Cellie's POV
Hair up or hair down.
I had been staring at my own reflection for thirty minutes debating this, which was thirty minutes more than I had ever spent on a decision this small in my entire life, and the fact that I could not make up my mind was telling me something I did not particularly want to hear.
I picked up my brush and ran it through my hair again.
The honest answer was that the hair was not the problem. The hair was something to focus on so I didn't have to focus on the larger issue, which was that I was getting ready to walk into a house full of criminals and sit through an event I didn't understand for reasons I hadn't been given, because a man I had complicated feelings about had told me I should be there, and I had said yes, and now I had to follow through on that.
I also had to see my mother, which was its own category of unpleasant.
And Demetrio.
I put the brush down and looked at myself in the mirror very directly.
I had spent the whole week trying to reorganize my feelings about that hallway into something manageable. I was good at this normally, at taking things that had gotten too large and filing them into smaller, more containable shapes. I had been doing it my whole life with Penelope, with every foster placement before her, with every version of not-quite-belonging I had ever navigated. You took the feeling, you looked at it, you named it, you put it somewhere it couldn't get in the way, and you moved forward.
The hallway was not filing neatly.
The problem was the look on his face when he had said I scared me today. Not the kissing, not his hands, not any of the physical things that I could categorize as chemistry and nothing more. The look on his face. Demetrio DeLeon, who shot a man at his father's wedding without changing expression, who had carried on a phone call at two in the morning with the flat affect of someone discussing the weather, had looked at me in a dim hallway and said those four words with something raw and unguarded moving behind his eyes, and I had not been able to put that away since.
I was annoyed about it.
"Hair down," I said to my reflection, and picked up my red lipstick, and decided that was the end of thinking about Demetrio DeLeon until I absolutely had to.
I inspected the result in the mirror. Dark green backless dress, red lip, hair loose. I looked good. I knew I looked good. I was going to walk into that estate and get through this evening and come home and watch something comforting on my laptop and pretend the whole week hadn't happened.
I had a plan.
The DeLeon estate looked nothing like it had on the wedding day.
Where the reception had been soft and floral and deliberately romantic, tonight's event had a different energy entirely, bolder and more deliberate, red roses in hanging baskets along the courtyard walls, wild flowers massed in tall arrangements, the lawn replaced with thick fake grass that gave the whole space an almost theatrical quality. The lighting was warmer and more dramatic. The guests were dressed in the particular way that money dressed when it wanted to remind you it was money, understated in fabric and cut, loud only in jewelry and attitude.
I stood at the entrance and took it in and thought about my apartment with its Pinterest poster and secondhand throw pillows, and the specific absurdity of being in both of those worlds in the same week settled over me like a coat that didn't quite fit.
A passing waiter offered me a champagne flute and I took it and reminded myself it was for appearance only.
I spotted Georgiana near the far end of the courtyard with a cluster of girls around her age, all of them laughing at something, heads bent together in the conspiratorial way of teenagers at a grown-up event who had found each other and retreated into their own smaller, more comfortable world. I watched her for a moment. She laughed at whatever was said, bright and pretty, and then it faded before it fully arrived, like a light switched on and off too quickly, and she looked, just for a second, like someone performing a version of herself that she had practiced in a mirror.
I recognized that look. I had worn it for years.
I filed that observation away and turned to find my mother heading toward me through the crowd.
"Cellie," Penelope said, with the particular warmth she reserved for public settings, arriving at my side and touching my arm briefly in the gesture that looked maternal from the outside. She looked me over in the fraction of a second before her smile arrived, and I saw the assessment in it, the catalogue of the dress, the hair, the shoes, the judgment rendered and filed before she said a single word. "Come, Manuel wants you to say hello."
I followed her.
She stopped three times on the way across the courtyard to greet other guests, and each time she introduced me as her precious adopted daughter with the same warm, practiced cadence, the same fond smile, the same performance of a mother who had chosen a child and treasured her. I stood beside her and smiled back and said the right things and thought about how good she had always been at this, at building the surface of a life that looked exactly like the real thing from every angle except the inside.
