Helena's POV
I watch my son fall into orbit around a woman I don't recognize, and something ancient and tired moves through me before I've even fully understood why. It's a feeling I know too well by now, a dread that arrives before the mind catches up to it, as though the body remembers every previous version of this moment better than I do. The champagne in my hand has gone warm, the bubbles long since surrendered, the glass sweating against my palm like it, too, senses what's coming. I set it down on a passing waiter's tray without looking at him, my eyes still fixed on Chase across the room.
I've spent twenty-six years learning to read the specific shape of a Sterling man about to make a choice he's already decided he can't be talked out of. Dominic had it. His father before him had
