Page 116 of Boardroom Ties
His jaw ticks. The knuckles stay white. But at least he trusts me enough to handle this myself.
Murdering my husband might be beyond my skillset. But dealing with handsy creeps? Like every other woman I know, I’ve been doing that since puberty.
Luckily, my first defensive attempt is enough. A cousin comes swaggering drunkenly over and steals away the senator. To my other side, Raymond and Brittany are canoodling quite closely.
A brief lull in the music allows a snippet of their conversation to float over to me. “You never know, Brit,” he’s telling her, just like he did when I first left to get his refill. “You really, really never know.”
“What don’t I know, Mr. Snyder?” she asks, batting eyelashes thick enough to swat a fly.
“What tomorrow holds.” Raymond swirls his bourbon. “What the nextminuteholds. People go around acting like everything’s permanent. But nothing is.” He shoots me a look across the bridesmaid’s shoulder. “Nothing’s permanent, sweetheart. Not one thing. The world turns. People disappear. Trust me. I’ve seen it happen plenty.”
Brittany giggles like he’s just told her she has pretty eyes.
I take a step back. I don’t feel so good. I know the baby can’t be kicking, not yet, but I still feelsomethinggoing haywire low in my belly.
As the music picks up again, couples start to flock to the dance floor. Is it louder now, or is that just me? Are the lights brighter, or am I imagining it? Are thoseliliesI smell?
“Excuse me,” I say to no one in particular. “I’m just— Uh, bathroom. Excuse me.”
No one notices me leave.
Well, notno one.
I feel Matvei’s eyes peel off my back as I cross the parquet, but I don’t look at him.
Going faster and faster with every step, I weave through the tipsy crowd at the edge of the dance floor. A waiter offers me a crab puff and I wave him off. I duck around a six-foot ice swan and slip through the gap between two enormous floral pillars into the side corridor that leads, according to the gold-leafed placard, toPOWDER ROOMS / TELEPHONES.
Thankfully, the corridor is nice and dim after the brightness of the ballroom. The roses give way to wood paneling and oil paintings of long-dead Plaza patrons, and with it comes quiet.
I lift my hand to my face. It’s shaking, but I don’t feel the tremors at all. It’s like the whole thing belongs to a stranger.
Six more hours left in this chapter of your life,I tell myself.Maybe fewer. Hopefully much fewer.
I just have to get through tonight. I have to let Matvei do what he came here to do, and not torpedo it the way I almost torpedoed everything in the woods last weekend. I have to be the wife at the wedding. I have to be the wife at the wedding.
Until I’m not the wife anymore.
Until I’m the widow.
Until I’m justCassagain.
The arm comes out of the dark. It’s around my shoulders before I’ve even processed that there’s an arm there at all—heavy, masculine, the wool of a tuxedo sleeve dragging against my bare skin—and then a second hand clamps over my mouth and I’m yanked sideways, off my feet, through a velvet drape, and into the shadow of a nearby alcove.
A mouth comes to my ear.
“Don’t scream yet, sweetheart. You’ll want to save it for when it counts.”
36
MAT
In some regards, a ballroom full of three hundred drunk people is the perfect place to kill a man.
Unfortunately, it’s also the perfect place to lose track of a woman.
I looked away for an instant—one fucking instant—and she up and vanished. It’s only been fifteen or twenty seconds since that happened, but those have been the longest fifteen or twenty seconds of my life.
After subtly warning me not to interfere with that leering fucker of a congressman—which was really lucky for him, because I would have strung him by his entrails from the goddamn rafters just for touching her—she stepped back and fled.