We reached Manuel and his company near a cluster of chairs at the far end of the courtyard.
Manuel was seated with four other men, all of them with the particular quality of people who had been powerful for long enough that it had stopped being something they performed and simply become the way they occupied space. Two of them I didn't recognize. One had a long scar running from his eyebrow to his chin that he wore with the indifference of someone who had long since stopped noticing it. One was watching my approach with an expression I did not like.
"Manuel," Penelope said warmly, "Cellie is here."
Manuel looked up. He gave me a nod that was not unfriendly, and then Penelope turned to the group with her hostess smile. "Gentlemen, this is my daughter Cellie."
They looked at me. All of them. The way men looked at women in rooms like this, assessing value and purpose simultaneously, and I felt my jaw tighten behind my smile.
"Beautiful girl," one of them said, with a grin that was aimed at Manuel rather than at me, as if I were a feature of the estate he was complimenting.
The scarred one, McKell according to Manuel's introduction, leaned forward slightly. "Might be time to set aside the business talk for marriage plans, DeLeon. What do you say?"
The champagne in my hand went cold.
I kept my expression exactly where it was. Neutral. Mildly interested. The performance of a woman who was not suddenly calculating exits.
Manuel laughed, a warm sound, the indulgent laugh of a man among allies. "Now, McKell. The boy is still finding his footing as don of the Irish outfit. Give him time."
"My nephew, then," another one said, before the relief of Manuel's first words had even fully registered. "Sharp boy. Good family. The girl is clearly well-bred."
Well-bred. Like a horse.
I watched Manuel's face shift into the expression of a man genuinely considering the logistics of a conversation he found interesting, his heavy brows drawing together slightly, his fingers loosely interlaced. He was not dismissing it. He was thinking about it, weighing it, and I was standing two feet away watching him do it and every nerve in my body was telling me that my opinion on this subject was not going to be one of the factors he weighed.
This was how it worked here. I had known it academically, from a distance, the way you knew facts about countries you had never visited. Women in this world were assets. They were alliances. They were traded in the language of family and loyalty and what was good for the outfit, and what they wanted for themselves was a detail that polite men mentioned once and practical men didn't mention at all.
I felt the nausea rising and controlled it.
"I believe," said a voice from directly behind me, "that this is a task that falls to me."
I did not react. I focused very hard on not reacting, on keeping my expression neutral and my shoulders still, because every cell in my body had already identified the voice and was doing something with it that I was not prepared to manage in front of five senior organized crime figures and my mother.
I turned around.
Demetrio was standing close enough that I had to tilt my chin up slightly to meet his eyes, which were on the group rather than on me, composed and deliberate and carrying that particular weight he moved through rooms with. He was in a grey suit tonight, clean-shaven, his hair back from his face in a way that made him look older and more formal, the kind of handsome that had nothing accidental about it.
I noticed he was not touching me, which was notable only because I was aware of the precise distance between us in a way I had no interest in being aware of.
He stepped forward past me and addressed his father's company with a brief nod that managed to convey both respect and authority simultaneously, the particular fluency of someone who had grown up navigating these rooms. "You don't need to trouble yourselves with it. I'll handle the arrangements for both Cellie and Georgiana when the time comes. The right matches, properly vetted."
Manuel studied his son for a moment and then nodded, something settling in his expression. "Of course. I trust your judgment."
The other men made sounds of acquiescence. Not enthusiastic, but not resistant either. Demetrio's word in this room carried a weight that didn't need argument behind it, and the conversation shifted, topics moving on with the ease of people who had simply crossed an item off a list.
I had just watched my own marriage prospects get managed like a business item and I was standing here with a champagne flute and a neutral expression and nowhere to put any of what I was feeling.
"If you'll excuse us," Demetrio said to the group, and his hand came to rest on the bare skin of my lower back, light but present, and my entire nervous system registered it with an immediacy that was profoundly inconvenient. "I'd like to introduce Cellie to a few people."