Chapter 5 THE FLASHBULB CAGE

By two o'clock the fortress is rebuilt. My blouse has no creases and my bun is tight enough to count as a decision, and I walk into the agency's media auditorium with my heels counting out each step like a metronome. The room is already white with flashbulbs.

Rows of reporters. Studio lights. A dais with five leather chairs and a row of microphones, and in the chair beside my place card, Pierce Montgomery, who has already begun to smile.

Pierce is the golden boy of the agency: a forward with a jawline made for billboards and a surname that opens doors without anyone knocking. As of this morning he is also a headline.

"Ah, the ice queen graces us." His voice carries to the third row and no farther, exactly as rehearsed. "I was beginning to worry you'd been swallowed by a spreadsheet."

"Focus on the microphone, Pierce," I murmur, smile fixed for the cameras. "Today is regional sponsorship tiers."

For twenty minutes, it nearly is. I walk the room through the new tier structure, the renewal rates, the regional spend, and I can feel the rhythm of the place settling around the numbers like water around stones. A man from a sports daily asks a sharp question about endorsement exclusivity, and I answer it better than he expected.

The pitcher of water on the table stays untouched. I don't take my eyes off the page.

Then a woman in the third row raises her pen. "Ms. DuBois, a question for you and Mr. Montgomery. The rumors. Is there anything you'd like to tell us?"

The room draws a breath.

"There's nothing to announce," I say.

"Come on, darling." Pierce drapes an arm along the back of my chair, close enough that his sleeve brushes my shoulder. "Everyone knows the real headline this season isn't the tiers. It's us. Right, folks?"

A delighted murmur rolls across the press corps. The shutters speed up.

"Ms. DuBois, are you and Mr. Montgomery shopping for rings?" someone calls from the back, and the laughter ripples.

"We're shopping for sponsors," I say. It earns a smattering of laughter and no relief at all.

This is what he is good at. Not hockey, though he's competent, but narrative: a hand placed just so, a word chosen to be clipped and replayed. This morning he called me his favorite distraction on television.

This afternoon he is writing the next chapter in front of two hundred witnesses.

"Daddy's watching," he murmurs, lips barely moving. "Smile."

"Take your arm off my chair," I murmur back, smiling for the cameras.

"Or what, darling?" He doesn't move it an inch.

I look toward the VIP box at the back of the room. My father sits with his hands folded and his face arranged in the small, cold smile I have spent my life learning to read. Approval. He is enjoying this.

The lights are hot enough to wilt the lilies on the dais. My phone vibrates against my knee, and I glance down beneath the table. