Chapter 1

The wine hit her like a slap.

Not the glass—Nadia was too careful for that, too practiced in her cruelties. She held the crystal cup high, tilted it, and let the red pour out in a deliberate, unhurried stream. It splashed across Sasha's forehead, ran down her nose, soaked through the collar of her crisp white shirt and bled into the gray of her housekeeping vest. The stain spread like a wound.

"Do you see this?" Nadia's voice rang off the marble walls of the corridor. "Do you see what insolence gets you?"

Sasha stood frozen against the luggage cart. The wine dripped from her braid, pattering on the floor in a rhythm that filled the silence. She could taste it, bitter and sharp. She blinked once, twice, but she did not raise her hands to wipe her face. That would have been a surrender.

"You think because I married Julian, I don't know how to deal with people like you?" Nadia's fingers were still twisted in the collar of Sasha's vest, the fabric bunched up against her throat. The woman's face was flushed with champagne and fury, her platinum chignon gleaming under the sconce lights. She smelled of expensive perfume and something sour underneath. "I saw you looking at him. When they opened the ballroom doors. I saw it."

Sasha said nothing. She had not been looking at Julian. She had been looking at the floor, at the nametag on her vest, at anything that was not the man she had once planned to marry.

"Nothing to say? The cat got your tongue?" Nadia laughed, a brittle, musical sound, and yanked the collar harder. Sasha's head snapped forward. "That's what I thought. You people are all the same. You think a uniform makes you invisible. You think you can stare at other women's husbands and no one will notice."

Behind them, the ballroom doors were closed, but the sound of the string quartet bled through the gaps. A waltz. Sasha remembered that tune. Six years ago, at a different hotel in a different city, it had been playing when Julian got down on one knee. She remembered the weight of the ring in her palm, the way his eyes had gone soft and frightened, the way he had said her name like it meant something.

"Sasha."

She had not heard that name leave his mouth in six years.

But the voice that said it now was not Julian's. It was Nadia's, and it was mocking.

"Sasha," Nadia repeated, reading the badge pinned to Sasha's vest. She laughed again, tilting her head to show off the sharp line of her jaw. "What kind of name is that? Somewhere out in the provinces, I suppose. Cleaning up other people's messes must pay well, Sasha. It's clearly bought you all this"—she gestured with her free hand, wine cup still dangling from her fingers—"luxury."

The cup was empty now. Streaks of red lingered on its crystal sides.

Sasha's hands hung at her sides. Her right hand was close to the cart, and she could grip the cold metal rail if she needed to steady herself. But she did not need to. She had learned a long time ago how to stand still.