The Merger Clause

Chapter Five: The Engagement Party

The Vane estate had been done up for the occasion in white roses and candlelight, the kind of understated excess that cost more than most people's houses, and Wren stood at the edge of it in a dress she hadn't chosen and a smile she'd practiced in the mirror that morning until it stopped looking like something forced.

"You're doing that thing," Isla murmured beside her, a glass of champagne she was too young to legally have in her hand, "where you look completely fine and I know for a fact you are not completely fine."

"I'm engaged to a man who has called me by my full name in every conversation we've had since we were sixteen. I'm allowed to not be completely fine."

"He's not wrong to look at you like that, though."

Wren followed her sister's gaze and found Sebastian across the room, in conversation with two men who were probably investors, doing that thing he did where he seemed to be listening to three conversations while actually watching one specific point in the room. That point, currently, was her.

He crossed to her without appearing to hurry, which she'd noticed was a particular skill of his, moving with purpose but never looking like he was in a rush to get anywhere.

"You look like you're at a funeral," he said quietly, close to her ear, under the noise of the party.

"I feel like I'm at one."

"Try to look happier. My father's watching, and he takes any sign of unhappiness as evidence he was right about something."

"About what?"

"That you'd resent this."

"I do resent this."

"I know," Sebastian said, and something in his voice made it land differently than it had in the conference room, less like negotiation and more like an actual admission. "Resent it quietly tonight. For an hour. I'll owe you."

It was, unexpectedly, the first thing he'd said all week that made her want to laugh instead of argue. "You'll owe me."

"Name your price."

"I'll think of something."

He almost smiled. She was starting to catalogue the almost smiles, the way they flickered and vanished before they fully arrived, like he didn't trust his own face to hold them.

Across the room, she felt it before she saw it: the particular weight of being watched by someone who wasn't trying to hide that he was watching. Rhys stood near the terrace doors, a drink in hand he wasn't touching, and when her eyes found his he didn't look away.

Sebastian followed her gaze and went very still.

"He wasn't invited," Sebastian said, low.

"He's your brother, Sebastian."

"He's my father's guest list problem, not mine." But he didn't move to intercept him, and Wren noticed that too, the choice not to make a scene, whether out of restraint or something else she couldn't name yet.

Rhys crossed the room eventually, unhurried the way his brother was unhurried, though it read entirely differently on him, less calculation and more ease.

"Sebastian." A nod, brief, brotherly in the way old wounds sometimes still performed old rituals. "Wren." Her name in his mouth did something to her chest it had no right to do, not here, not tonight.

"Rhys." Sebastian's voice had gone flat, careful. "I didn't realize you'd be attending."

"Father invited me. Apparently dying men get sentimental about their sons." He looked at Wren then, and whatever was between the brothers dropped away for a second, replaced by something only she could read. "Congratulations. Truly."

"Thank you," she said, because there was nothing else she could say, not here, not with Sebastian's hand finding the small of her back like a claim he hadn't meant to make.

Rhys's eyes flicked to the gesture, held there a beat too long, and something passed across his face before he smoothed it away. "I won't keep you from your party."

He walked away toward the terrace, and Wren watched him go with a feeling in her chest she refused to examine too closely, not with Sebastian's hand still warm against her back, not with a hundred people watching the two of them for cracks in a performance she wasn't entirely sure was a performance anymore.

"You should go back inside," Sebastian said, quiet, close.

"Are you jealous?"

"I don't get jealous." But his jaw was tight, and his hand hadn't moved, and Wren thought, not for the first time that week, that Sebastian Vane was a much worse liar than he believed himself to be.