Chapter 20 · Eye of the Storm

The champagne was still running off Caspian's chin when the first phone went up.

Then the second. Then forty of them, all at once, a wall of screens lifted over the crowd like everybody in that ballroom had been waiting their whole lives for the exact moment the Sterlings ate each other alive.

Marcus's hand closed around my wrist. Not hard. Worse than hard — casual, like he'd done it a thousand times before and would do it a thousand times after.

"Smile," he said, right against my ear. "They're already writing it. Give them something better than the truth."

"Get off me."

"Not yet."

Caspian wiped his face with the back of his sleeve. His shirt was ruined. His hair was ruined. Somewhere behind him a board member's wife was whispering into her husband's shoulder and the husband was nodding like a man watching a building come down.

"You're insane," Caspian said. His voice cracked right down the middle. "You just told four hundred people you're—with her. With my—"

"Say it," Marcus said pleasantly.

"She was MINE."

"She was never yours. You had five years and you never once learned her name properly. It's Vance.