Page 53 of His Vow

Her hand went rigid in mine.

I felt it happen — the fingers that had been warm and laced through mine for the last three hours turning to wood. Her pulse jumped against my palm. She was looking at Hugh, then at me, then at Hugh, and the meaning was assembling on her face. Slow. Impossible to stop.

I reached for her. My fingers tightened around hers. She pulled her hand free.

One step back. 2 ft. between us and several months of lies.

I scanned the room. Declan was on his feet, his chair shoved back so hard it hit the table behind him. His face wasn't angry — it was cold. Clear. The expression of a man assembling facts at speed. His eyes found mine across the room and what lived in them wasn't betrayal. It was calculation. He was already measuring the damage.

Julian sat frozen. The champagne flute was still raised. The crinkled grin was gone and the face beneath it was blank, stripped, a mind that processed everything through humor discovering a situation humor couldn't touch.

Gerald Ashworth's knuckles were white around his glass. His shoulders had already turned 2° away from the stage. By morning, he'd deny ever having recommended me.

Then Rhys. At the bar. His glass stopped halfway to his mouth. He hadn't gasped. Hadn't performed shock. He'd gone pale. Completely still. His fingers were shaking around the glass and the amber liquid trembled. His eyes locked on mine and the expression on his face wasn't fury. It was recognition. Terror. The name Reeves had landed in front of three hundred people, and Rhys was the only one who knew what followed it — the girl, the pregnancy, the phone call from his father.

He set the glass down carefully. Stood. Buttoned his jacket — missed the first attempt, found it on the second — and walked toward the exit. No scene. No confrontation. Just a man leaving before the questions started.

Soleil's voice cut through the room.

"Everyone." Not loud. But the quality of it — a register none of them had ever heard — stopped the murmurs dead. "Shut up."

Three hundred people went silent. The woman who smoothed things over, who steered conversations to safety, who laughed off tension and made everyone comfortable — that woman was gone. What stood on the stage was someone none of them had met.

She looked at Hugh. At the empty space where Rhys had been. At the room watching her like a spectacle. Then at me.

"You. Come with me."

She walked off the stage. Past Declan, who reached for her arm and missed. Past Margaux, who didn't reach but whose eyes tracked her with the precision of someone cataloguing evidence. Through the ballroom doors and down the corridor without looking back.

I followed. Down the hall, past the coat check, into a small office at the end — unused, dark except for the corridor light cutting through the open door. She turned on me. Her eyes were dry. That was worse than tears. Tears would mean she was processing. Dry eyes meant she was holding everything back with both hands and the dam was glass.

"Talk." Her voice was low and flat. "Now. All of it."

My mouth opened. Closed. The words were there — the same words I'd almost given her in bed. The sentence that had formed and died behind my teeth a dozen times. But this wasn't a bed. This wasn't her head on my chest and her fingers tracing patterns on my skin. This was a dark room and a woman with dry eyes who had just watched her world crack open on a stage in front of three hundred people.

"I have a sister." My voice came out rough. Wrong. Like the machinery that usually controlled it had been disconnected. "Adira. She's three years younger than me."

Soleil's arms were at her sides. Her chin was level. She didn't move.

"When she was nineteen, she fell in love." I swallowed. "With your brother."

The first crack. Small. A flicker behind her eyes — confusion, the beginning of a question that didn't make it to her lips. Her fingers curled at her sides.

"They were together for almost a year. She was — " My throat closed. I pressed through it. "She was happy. She called me three times a day to tell me about him. About their plans. About the future she was building."

Soleil's jaw tightened. A millimeter. She was listening with her whole body.

"She got pregnant."

The second crack. Wider. Her lips parted. Her eyebrows pulled together — not understanding yet, but feeling the ground shift beneath her.

"She told Rhys. And Rhys told your father."

I watched her face. The confusion deepening. The first shadow of dread.

"Your father made her disappear, Soleil." My voice dropped. "The apartment — her lease was terminated by a management company that traced back to Lattimore Holdings. The job she'd just started — gone. Terminated without explanation. Then the stories started. Whispered. Planted. Spreading through channels she couldn't see, poisoning every connection she had."

Soleil's hand came up to her mouth. Not covering it — pressing against her lips, her fingers trembling.