Trial by Power

Chapter 7: Nobody

The invitation said the top floor of the hotel, seven o'clock.

Ethan was on the list as a featured guest, which meant we did not stand in the line at the ballroom doors. We walked past it. The woman with the clipboard found our names on her sheet, stepped back, and we went in.

The room was glass and low light. A wall of windows looked east over the water, and downtown stood up behind the water in a line of lit towers. I was in black velvet, floor-length, cut close through the waist. He had picked it off a rack an afternoon earlier, in a*****e I had thought we were in for something else until the fitting room attendant asked me to turn. The blue stone at my throat caught the light every time I moved my head.

He kept his hand at the small of my back until we were four steps inside, then let go.

"Twenty minutes," he said. "Get something to drink."

He was already being pulled toward a knot of men near the bar — one name I recognized off the summit program, two I didn't. I took a glass of champagne off a tray and walked to the window.

That was when I felt it.

Not a look. A weight. The specific pressure of being watched by someone who does not want anything from you except to see you fail.

I turned my head, slow, and checked the corner the way I would check a clock.

Vivian. Near the service doors, in a dress that had been expensive four seasons ago, beading gone dull at the shoulders. Her hair was done well. She had spent the money on her hair and not on the dress, which told me she had exactly one good card left. Hunter stood with his back half turned to her. Elliot was beside them, and his face had gone slack in a way I had not seen before. He had been the pretty one. That was the whole of him, from the beginning — the smile, the eyes, the way he could make a room turn to look. Now his eyes were tired, and not from a late night. From a year.

The three of them had come to Boston.

I sipped the champagne and looked back out at the water.

Footsteps behind me. Two sets, then three.

"Look at this."

Hunter. The voice was the same — short, flat, no question in it. The voice you would use on staff.

I turned.

He looked me over slowly, from the shoes up. The old move. I had watched him do it to waitresses.

"Found yourself a new backer?" he said. "I called it a long time ago. You were never the quiet type. You were always the one hanging around where you weren't wanted."

Behind him, Elliot laughed. It was a thin laugh, late, like a man running a bit he no longer had the material for.

"Come on. Don't be like that." Elliot stepped around Hunter and put a hand out, palm up, the friendly little gesture he used to make when he wanted a door held for him. "You did all right out here. We're a little tight right now. Put in a word for us with your boss."

I looked at the hand.

"Why would I do that?"

"Because you used to follow us around like it was your job," Vivian said.

She had come forward. Her heels cost three hundred dollars and she was not walking well in them, or maybe she was, and I had just never been this close.

She was looking at my necklace. Not at me. At the necklace, at the blue against the velvet, and her face did something I had never once seen it do. It tightened in the middle and pulled at the mouth, and she was too proud to look away, so she stayed there, staring at the stone.

"You think a dress changes it," she said. Low, for us only. "I know exactly who you were. I know every single one of them. You want to keep walking around this room like you belong in it?" A breath. "Introduce us to your boss. Right now. Or I'll tell this entire room what you used to do to get people to look at you."

She was close enough that I could smell her perfume. Not the one she used to wear. Close, and cheaper.

I laughed. It came out once and stopped.

"Go ahead," I said.

Her face stopped moving. She stood there with her mouth half-open, and something went through her eyes and was gone before it finished, water down a drain, and I watched her get it — not all of it, but the part that mattered. She was standing in a room full of people she could not name, and the girl she had spent years trying to bury was ahead of her, in a dress and a stone somebody else had paid for, holding a glass.

Hunter had gone quiet. He always did, when a room stopped being his. He was looking past me, at something over my shoulder, and all the color had left his face.

I did not need to turn around.

The music had not stopped, but the sound around us had dropped by half. Heads turned in a wave, then eyes dropped. Anybody who does not already know who the important person in a room is will find out within four seconds of him crossing it.

Vivian got there first. She turned to face him with her chin already lifted, and the lifted chin was the only part of it that worked. She had rehearsed this, or some version of this, back when his name had still been worth saying out loud and hers had still opened doors.

"Mr. Lu," she said. "I'm Vivian Lin."

Her voice had gone up. Not a normal register — higher, softer, thinning at the end of the sentence like it had been tested on someone else and had worked then. She put a hand out. Halfway through the motion she seemed to remember that people do not shake hands at a reception like this, and she stopped it in the air, and settled the hand against the side of her dress.

He walked past her. He did not change his pace. His eyes went over her the way they went over the drapery.

The hand at her side closed on the velvet and stayed closed.

"Didn't realize you'd get such a warm welcome."

Ethan.

He came up on my left and stood so his shoulder blocked Vivian's line to me. His hand found my waist. He looked at my face.

"Bored yet?"

"No," I said.

He turned his head then and looked at the three of them, the way a man reads a room he already owns. He said nothing to Vivian. He had not said anything to her the last time either. That was how it would stay.

He said to me, at a volume that carried:

"Who are these people?"

I handed my glass to a server passing behind me.

"Nobody," I said. "They were just leaving."

Ethan nodded once and turned his head toward the end of the bar, where a broad man with a black radio on his belt was watching us and pretending not to.

"Walk them out," Ethan said. "The three of them."

The man was moving before Ethan finished.

"Also — they don't come to anything I'm at. Not this building, not any building. Find out who cleared them and pull the invitation."

"Sir."

Hunter said something. It did not carry. The man with the radio put a hand flat on his back below the shoulder blade, and Hunter walked. Elliot looked at me once — the old look, the one that used to work — and it did not work now, and I do not think he understood that in the moment; his eyes just held mine while he was walked past the bar toward the service doors. Vivian went last. She had her chin up. She looked straight ahead at the doors. She did not look at me, and I knew about that, and I did not mind.

The doors closed. The room came back up to its own volume in a slow wash of talk and silverware.

The band started a new set. The blue stone was still at my throat. Ethan's hand had not moved from my waist. He leaned in close to my ear.

"Let's get out of here before somebody else wants something."

I turned my head and looked at the room. Four hundred people, none of whom I had known two years ago, and about half of whom had watched somebody get walked out a minute ago and had already turned back to their drinks.

"All right," I said.

He did not say anything else on the way out.