Chapter 7

The ballroom felt cavernous with only six people in it. The chairs had been returned to their places around the banquet table, the spilled champagne mopped up by staff who moved in and out of the shadows like ghosts. The silver bracelet's absence from the floor was the only sign that anything had changed — that and the man still kneeling in the center of the marble, exactly where Marcus had left him.

Julian had not moved. His head was bowed, his hands limp at his sides. The blood from his split lip had dried into a dark crust. His shirt was untucked, his jacket crumpled. He looked like a man who had finally run out of the energy to be defiant, and had nowhere left to hide behind his family's name.

Marcus walked past him without a word, took his seat at the head of the banquet table, and gestured for Elena to sit at his right. Victoria sat at his left. The two empty chairs between them and the head of the table might have seemed like distance, but Julian understood the geometry: the table now had a new order, and he was no longer on the guest list.

"Stand up, Julian," Marcus said.

Julian pushed himself to his feet, swaying slightly. He was not crying anymore, but his eyes were red and raw. He looked from Marcus to Elena, and the words he had rehearsed in his head fell away.

"I don't have anything to say that will make this right," Julian said. His voice was hoarse, scraped clean of arrogance. "I know that. I've been sitting here thinking about all the ways I could apologize, and none of them are enough. I took something from her tonight that I can't give back. I showed her that the world is cruel and that people would let it be cruel if the price of intervention was too high. And I did it for fun. Because I was angry, and I was drunk, and I was used to getting away with things."

He looked at Elena, and his voice cracked. "I've never been stopped before. Not once. Not by my father, not by the law, not by anyone. I thought the money was a shield. I thought it was armor." He shook his head. "It wasn't. It was just a wall I built around myself so I couldn't see how small I was."

Elena studied him for a long moment. She did not speak.