your face,” I said. “And I have seen what happens to rooms when you decide they have run out of patience p>

Something flickered behind her eyes, sharp and certain, gone again before anyone watching from across the room would have caught it.

She did not answer me.

She simply held my gaze a moment longer than was safe in a room full of her family, long enough that I felt the entire evening shift underneath us, and then she turned and walked back toward her mother, leaving me standing alone at the window with a drink I still had not touched and the absolute certainty that whatever Katia Kensington had planned for tonight, none of us standing in that room were prepared for it.

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