Cellie's POV
She looked me over once and her expression went from morning-blank to sharp in the time it took me to register she was there. I watched her eyes travel over me, cataloguing every piece of evidence. My wrinkled dress. My shoes still hooked over my fingers instead of on my feet. My hair, which I could only imagine. The direction I had come from.
I watched her put it together and I watched what putting it together did to her face.
"You bitch." She crossed the distance between us in three quick steps and grabbed my arm hard enough that I knew I'd have a mark, steering me sideways and into one of those little alcoves built into the walls between doors, dark and cramped and private. Her grip didn't ease. "I took a risk including you in this, Cellie. Do you understand how much is riding on this for me? I cannot have you blowing everything up before the ink is even dry."
"Let go of my arm." I kept my voice low and steady even though my pulse was spiking in a way that had nothing to do with calm.
She didn't let go. She leaned in close instead, close enough that I could smell her perfume, something expensive that Manuel had probably already bought her, and she inhaled like she was checking for evidence. Her face pinched.
"Don't stand there and lie to me. I know what you look like when you've been with someone. I've been cleaning up after your messes since you were seventeen years old."
"You have never cleaned up a single thing for me in your life," I said, and I kept my voice pleasant, because that always got to her more than yelling did. "And I don't know what you think you're smelling, but I had too much to drink and I asked one of the staff to find me a room. That's it. That's the whole story."
Her grip shifted slightly. I saw the uncertainty move through her eyes like a cloud passing, brief but real. She didn't know. She was guessing, projecting, doing what Penelope did best, which was assume the worst about me on instinct and build a case around it afterward. But she didn't actually know.
Which meant she didn't know it was Demetrio's room.
Which meant if I could just hold this together for another thirty seconds, I could walk out of this house and never speak of last night again and take this particular secret to my grave.
"The staff," she repeated, her voice flat with suspicion.
"The staff," I confirmed, meeting her eyes without flinching. This was the one thing I was genuinely good at. I'd had a lot of practice.
The silence stretched. Her fingers loosened around my arm degree by degree. She still looked like she wanted to argue but she was running the math in her head, the same math I was. If she pushed this and she was wrong, she looked paranoid and cruel in her own fiancé's house. If she let it go and she was right, she could revisit it later with better evidence.
Penelope had always been smarter about her own interests than anything else.
She released me. Stepped back. Smoothed the front of her robe with both hands and lifted her chin in that way she had, reassembling herself into something composed and polished.
"I'm not your mother," she said, and somehow she made it sound like the worst thing she could call herself, like it was my fault she had to say it at all.
She turned and walked away down the hall, her slippers silent on the carpet, and I stood in the alcove and watched her go and didn't say a word.
I didn't move until she'd turned the corner and I couldn't hear her anymore.
Then the shaking started. Not dramatic, not crumbling, just a fine tremor in my hands that I couldn't stop as I finally put my shoes on and stood up straight and started walking toward the staircase that I hoped, desperately, led to the exit. The house was enormous, all dark wood and high ceilings and oil paintings that watched you move through the halls, and every corridor looked like the last one, and I was beginning to feel like I was never going to get out.
I was almost to the landing when I heard his voice from below.
Not on the phone this time. In person. Low and carrying the way voices did in big empty spaces, bouncing off marble floors and walls, drifting up the staircase. He was talking to someone, one of his men from the sound of it, and whatever they were saying was quiet enough that I couldn't make out words. Just the tone. Clipped. Certain. The tone of a man who had never once doubted that the world would arrange itself around his decisions.
I stopped at the top of the staircase and looked down.
He was standing in the foyer, suited already, dark jacket, white shirt, the gun from the nightstand presumably relocated somewhere less visible. He had his back to me, one hand in his pocket, the other holding a phone loosely at his side while he spoke to a man I didn't recognize. His hair had been tamed since this morning. There was no evidence on him whatsoever of last night. He looked like he had slept perfectly and woken up refreshed and had absolutely nothing on his conscience.
I hated him a little for that.
And then, as if he had some kind of internal alert system wired to my specific frequency, he turned.
His grey eyes found me at the top of the stairs immediately, like he'd known I was there the whole time. We looked at each other across the length of the foyer, across all that marble and morning light, and I held his gaze because I was not going to be the first one to look away. Not from him. Not after everything.
Something moved through his expression that I couldn't name. Not quite apology. Not quite anything I had a word for.
Then he turned back to his man and continued talking like I wasn't there.
I walked down the stairs, crossed the foyer without looking at him again, and let myself out the front door into a Chicago morning that was grey and cold and already loud with traffic, and I stood on the front steps of Manuel DeLeon's house and breathed actual outside air for the first time since last night.
My phone, miraculously, was in my jacket pocket. I had seventeen missed calls. Eleven of them were from Kevin.
I stared at Kevin's name on the screen for a long moment and then I put my phone away and started walking toward the street to call a cab.
There was a knot sitting somewhere behind my sternum that I suspected wasn't going to go away anytime soon, made of equal parts shame and anger and something else I didn't want to look at directly. The thing about bad decisions was that they didn't feel like bad decisions when you were making them. They felt like the only available option. They felt like relief.
This morning, standing on the cold sidewalk outside the most dangerous household in Chicago, all I felt was the weight of how complicated my life had just gotten.
Because Penelope was going to marry Manuel. She had been working toward this for years and she wasn't going to let anything stop her, least of all me. Which meant Manuel DeLeon was going to become my stepfather. Which meant his house was going to become somewhere I was expected to appear at holidays and family dinners and whatever other rituals rich Italian crime families used to mark their calendars.
Which meant Demetrio DeLeon was going to become a permanent fixture in my life whether either of us wanted that or not.
The cab app loaded slowly on my phone, the little car icons crawling across a map of the city, and I stood there waiting and thinking about the way he had looked at me across that foyer and the way something in his expression had shifted for just one second before he put his walls back up.
I was going to need to be smarter than this. Starting immediately. Starting today.
A black cab pulled up to the curb and I got in and gave the driver my address and leaned my head back against the seat and closed my eyes.
Behind my eyelids, all I could see was grey eyes and white silk sheets.
I was in so much trouble.