Cellie's POV
There is a particular kind of mistake that announces itself clearly and early, gives you every opportunity to course correct, and then watches with great interest while you make it anyway.
That was the bathroom situation in a nutshell.
I had been looking for the guest bathroom for ten minutes, which was its own small humiliation given that I had grown up in apartments where you could stand in the kitchen and see every other room simultaneously. This house had corridors that branched into other corridors, doors that led to sitting rooms that led to libraries that led to more doors, and the whole thing was lit with the warm, amber glow of wall sconces that made everything look like an oil painting and absolutely nothing look like a bathroom.
The server who had been refilling champagne glasses near the terrace had pointed me toward a hallway off the east wing, and I had followed his directions to a door at the end of it, and I had pushed it open without knocking because it was a bathroom at a party and nobody knocked on bathroom doors at parties.
Mistakes were made.
Demetrio was standing at the sink.
His jacket was draped over the towel rail. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow. He was washing his hands with the focused, methodical attention of a man completing a task, and the water running off his fingers was faintly pink before it spiraled down the drain. He had taken off his rings and his watch and set them on the marble counter, and his eyes flicked to me in the mirror the second I opened the door, a brief flash of grey and irritation.
I stood in the doorway.
Every reasonable instinct I had said to close the door, find another bathroom, locate that helpful server and ask him for a more specific redirect, and spend the rest of the reception on the opposite side of the estate from this man. My bladder, however, had been listening to my champagne intake for the past hour and a half and had opinions of its own.
I stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind me.
He made a sound low in his throat, not quite a word, more like the vocal equivalent of an eye roll, and turned back to the sink.
I set my wine glass on the far end of the counter, kept my eyes forward, and walked to the stall at the absolute furthest point from him, which was still not very far because this was, at the end of the day, one bathroom. I took my time. He was clearly taking his time. We were two people with the mutual understanding that we needed to get through the next three minutes without incident and then never be in a room this small together again if either of us had any sense left.
When I came back out, he was drying his hands with a monogrammed towel and reaching for his watch.
I moved to the sink and turned on the tap and focused very intently on my own hands.
His reflection was right there in the mirror whether I wanted it or not. The line of his jaw. The set of his shoulders. The way he clasped his watch back onto his wrist with the unhurried efficiency of someone who had never once rushed for anyone. He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at his own reflection, checking something, adjusting his collar, and I was looking at the soap dispenser and definitely not at him.
The silence was doing something strange to the air in the room.
"Did you have to kill him?" I said it before I had fully decided to, the words just arriving in my mouth ahead of any permission from my brain.
He looked at me in the mirror. Not at my reflection. At me, specifically, like there was a difference and he was making a point of it.
"Do you know what he said about you?" His voice was even, unhurried, carrying that accent like it was simply where words lived.
I went still, my hands still under the running water. "About me?"
"He was talking at the bar." Demetrio turned away from his own reflection and leaned back against the counter with his arms loosely folded, looking at me directly now. "Said he recognized you from campus. Said you were easy. Said some other things that I won't repeat because this is a bathroom at my father's wedding and I have a certain standard for what I discuss in bathrooms at my father's wedding."
Something cold settled in the pit of my stomach and I turned off the tap. "I don't know him. I don't remember him."
"No," Demetrio said, "I figured. Which is its own problem."
"I didn't ask for your analysis," I said, reaching past him for a hand towel and immediately regretting leaning that close because he smelled unreasonably good for a man who had just washed someone's blood off his hands. "And I definitely didn't ask you to shoot him."
"No," he agreed again, in that same flat tone. "You didn't. I made that call independently."
I turned to face him with the towel still in my hands, because that deserved a response. "You shot a man at your father's wedding because he said something rude about me?"
"I shot a man at my father's wedding because he disrespected this family in this family's home," Demetrio said, and his voice didn't change at all, same steady cadence, same controlled volume, but something in the air shifted the way it did before a storm, pressure building quietly. "You are part of this family now. What people say about you reflects on us. That is not negotiable and it is not about you personally."
"It feels pretty personal," I said. "Given that I'm the one being discussed."
"Then perhaps," he said, and his eyes dropped briefly to my dress in a way that managed to be neither leering nor cold but landed somewhere uncomfortable right between the two, "you might consider that the way you present yourself has consequences that extend beyond yourself now."
I stared at him.
"I'm sorry," I said, keeping my voice very even. "Are you telling me that a man is dead because of what I was wearing?"
"I'm telling you that a man is dead because he had no manners and chose the wrong venue to demonstrate that." He straightened up from the counter, which put him closer than was entirely comfortable, and his voice dropped just slightly. "But I'm also telling you that you're going to have to be more careful now, Cellie. Whether you want to be part of this family or not is not a conversation you get to have. You're in it. And people are going to look at you and talk about you and I cannot shoot all of them."
"What a comfort," I said flatly.
The corner of his mouth moved in something that was not quite a smile. "What I mean is that you are going to need to conduct yourself in a way that doesn't invite that kind of attention. You'll be dealing with suitors soon enough, men that my father will want to introduce you to, and I need them to look at you and see a woman worth respecting."
The cold in my stomach turned into something hotter and considerably less polite.
"I want to make sure I'm understanding you correctly," I said slowly, setting the hand towel down on the counter with great deliberateness. "You're talking about controlling how I dress. Who I see. How I carry myself. Because I'm now a DeLeon adjacent woman and that comes with a certain image requirement. Is that what you're saying to me right now?"
He held my gaze without flinching. "I'm saying that this world has rules and you are now living in it."
"I didn't choose to live in it."
"No," he said, and something moved through his expression, brief and almost human. "Neither did I."
The silence that followed was a different kind than the one before. Still taut, still charged, but carrying something else in it now, something I didn't entirely have a name for and wasn't entirely sure I wanted to examine.
I picked up my wine glass from the counter and took a slow sip and looked at him over the rim.
He was watching me with those grey eyes, steady and unreadable, and I could feel the weight of that night between us sitting in the middle of the bathroom like a third person nobody wanted to acknowledge.
I lowered the glass.
"You know what your problem is?" I said.
"I'm sure you'll tell me."