Chapter 2
Story: The Heir Wrapped His Blazer Around the Cleaning Woman His Fiancée Was Mocking
The first man to apologise was a senator — Nadia recognized him from the papers, a silver-haired man in a midnight suit who had been laughing into his napkin when Rosalind's heel had clicked against the marble. He did not look at her when he said it. He looked at Darius, and his mouth moved through the word like he was chewing glass.
"I apologise."
Then the woman beside him. "I'm sorry."
Then the man across from her, and the couple next to him, and the whole long table in order — board by board, place setting by place setting — grown men and women in evening dress lowering their eyes and mumbling it out loud. One of the women had tears in her eyes, and Nadia could not tell if they were from shame or from fear. The apology moved down the table like a fire moving down a fuse, quiet and inevitable, until it reached the empty chair beside Darius's place and stopped.
Rosalind had not spoken.
She stood in her sapphire gown with her chin up and her smile fixed, and she was looking at Darius like she had caught him doing something embarrassing. "Should I be jealous of the help?" she asked, and her voice was bright and brittle, and the diamond drops at her ears swayed as she tilted her head. "Should I be worried, darling? Is she better at—"
"You should be careful." Darius said it quietly, and the room went cold. Rosalind's smile flickered at the edges. She opened her mouth to answer, but the double doors at the far wall crashed open, and the hotel manager burst in with a clipboard raised like a flag.
"Miss Reyes." The manager was a thin man with gray hair and a gold name tag, and he was already pointing at Nadia with his pen. "Outside. Immediately."
Nadia felt the blazer settle heavier on her shoulders. She had not moved since Darius had put it there. Her hands were still wet with wine, and she could feel the cold creeping up her shins from the soaked hem of her tunic, but she was not shaking anymore.
"She leaves when I say," Darius said.
The manager's clipboard came down to his side like a flag at half mast. He looked at Darius, then at Rosalind, then at the long table of guests who were all looking at their plates, and he found nothing in any of their faces to tell him what to do next.
"Mr. Calloway," the manager started, "I understand the situation, but the staff member—"
"She was told to kneel," Darius said, and his voice did not change, "by the woman who made the mess. She cleaned it. She was insulted. Now she's being blamed." He turned to the manager, and something in his face made the manager take a half-step back. "You want to discuss her employment, you discuss it with me. In the morning. When I have had time to think."
The manager opened his mouth, closed it, and stepped aside. The pen in his hand was shaking.
Rosalind laughed — a sharp, ugly sound that cut through the quiet. "Oh, this is wonderful. The housemaid gets a blazer and a bodyguard. Shall we keep her? As an engagement gift? I'll have her follow me around the apartment and apologize whenever I drop something."
Nobody laughed with her this time. The silence was different now — it was the silence of a room that has seen how the power moves and is trying to remember where it put its own loyalties.
Darius walked to the doors. He opened them himself, and he stood aside to let Nadia pass. "Take the coat," he said quietly, for her ears only. "It's cold out. And whatever you saw tonight —" He stopped, and something passed across his face, something almost like regret. "Whatever you think you saw," he said, "you hold onto it. You hold onto it tight."
Nadia stepped through the doors. The hallway beyond was dark and empty, and the air was cooler than the ballroom, and the blazer was warm around her shoulders in a way that made her chest ache.
Behind her, she heard Rosalind's voice, thin and sharp against the marble: "You'll regret embarrassing me."
Nadia stopped. She squared her shoulders under the black blazer. She turned her head just enough to see Rosalind standing in the doorway in her sapphire gown, her diamond drops swaying, her smile cracking at the edges.
"I think you will," Nadia said softly.
Then she walked down the hallway with the heir's coat on her back and the black capsule still lying under the table leg behind her, and the room she left behind broke into whispers.
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