SAY MY NAME

CHAPTER FOUR: THE SPRING GALA NIGHT

Lucian noticed the wrongness in his own body about forty minutes before he lost the ability to hide it.

It started small. A looseness behind his eyes, like the room had been tilted two degrees without his permission. He blamed the wine, though he'd had exactly one glass all night, nursed slowly through three hours of handshakes and donor small talk. Then the edges of the ballroom started to blur when he turned his head too fast, and the sound of the string quartet — upgraded to the main stage, he remembered thinking earlier, with something close to admiration, *she actually pulled it off* — began to stretch and warp, each note arriving a half-second later than it should have.

"You look pale," Evelyn said, appearing at his elbow with a canapé she didn't offer him.

"I'm fine."

"You're sweating through your collar, Lucian, you are extremely not fine."

He was about to argue when the floor tilted for real, and he had to put a hand flat against the nearest table to keep himself upright. His heart was going too fast. His thoughts had gone thick and slow, like wading through something that wasn't quite water.

"I need air," he managed, and started for the side exit, aware, distantly, that his own legs didn't feel entirely like his.

He didn't remember much after that. Fragments, mostly. The cold hallway air hitting his face and not helping. A service elevator he had no memory of choosing to take. The particular, useless clarity of knowing, somewhere underneath the fog, that this was not alcohol and not exhaustion, that someone had put something in his glass, and that he needed to get somewhere private before three hundred donors and half the city's press watched the CEO of the Wood Group collapse in a ballroom.

He remembered a door. A key card that took him three tries to get to scan correctly. And then very little else at all.

---

Val found him because she was doing one last sweep of the service corridors before calling it a night, checking that no wandering guest had ended up somewhere they shouldn't be, and instead found the CEO of the company that had just hired her leaning against the wall outside a supply closet on the fourth floor, sliding slowly down it, his tie half undone and his eyes not quite focusing on anything.

"Mr. Wood?"

He looked up at her, and even through whatever was clearly happening to him, some part of his mind seemed to recognize her, because his mouth curved into something that was trying to be his usual composure and failing badly.

"Valerie," he said, the word slurring slightly at the edges. "You're — you're very good at your job."

"Okay, that's not normal. Are you drunk?"

"One glass." He tried to push himself up off the wall and immediately failed, his legs not cooperating, and Val crossed the distance between them fast, catching his arm before he went all the way down.

"One glass doesn't do this." She got a closer look at his eyes — pupils blown wide, unfocused, sweat beading along his hairline despite the cold hallway. Her stomach dropped with a fast, cold understanding. "Someone put something in your drink."

"That's..." He blinked slowly, like the sentence took real effort to process. "That's not a good theory for a Tuesday."

"It's Friday."

"Is it." He said it like this was fascinating information, and Val realized, with growing alarm, that whatever was in his system had him somewhere between drunk and genuinely dangerous territory — heart racing under her hand where she'd braced it against his chest to keep him upright, breathing too fast, sweating through a two-thousand-dollar shirt.

She had three options, and she ran through all of them in about four seconds. Call an ambulance and watch tomorrow's headlines write themselves — *Wood Group CEO hospitalized after gala, foul play suspected* — with her family's company's name attached to the worst night of his life. Call security and hope discretion held, though she had no way of knowing yet who she could trust in this building, or whether whoever had done this was still watching. Or handle it herself, quietly, and get him somewhere safe long enough to sober up and figure out the rest in the morning.

"Can you walk if I help you?" she asked.

"Anywhere you want," he said, with a loose, unguarded smile that had absolutely nothing to do with the man who'd told her *I'll be watching* in this same hallway less than a week ago, and everything to do with whatever chemical was currently taking his careful control apart piece by piece.

She got his arm over her shoulders and half walked, half carried him to her room — the events team kept two on the fourth floor for late nights, and hers was closest, and she was not, under any circumstances, walking a drugged billionaire through a hotel lobby full of guests and reporters at midnight. He was heavier than he looked, all solid weight leaning into her, and by the time she got the door shut behind them her arms were shaking with the effort.

