Chapter 35
Harrison‘s pov
I always find Sienna before she finds trouble.
Chloe corners her near the center of the room, voice pitched for an audience. I watch without moving. Sienna's spine is straight, her expression locked down.
She decides on just enough. A dismissal, clean and final, and then she turns to leave.
Chloe grabs her wrist.
The mark appears fast. Even from across the room I can see the red line against her skin, and something in my chest pulls taut and holds.
Sienna wrenches free. Says something that stops Chloe's hand mid-swing. Then she walks away without looking back.
I return to the conversation I'm supposed to be having. I have no memory of what was said.
I find her again a few minutes later, moving along the edge of the room alone. No Luna Reed. No one she knows. Just Sienna in a borrowed crowd, holding a glass she isn't drinking, her eyes doing a slow circuit of the hall that finds nothing worth stopping on.
She looks like a woman who has learned to take up very little space.
I'm about to move toward her when Julian Vane appears at her side, a glass already extended in her direction — that particular smile of his arranged with surgical precision, warm enough to invite, distant enough to intrigue. I've watched him deploy it across half the rooms in New Haven. It works because he commits to nothing, and women who are exhausted by men who want too much find that kind of emptiness restful.
Sienna reaches for the glass.
She's smiling.
Not the smile she gives me — that careful, controlled arrangement of features designed to reveal nothing. This one is different. Lighter. The kind that arrives before she's decided to allow it.
Something cold moves through my chest and settles there.
I've run the numbers on Julian Vane for months. Every move he's made against Blackwood holdings has been deliberate, incremental, and personal. He isn't competing with me. He's dismantling me, one asset at a time. And when his reach started extending toward people adjacent to Sienna, I understood what the next target was.
Nora is not leverage I took for cruelty.
She's leverage I took before he could.
Vane would have found her eventually — a pressure point too clean to leave unguarded. I moved first. I made myself the villain in that story so that he couldn't write himself as the hero.
Sienna has never asked why. She assumed. I let her.
Now she's standing three feet away from the man I took her mother to protect her from, and she's smiling at him like he's someone worth smiling at, and the cold thing in my chest is doing something I refuse to name.
I cross the room.
I don't run. I don't raise my voice. I simply arrive, remove the glass from her hand before it reaches her lips, and feel the warmth of the crystal against my palm — warmth that came from her fingers.
"This glass," I say, keeping my eyes on Vane, "I'll drink for my wife."
I feel her go still beside me. Not surprised. Something closer to resigned.
Vane's smile doesn't falter, but it changes — sharpens at the edges. He's enjoying this. He came here specifically to enjoy this.
I drink the champagne in one motion and set the glass down.
"I heard you'd found a new companion," Vane says pleasantly. "I assumed a man in your position would be — occupied elsewhere tonight."
The people nearest to us have already stopped pretending not to listen.
This is what he wanted. A public stage. Sienna as the prop. Me as the man who either confirms the scandal by reacting, or confirms it by not reacting. He's constructed a situation with no clean exit.
"Blackwood family affairs," I say, "don't require your commentary."
I take Sienna's arm and move.
She comes with me — no choice, in the moment — but I can feel the resistance in the line of her body, the way she angles herself fractionally away even while matching my stride. She knows a scene in this room costs her more than it costs me.
I guide her past the edge of the main hall, through the service corridor behind the east doors. The lighting drops. The sound of the gala becomes a murmur behind us.
She starts to pull away the moment we're clear of the crowd.
"If you wanted Elena, she's still in the main hall—"
I turn her against the wall.
She goes very still — the kind of still that means she's waiting for it to be over.
My mouth finds the curve of her collarbone. I feel her breath catch. I press harder. I want her to feel this tomorrow.
When she finally makes a sound, I lift my head.
"Stay away from him."
She looks up at me. The corridor light catches the exhaustion under her eyes — the concealer doing less work than she'd hoped.
"Why?" she asks.
I can't answer that.
What I can't stop seeing is the set of her shoulders when she reached for his glass. Easy. Unguarded. The exact posture she hasn't used around me in years.
I don't say any of that.
"No reason." I reach up and begin refastening the button I'd pulled loose. "Be a good Mrs. Blackwood."
She's quiet for a moment.
Then she lifts her hands and rests them on my shoulders. Her thumbs trace the line of my throat — slow, deliberate, the kind of touch that isn't gentle and isn't cruel and is somehow worse than either.
"He approached me," she says. "That's not my fault."
"You could have refused."
"I can't always refuse."
I lean closer.
"Then find me," I say. "When you can't refuse — find me instead."
She stares at me.
I kiss her before she can ask the question forming on her lips.
She tries to pull back twice. Both times I follow. The third time she stops trying — the small surrender in her shoulders, the way her breathing changes.
Footsteps in the corridor.
I release her. Step back. Button the last clasp at her collar. Press my thumb against her lower lip, clearing the smear of color at the corner of her mouth.
"I don't like other people's hands on what's mine."
She says nothing.
Then: "Alright." Her voice is even. Careful. "I'll agree to that."