She wants me to react. She wants me to break. She wants me to abandon the courtship and run to the corridor and prove to every creature in this room that the Duke of Ravenshade is compromised by a mortal girl, and then she will have the leverage she needs to destroy me and everyone I am trying to protect.
He did not react. He did not break.
He took Valestra's arm. He smiled. He walked into the crowd and danced and talked and performed the elaborate, exhausting theatre of aristocratic courtship, and he did it with every muscle in his body screaming to turn around and walk through that door and find the woman with the golden hair and the storm-gray eyes and the basket of pins and ask her if she was all right.
He did not ask.
