The Night They Burned Me, I Was Reborn

Chapter 5 — The Signature

"Sebastian Cole," Elena said, turning, her voice smooth as the champagne in his hand. "This is Lucian Vale."

She watched the two men measure each other in the half-second before either spoke, and it was like watching two different kinds of weather decide whether to collide.

"Vale." Sebastian's smile was wide and easy and did not reach his eyes. "I didn't realize you and my fiancée were acquainted."

"We're not," Lucian said. "Yet."

The single word hung there a beat too long. Elena saw Sebastian's jaw tighten a fraction — the same micro-recalibration she'd watched him make over the red dress, a man who liked a controlled board and was finding pieces moving on their own tonight.

"Mr. Vale was admiring the gardens," Elena offered lightly. "I was telling him my father designed them."

"Your late father had excellent taste." Lucian's grey eyes did not leave Sebastian. "In gardens. In daughters. Shame about some of the company that's since attached itself to the family."

It was so smooth, so politely lethal, that it took Sebastian a full second to register he'd been insulted. Elena had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep her face still.

"I'm sorry," Sebastian said, the warmth cooling by a degree. "Have we—did I do something to offend you, Vale?"

"Not yet." Lucian picked his glass back up off the windowsill, finally, and took a slow sip. "Give it time."

"Sebastian." Delia's voice slid in from the side, bright and rescuing, and then Delia herself was there in pale silver, slipping a hand through Sebastian's arm with the ease of long practice. Too long, Elena thought, watching the way her sister's fingers found the crook of his elbow without looking, the muscle memory of a hundred private moments. "Mother's asking for the toast. And Lena—" the smile she turned on Elena was sugar over steel "—you've barely greeted a soul. People are starting to talk about the red."

"Let them talk," Elena said.

Something passed between the sisters then — a held look, a fraction too long — and Elena let her own smile sharpen just enough that Delia would feel the edge without being able to name it. Watch me, the look said. I'm not who you buried.

Delia blinked first.

"The toast," she repeated, and drew Sebastian away into the crowd. He went, but he glanced back once at Lucian, and the glance was no longer warm at all.

Elena turned back to the window. Her hands, she noticed, were trembling — not from fear now, but from the sheer effort of holding herself together through a conversation in which a man had calmly told her he'd watched her die three times.

"You enjoyed that," she said.

"I've waited a long time to say it to his face." Lucian set the glass down again. Up close she could see what the magazines would never capture: the exhaustion banked behind the cold, the look of a man who had been awake for something far longer than one night. "He doesn't know yet. What he is. What he does to you. Right now he still thinks he's just a clever man marrying up." His mouth twisted. "Enjoy this version of him while it lasts. It's the only one that ever looks at you with anything like affection."

"Stop." The word came out sharper than she meant. "You can't just—you say these things like I'm supposed to simply believe a stranger at a party that my husband is going to—"

"Burn you alive. Yes."

A passing waiter's tray rattled. Elena realized she'd gripped the windowsill hard enough to whiten her knuckles.

"Why," she said, very low, "should I trust you. You appear out of nowhere with a phone number and a dead woman's secrets and you expect me to—what? Take your hand? Walk away from everything I know on the word of a man I rejected?"

"You rejected me last time too." Lucian's voice didn't change, but something behind it did. "Two months from now, you'll get a letter from me. A proposal. A real one—not romance, an alliance. My capital and your father's shares against the people circling you. You'll laugh at it. You'll marry Sebastian instead because he's charming and he's one of you and I am, what was the word your stepmother used—" his mouth curved without humor "—oh yes. Vulgar."

Elena said nothing. Because she had thought exactly that, in her first life. She remembered the letter. She remembered laughing.

"I don't need you to trust me," he went on. "I need you to do one thing. Tonight, before the toast is finished, your stepmother is going to take you aside and ask you to sign a single document. She'll call it a formality. Insurance, for the family, in case anything happens to you before the wedding." His eyes held hers. "Don't sign it."

"What is it?"

"It's the thing that makes your death profitable." He said it without weight, the way you'd report the weather. "Every time, it starts with that signature. Every time, you sign it because you trust her. And every time, eleven months later, there's a fire."

From across the ballroom, a silver spoon rang against crystal. The crowd began to hush. Margaret Hartwell stood at the head of the room, radiant, a glass raised, her eyes already searching the crowd—and finding Elena. Finding her, and beckoning, with one elegant beckoning finger and a smile of pure maternal love.

"There," Lucian murmured beside her. "Right on time."

Elena's blood went cold.

Margaret's lips moved. Across the whole length of the ballroom, over four hundred heads, Elena read them perfectly.

Come here, darling. There's something I need you to sign.