Chapter 1
The clasp gave way like a small bone breaking. Diamonds scattered across the marble — twelve years of marriage hitting the floor in pieces — and two hundred people went silent at once. Marcus’s mouth was still shaped around the last word he’d said to her. Placeholder. Elena didn’t run. Running would have looked like guilt. She walked. Barefoot, through spilled champagne, past the mayor’s table and the investors and the woman in red, out through the doors of the Grand Meridian and into the rain. She never looked back at the ballroom. So she never saw the man in the corner — the one who hadn’t touched his drink all night, the one whose eyes had followed her since the coat room. He set the glass down. He stood. And he followed her into the storm.
CHAPTER 1
The clasp was still warm from the jeweler’s hands when Marcus fastened it around her throat.
“Forty thousand dollars,” he said, close enough that his breath moved the hair at her ear. “Smile, Elena. Everyone is watching.”
She smiled. That was the job.
The Grand Meridian’s ballroom had been transformed for his forty-second birthday — eight hundred white roses, a twelve-piece orchestra, ice sculptures shaped like the skyline he owned pieces of. Two hundred guests. The mayor at table one. Three city councilmen at table two. Elena had spent six weeks planning it, down to the napkin fold, because that was also the job.
An hour ago, a waiter had touched her elbow and murmured that Mr. Martinez needed her by the kitchen.
She had gone. Of course she had gone.
He was waiting between the coat racks, in that narrow room that smelled of cedar and other people’s perfume. He didn’t look at her when she came in. He was checking his cuffs.
“You want to know what you are to me, Elena?”
She had thought, for one absurd second, that he was going to say something kind. It had been that kind of evening — the necklace, the kiss for the photographers, his hand warm on the small of her back.
“You’re a placeholder.” He said it the way a man reads a number off a contract. “A beautiful, expensive placeholder. Until I find someone worthy of the Martinez name.”
The coat room had a brass hook on the wall and a mirror above it, and Elena watched herself in it. She watched her own face not move. Twelve years of practice.