SAY MY NAME

Forty minutes before three hundred of the richest people in the city walked through the doors of the Grand Meridian, the singer everyone had paid to see called to say she wasn't coming. Val stood in the ballroom's back hallway with her phone against her ear, watching a florist argue with a lighting tech over a centerpiece, and tried to keep her voice from climbing. "You signed a contract, Marina." "I know, I know, I'm sorry, my voice is just — it's really not there tonight, Val, I can't—" "You sounded fine on the phone two hours ago." "I have to go." The line went dead. Val stood very still for exactly three seconds, which was the amount of time she allowed herself for panic before she had to be useful again, and then she pulled up her contacts and started making calls. None of them worked. Every backup singer worth hiring was already booked on a Friday night in October, and the Wood Group Foundation Gala was not the kind of event where you told three hundred guests, several of them reporters, that the entertainment simply wasn't happening. "Tell me you have good news," said Marcus, appearing at her elbow with a tray of champagne glasses he had absolutely no business carrying himself, since that was not his job, but Marcus did whatever needed doing, which was why Val had hired him in the first place. "Marina's out. Laryngitis, apparently, which is a funny thing to develop forty minutes before a five-thousand-dollar booking." "You think somebody poached her?" "I think somebody offered her more money to not show up, and I don't have time to prove it." Val rubbed her forehead, careful not to smear the makeup she'd done herself in a bathroom mirror an hour ago. "I need a plan B and I need it in the next ten minutes, or Evelyn Wood is going to open her gala with a silent stage and my father's company on the front page for all the wrong reasons." "There's a string quartet on standby, right? For cocktail hour?" "They're not a headline act. They're background music for people eating shrimp." "So we upgrade them. Move them to the main stage, cut the DJ set in half, and I'll get on the mic and thank everyone for their generosity so many times nobody notices there's no singer." Marcus said it like it was obvious, because to him, apparently, it was. Val looked at him for a second, and something in her chest loosened just slightly. "That might actually work." "It'll work. Go fix your face, you've got a crease between your eyebrows that says disaster, and disaster is not the vibe we're selling tonight." She didn't have time to fix her face. She had time to walk fast toward the ballroom's side entrance, phone still in hand, running numbers on how much of the discretionary budget she could spend on a last-minute upgrade to the quartet's setup without her father noticing before Monday — and that was the exact moment she walked directly into a wall of gray suit that did not belong to a caterer, a guest, or anyone she recognized. "Sorry," she said automatically, stepping back, and looked up. The man looking down at her was not sorry at all. He looked, if anything, mildly inconvenienced, in the specific way of someone who was not used to being run into by anyone, ever, and was recalibrating in real time how to feel about it. He was tall, dark-haired, dressed in a suit that fit him the way suits only fit men who had them made rather than bought, and his eyes were a cool, pale gray that made Val feel, for one entirely unreasonable second, like she'd been caught doing something she shouldn't. "You're the events coordinator," he said. Not a question. "I'm the events coordinator who is currently missing a headline performer forty minutes before doors open, so if this can wait—" "It can't." He said it simply, without raising his voice, which was somehow worse than if he'd shouted. "You're aware this gala raised eleven million dollars last year. You're aware every donor in that room tonight is deciding, in real time, whether the Wood Group Foundation is worth their trust for another year. And you're telling me the entertainment fell through with less than an hour to go." Val's spine went straight. She recognized, belatedly, exactly who she was talking to — she'd seen his photo in the venue's press kit that morning, filed it away as *Lucian Wood, CEO, will not be directly involved, foundation events run through Evelyn* — and adjusted her voice accordingly, though not by much. "I'm telling you it's handled," she said. "The string quartet is being upgraded to the main stage, we're restructuring the run of show, and by the time your guests arrive, they won't know anything went wrong at all. Which is, generally, how a good events team handles a problem — by solving it, not by standing in a hallway asking the person solving it to explain herself." Something moved behind his eyes. Not anger. Something closer to surprise, quickly put away. "You're Robert Smith's daughter." That landed harder than she expected. "You know my father?" "I know his company's name is on tonight's contract." He said it smoothly, evenly, and if there was more underneath it, she didn't have the time or the security clearance to find it right then. "I make it a point to know who's responsible for nights like this before they happen, not after." "Well. Now you know." Val glanced at the clock on her phone — thirty-two minutes — and felt the panic start climbing again despite herself. "I really do need to go fix this, Mr. Wood." She expected him to step aside. He didn't, not right away. He looked at her a beat longer than the conversation required, the way you look at a puzzle you weren't expecting to find in a hotel hallway, and something about it made her skin feel too warm for the air conditioning in the room. "Fix it," he said finally, stepping back just enough to let her pass. "I'll be watching." "Comforting," she muttered, already moving past him. "It wasn't meant to be comforting," he said, to her back, and there was something in his voice that might have been the start of amusement, if a man like that allowed himself such a thing. "It was meant to be true." Val didn't turn around. She didn't have time to turn around, not with thirty-one minutes on the clock and a stage that needed rebuilding and a father whose company's name was riding on the next hour going right instead of catastrophically wrong. But she felt his eyes on her the whole way down the hall, and by the time she reached the ballroom doors, her heart was beating too fast for reasons that had nothing at all to do with the missing singer. The gala went off without a single guest noticing anything had ever gone wrong. Val spent the next four hours running the room like a battlefield, and if anyone had asked her afterward what the evening's centerpieces looked like, or what the mayor had said in his opening remarks, she wouldn't have been able to tell them. What she could have told them, if anyone had asked, was that Lucian Wood spent the entire night working the room like a man born to it — shaking hands, laughing at things that clearly didn't amuse him, thanking donors with a warmth that never once reached his eyes — and that every single time Val looked up from whatever crisis currently had her attention, his gaze was already on her, like he'd never stopped watching at all. It was near midnight, the last guests trickling toward the valet stand, when Evelyn Wood found her by the coat check, glowing and slightly drunk on champagne and success. "You are a miracle," Evelyn said, gripping both of Val's hands. "A literal miracle. Do you know what my brother said to me twenty minutes ago?" "I can't imagine." "He said, and I'm quoting directly, 'Make sure Smith and Daughters gets the spring gala too.'" Evelyn's eyes were bright with something that looked entirely too much like matchmaking for Val's comfort. "Lucian doesn't say things like that. Ever. About anyone." Val laughed it off, said something about being glad the night went well, and told herself the warm, unsteady feeling in her chest was just exhaustion and relief. She almost believed it, right up until she stepped outside into the cold October air and found Lucian Wood standing by the valet stand, alone, not waiting for a car, watching the door like he'd been waiting for exactly one specific person to walk through it. "Mr. Wood." "You saved my sister's gala tonight," he said, "and I don't know your first name." "Valerie." "Valerie." He said it slowly, like he was deciding whether it fit her, and something about the way he looked at her made it very clear he'd already decided it didn't. Not quite. "I'll see you at the spring gala, Valerie Smith." He walked past her toward a car that pulled up exactly when he needed it to, the way everything in his life apparently arrived exactly when he needed it to, and Val stood on the curb in the cold, watching the taillights disappear, with absolutely no idea that the man now vanishing into traffic already knew something about her family that she didn't — and that the next time he said her name, it would not be the last name he chose to use.