Page 99 of Arrow

I stood there, my dress clinging to my skin, and felt the weight of at least a dozen eyes that had caught the exchange. The way Atlas now watched me with a new calculation. The way Orion’s jaw had tightened. The way my father, across the room, had gone very still.

Arrow had just shown them something. And worse, he’d shown me. That whatever was happening between us wasn't just strategy anymore.

It was hunger. His, and God help me, mine too.

At the edge of the group, I watched Arrow launch into some parable about ancient duels: “Whoever loses the right hand keeps the girl, but has to learn how to jerk off lefty for the rest of his life.”

The cold fusion of power arced between every man and woman in the room—Arrow talking about wild animals and bluffs, but the real machinery was on display in tailcoats and vintage Cartier, in perfume so thick it wrapped around each face until you couldn’t distinguish flesh from mask.

Invisible. That’s what I’d been at these events with my father, especially when Luca was alive. But tonight, every set of eyes tracked my movement. I let the weight settle into my shoulders until it became a new normal, a new gravity.

Girls, who’d once called me friend, slid past with hunger naked on their faces. Even my father’s associates had recalibrated. I was no longer arm candy, but a Trojan horse, rolling toward their gates in fuck-me heels and Romanov Red.

Arrow’s hand at my waist was the only anchor I had left.

Across the ballroom, a trio of old men held court under a stained-glass dome. Virelli—the parasite-cousins with a taste for small girls and larger enemy lists.

One craned his neck, spotted me, and murmured something to the second, who didn’t bother hiding his up-and-down slice of my silhouette. The second I saw them, I saw the world they belonged to, a world where I’d be a second wife by thirty-five, and dead by fifty.

“Where is the old bastard, Antoli, tonight?” Atlas asked, bringing my attention back to the conversation.

Arrow’s father.

I scanned the crowd and realized I hadn’t seen that psycho fucker anywhere. That prickled my nerves more than I cared to admit.

Arrow sipped his drink, unbothered. “Antoli picks his moments. He’ll come when there’s a reason.”

“So he’s coming,” I said quietly, for Arrow’s ear only.

“Eventually.” His eyes tracked the room with predatory patience. “He wouldn’t dare miss the show.”

* My beautiful viper

* Little viper

* Beautiful

* Ci ho preso gusto da te, padre (Italian)

* Little girl

* Beautiful

22

TWENTY-TWO

HARLOWE

Around us, the crowd churned. People were clustered at the bar, their voices overlapping into white noise—the same recycled gossip, the same hollow laughs. Nobody said anything that mattered. It was all surface level. Compliments that landed like insults, questions designed to extract information, smiles that didn’t reach anyone’s eyes.

The calculations were visible if you knew where to look., and every glance held the same equation. How much money? How much power? How useful are you to me? The room was full of predators in tailored suits, all of them measuring each other’s throats.

Arrow and I were the main event. I felt their stares like a weight, as they tallied us up, wondering what the engagement meant, what it would cost them, what they could gain. In this world, everything had a price. They cared about what we represented—power, money, the shifting alliances that kept their world turning. We were pieces on a board, and they were all trying to figure out how to move us.

I let my shoulder drift against Arrow’s, half to taunt the room, half to gird myself for the next arrival. If Antoli Romanov was the past, then Arrow was the living present, the afterlife in a Charvet shirt. The only man I’d ever met whose charm felt less like generosity than experimentation.

Watching him scan the ballroom, I felt the old, idiotic urge to both kill him and crawl into his lap—let him snap my spine, bend my will, and let every rival in the city watch him do it.