She got him onto the bed, on his side, the way she remembered from some long-ago health class about exactly this kind of situation, and checked his pulse against her fingers, too fast but steady, and his breathing, ragged but even.

"Stay with me," she said, mostly to herself, pulling off his shoes, loosening his tie the rest of the way, keeping her voice low and steady the way you'd talk to something frightened. "You're okay. You're going to be okay."

"Val," he mumbled, eyes half closed, reaching for her hand with a clumsy, uncoordinated grip that found her wrist instead. "Don't let go."

"I'm not going anywhere."

She sat on the edge of the bed for the next three hours, checking his pulse every twenty minutes, keeping a bucket by the bed and a cool washcloth on his forehead, watching the worst of it slowly, slowly ease out of his system. Somewhere around two in the morning his breathing evened out into something like real sleep, his hand still loosely wrapped around her wrist, and Val allowed herself, for one unguarded moment in the dark, to actually look at him — the sharp lines of his face gone soft and unguarded in a way she was fairly sure almost nobody alive ever got to see, his usual careful control stripped completely away by something someone else had done to him on purpose.

*Someone did this on purpose.* The thought sat cold and ugly in her chest. Someone at that gala had wanted Lucian Wood incapacitated, publicly, in front of donors and press, and the only reason it hadn't become the story of the year was that she'd happened to be walking down the right hallway at the right time.

By four in the morning, certain he was stable and sleeping deeply, she carefully worked her wrist free of his loosened grip, left a glass of water and two aspirin on the nightstand, and let herself quietly out of the room — because whatever this had been, whatever it meant, she understood with total certainty that Lucian Wood would not want to wake up and find her there, and she had no intention of making him explain himself to her in the cold light of morning.

She didn't leave a note. She didn't think he'd remember enough of the night to need one.

---

Lucian woke at nine the next morning in an unfamiliar room, fully dressed except for his shoes, his head pounding like he'd been hit with something considerably worse than a hangover, with absolutely no memory of how he'd gotten there.

He sat up too fast, and the room spun, and it took him a full minute of careful, controlled breathing to get his bearings enough to look around — a hotel room, one of his own hotel's rooms, small and plain in the specific way of staff accommodations rather than guest suites, a glass of water and two aspirin sitting on the nightstand like someone had left them for him on purpose.

He had no memory past the ballroom floor tilting under his feet.

He drank the water. Took the aspirin. Sat on the edge of a bed that wasn't his, in a room he'd never been in, and tried to reconstruct a night that had simply stopped existing somewhere around the third hour of the gala.

It should have frightened him more than it did. He catalogued instead, with the same cold efficiency he applied to any unexpected variable — no missing possessions, wallet and phone both accounted for in his jacket pocket, no obvious signs of what had happened to him beyond the pounding skull and the gap in his memory that felt, disturbingly, like a physical absence rather than simple forgetting.

Someone had drugged him. He was almost certain of that much, piecing it together from the fog of memory that did remain — the wine tasting normal, the room tilting too fast to be alcohol, a hallway, a door.

Someone had also, apparently, gotten him safely out of that ballroom, into this room, and left him water and medicine before disappearing without a word.

He stood, testing his legs, and became aware, as he did, of a scent still caught in the fabric of the pillow beside him — something soft and clean, vanilla and something floral underneath it, faint but unmistakable, nothing like the sheets or soap this room would have provided on its own.

It hit him harder than it had any right to. Some part of his brain, underneath the pounding headache and the frightening blank space where last night should have been, reacted to that scent with a recognition so immediate and so physical that he went still for a full ten seconds, one hand braced on the nightstand, trying to understand why the smell of vanilla and something floral had just made his chest go tight in a way he had absolutely no memory to explain.

He didn't know who had taken care of him last night.

He was going to find out.