THE ASSASSIN BRIDE OF VALE COPORATION

4. LUNA

"I'm sorry." The words came fast, tripping over each other, exactly the way they were supposed to.

I dropped my eyes to the floor. Let my hands come together in front of me, fingers twisting.

"I grew up alone." My voice shook, small. "No one to watch out for me. I got used to carrying something sharp ... it made me feel safe. I didn't think...." I let my breath catch. "I'm sorry. I should've told you."

Adrian said nothing for a moment.

He studied me. Really studied me, eyes moving over my face like he was looking for the seam in it, the place where the lie showed through.

I kept my face open. Soft. A girl who'd never held a blade with any intention behind it.

He didn't press.

He just nodded once, turned the knife over in his fingers one last time, and set it down on the dresser like it meant nothing to him at all.

"Get dressed," he said. "We're leaving in twenty minutes."

I opened my mouth — some instinct in me wanting to argue, to ask where, to push back the way I would with anyone else who told me what to do — and then I caught myself and lowered my head instead.

"Yes."

He walked out without another word.

The second the door shut, my shoulders dropped an inch. I hadn't realized how high they'd climbed.

He hadn't seen it. Whatever he'd been looking for in my face, he hadn't found it, and some small, ugly relief unwound in my chest at that, loosening something I didn't know had been wound so tight.

Twenty minutes later I was dressed and following him down the stairs, and twenty minutes after that we were in the car, him driving, me watching the city slide by through the window, trying to map streets I'd never walked.

Vale Corporation rose up out of the skyline like it owned the light around it. Glass and steel and a lobby that swallowed sound.

He didn't slow down for any of it. Walked me straight through, straight into an elevator, straight into a boardroom full of men in suits who all stood the second the doors opened.

Then suddenly. "My wife," he said, flat, like he was reading off a memo. "Aria."

The room went quiet in a way that had weight to it. A few eyes flicked to each other. One man's jaw tightened like he wanted to say something and thought better of it in the same breath.

Nobody said anything else.

Adrian's hand found the small of my back, light, barely there, and I felt every man in that room recalculate something behind their eyes. Whatever question they'd been about to ask, it died before it reached their mouths.

I kept my head slightly down, the picture of a girl who didn't know what to do with that many eyes on her at once, and underneath the picture I was doing math of my own.

He wasn't possessive because of me. That much I would d bet on. Maybe there was someone here he just seemingly wants to keep away,

The meeting went on around me, numbers and names I filed away without understanding half of them. When it finally broke, I touched his arm, soft, tentative then and asked l,

"Sir..I mean Adrian, can I take a look around, please" my tongue itches one the last word but I bit down keeping it low

He didn't even glance at me twice. "Fine."

I didn't need twice.

The second I was out of that boardroom, the nervous wife peeled off me like a coat I could take on and off at will. My steps picked up. My eyes started reading everything — door labels, badge scanners, the direction foot traffic moved in.

I wasn't here for the tour.

Somewhere in this building was information on a compound that could keep Mina breathing another month, another year, long enough for me to find something better. I didn't know which floor. I didn't know which department.

But I had time, and I had a building full of unattended doors, and that was more than I'd had yesterday.

I turned a corner too fast and walked straight into someone.

"Watch where you're—" The woman stopped mid-sentence, her eyes narrowing as they landed on my face, then dropped to the ring on my hand.

Something shifted in her expression. Recognition, and right behind it, something uglier.

"You're her." Her voice went flat and cold. "Adrian's new wife."

Two bitches now, I thought, tired, before I could stop myself.

Out loud, I made my shoulders curl in. "I'm sorry, I wasn't looking where I was...."

"Do you have any idea," she cut in, stepping closer, "what I gave up for that man? What I built here?" Her eyes raked over me the exact way Seraphina's had, like I was something dragged in off the street and dressed up wrong. "And they hand it to you."

"I didn't ask for any of this," I said, soft, eyes down.

That only seemed to make it worse.

Her hand came up fast, and I let it land.

The slap cracked across my cheek, and I staggered a step, let my hand fly up to my face like the world had just ended.

Inside, I catalogued the angle, the weight behind it, the amateur follow through that told me everything I needed to know about how many real fights this woman had actually been in.

She hit me again. I took that one too, staggering further, letting a sound escape my throat that sounded exactly as broken as she wanted it to.

Not yet, I told myself, even as her nails caught my arm hard enough to leave marks. *Not yet. Let her finish digging her own hole.*

She grabbed a fistful of my hair, yanking my head back, and something in me went very quiet and very still, the noise of my own restraint the loudest thing in the hallway.

Enough.

I moved before she saw it coming — two fingers, one precise strike just under her ribs, nothing that would bruise, nothing that would show, just enough to steal the air straight out of her lungs.

She doubled over with a strangled gasp, more shock on her face than pain, though the pain was clearly doing its own damage underneath.

I stepped back immediately, already folding myself small again, already letting my eyes go wide and wet.

Footsteps. Fast, familiar, coming from the boardroom end of the hall.

I dropped.

Straight to the floor, knees first, one hand pressed to my reddened cheek, eyes lifting to Luna with exactly the amount of fear a girl who'd just been attacked should have. She was still hunched, one arm wrapped around her middle, glaring down at me like I was the one who'd started it.

Perfect. Let her look exactly as guilty as she was.

The doors at the end of the hall opened.

The air in the corridor changed before he even said a word.

Adrian's eyes moved once, fast, taking in the whole scene .... Luna standing, me on the floor, my hair loose from where it had been pulled, the mark already rising on my cheek.

I kept my face pitiful. Kept my eyes glassy and wide, tilted just enough toward him to watch what his did.

He crossed the distance between us slow, and each step made the temperature in that hallway drop another degree.

His gaze found me first.

Then it moved past me entirely, and settled on Luna.