Ruthless Vow

Chapter Eight

The Dinner

I owned one dress.

I'd borrowed it from Sofia two years ago for a funeral and I'd kept it because I never knew when I'd need something dark. It was black, plain, and it fell below the knee. I laid it out on the bed in the guest room and stood there looking at it for a minute, because I had nothing else.

Then Greta knocked and said the car would be downstairs at seven.

She didn't say anything about the dress. She just looked at it once, then at me, and left.

The restaurant was forty blocks north, in a part of the city I'd driven through but never stopped in. The kind of street where the storefronts don't have signs and the doormen wear suits with no name tag.

Damian didn't say much in the car. He wore a dinner jacket and a plain tie and didn't check his phone once, which I noticed, because I'd never seen him go fifteen minutes without checking it.

At the door, he stopped and turned to me.

"Rules for tonight," he said.

"Of course there are."

"People will ask who you are. Say you're a friend of my mother's, or say you work in design. Don't confirm anything. Don't deny anything. Either way, don't say your last name."

"Because of your uncle."

"Because of everyone." He looked at me for a second. "And if someone says something you don't like, you tell me. Not with your eyes. With your mouth."

"That sounds like the first reasonable thing you've said all week."

He almost smiled. Barely. It was gone before it landed.

The room was warm and low-lit and full of men in dark suits and women in dresses that cost more than my rent. Somebody handed me a glass of wine I didn't drink. Damian introduced me twice and both times gave a name that wasn't mine.

I stood at the edge of a conversation about the northern rail line for eleven minutes and understood none of it.

Then a woman in a red dress came up to me at the bar.

"I'm Colette." She looked me over once, top to bottom, the way you'd look at a coat you were considering buying. "You're the houseguest."

I set my glass down. "Who told you that."

"Everyone." She smiled. "You're wearing a funeral dress to a dinner at Ellery's. It's the only interesting thing that's happened tonight."

"It covers the essentials."

"Barely." She picked up her own drink. "You should know, this table hate people like you. I've watched it happen four times. Somebody sits down without the money, It's not personal. It's just the room."

"Are you warning me or are you enjoying this?"

She looked at me a beat longer than she needed to.

"Both," she said, and walked off.

---

Dinner was long. Twelve people at a table built for eighteen, so nobody had to sit close to anybody they didn't want to.

Damian sat at the head. I sat to his right, because he'd pulled the chair out for me without making a thing of it.

I watched him for two hours.

I'd never seen him do this before. He didn't talk much and everyone listened anyway. When he made a point, he made it in eight words. And when he turned his attention to a person, that person straightened up in their seat like he'd turned a light on them.

He knew the name of every waiter. He asked one of them about a recent surgery and the man's whole face changed.

Nobody at that table liked him. But every single one of them wanted him to keep liking them, and all of them knew he was deciding.

I didn't hate it. That was the unsettling part. I expected to hate it and I didn't.

Halfway through the main course he put his hand flat on my back, once, low, above my waist. Not pulling me anywhere. Just there for a second while a man leaned past him to talk.

Then he took it off.

Neither of us mentioned it. Then or later.

---

It happened over dessert.

A man across the table, older, red-faced, in a tie that cost more than my car, looked down the table and said, "Damian, is Victor coming in Sunday?"

"He's in Florida." Damian passed a plate. "Back Tuesday."

"Good. Good." The man turned to the woman next to him with real warmth in his face. "You know, I'll say it in front of everybody. There isn't an honest man left in this business. Not one. Except Victor Cross. That man has held half this city together and never once asked for credit."

Around the table, three people nodded. One of them raised a glass.

Damian nodded too.

"He's been good to me," he said.

And he said it easily. No pause. No tension in his jaw. No tell anywhere in his face. Just a man agreeing with a table about his uncle.

I picked my fork back up and didn't look at him.

But I'd been watching him for two hours, and for two hours I'd been able to read him. Every point he made. Every pause. Every small thing he did with his hands.

For the first time all night, he hadn't given me a single thing.

---

We stayed another hour. I answered three questions about design and dodged two about my family. The man with the red face told a long story about a boat. Colette watched me from the other end of the table all night.

In the car, Damian put his phone away and didn't start the engine for a second.

"Ask it," he said.

"Ask what."

"You've been quiet since dessert."

I looked out the window at the restaurant door and the men still standing on the sidewalk in their jackets, saying goodnight to each other.

"Who is Victor Cross," I said.

"Where do you want me to start?"

"The part you already told me. He raised you. He told you my father stole from your family. You believe him." I turned to look at him. "Now tell me the part you haven't."

He sat with his hands on the wheel and didn't answer for long enough that I thought the whole conversation was over.

Then he reached past me and opened the glove box and took out a photograph. Folded, worn at the corners, the kind you keep in a box for years and don't look at.

He held it out without looking at me.

"There was a fifth dinner," he said. "Eleven years ago. Before any of this."

I took the photo and opened it under the light from the streetlamp.

A long table. Twelve seats. A flash from the end of the table. Four people sitting at it, half the table empty on either side, like it was late and they were the last ones left.

The silver-haired man with glasses on the left.

A dark-haired man across from him.

A boy of maybe nineteen in a bad suit, unmistakable, even then.

And across from the boy, third seat on the right, with sunglasses pushed back on her head and her arms folded on the table, smiling at the camera —

my moth

er.

I looked up.

Damian Cross was already looking at me.

"Your mother and my uncle were friends," he said. "For years. Before you were born.”