Cellie's POV
"Your problem," I said, taking one step toward him because I was done being the one who felt small in this conversation, "is that you've spent so long being the most dangerous person in every room that you've completely forgotten how to talk to someone who isn't afraid of you."
Something shifted in his expression. Imperceptibly, but it shifted.
"You should be afraid of me," he said quietly.
"Probably," I agreed. "And yet." I reached up and touched the lapel of his jacket, just the edge of it, a gesture so light it barely counted as contact, and I watched his jaw tighten. "You want to talk about image and reputation and how I carry myself, but you're standing in a bathroom at your father's wedding with my lipstick still on your collar from two weeks ago and you haven't said a single word about that."
His eyes dropped to his collar and back to my face in under a second, and I had the particular satisfaction of watching Demetrio DeLeon recalculate.
"That was a mistake," he said.
"Which part?" I asked. "The part where it happened, or the part where you pretended not to know my name the morning after?"
His hand came up and wrapped around my wrist, not roughly, not gently either, just firmly enough to make clear that this was a deliberate choice he was making. His thumb pressed against my pulse point and I was furious at my own heartbeat for giving me away immediately.
"Both," he said, and his voice had shifted, lower and closer than it needed to be for a conversation. "It complicated things."
"Oh, it complicated things," I repeated, in a voice that I kept carefully light. "Great. Useful information. Very clarifying."
"Cellie." My name in his accent had no business doing what it did to my concentration.
"Don't," I said. "Don't say my name like that when you're also standing there telling me what to wear and who to be and that I have an image to uphold for your family. Pick a lane, Demetrio."
His grip on my wrist didn't loosen. His eyes stayed on mine. The bathroom was not a large room and he was not a small man and I was running out of ways to pretend that my pulse was behaving itself.
"You're not going to make this easy, are you," he said. Still not a question. This family really didn't believe in question marks.
"Absolutely not," I said pleasantly. "I don't do easy. You should know that by now."
His other hand came up and found my ponytail, curling around it slowly, not pulling, just holding it in a loose wrap of his fingers, and something in my stomach made a decision that my brain was still arguing with. I tilted my chin up to keep his gaze and I kept my expression exactly as steady as I could manage, which was not very steady at all but I hoped the confidence was reading clearly enough to cover it.
"I meant what I said," he said, low and even. "You're part of this world now and I need you to understand what that means."
"And I meant what I said," I told him, holding his gaze. "There is not a single man alive who gets to tell me what to do with my life or my body. Not even you."
He searched my face for a moment, something working behind his eyes that I couldn't read, and then his grip on my hair loosened. He stepped back. Not far, just enough that I could breathe at a normal rate again, and he looked at me with that particular expression he had, the one that wasn't quite cold and wasn't quite warm and somehow managed to be more unsettling than either.
"You're going to be a problem," he said.
"You're not the first person to tell me that today," I said, picking up my wine glass and stepping back myself, putting the length of the counter between us. I caught our reflection in the mirror, his collar askew, the faint trace of something that might have been the ghost of a smudge near his jaw, my dress bright gold against the white marble of the bathroom, both of us looking like exactly the kind of complication neither of us had asked for.
I tipped the glass toward him in a small toast. "Try not to shoot anyone else tonight. As a personal favor to me."
He looked at me for a long moment, something unreadable moving through his expression.
"No promises," he said.
I turned and walked to the door and opened it and stepped out into the corridor, pulling it closed behind me, and then I leaned against the wall and let out a long, slow breath that I had been holding for approximately five minutes.
My wine glass was nearly empty. My heart was doing something complicated and unhelpful. And I could still feel, with a precision that annoyed me enormously, exactly where his thumb had pressed against my wrist.
Down the corridor, the sounds of the reception drifted in, music and laughter and the comfortable noise of a party that had successfully moved past a man being shot on the lawn and returned to celebration.
I pushed off the wall.
I needed more wine. I needed fresh air. I needed, more urgently than either of those things, to stop having reactions to Demetrio DeLeon in bathrooms, which was rapidly becoming a pattern that I could not afford.
I was halfway down the corridor when I heard the bathroom door open behind me.
I did not turn around.
I kept walking, chin up, shoulders back, heels clicking on the marble floor, and I felt his eyes on the back of my head the whole length of that hallway.
I did not look back.
I absolutely wanted to.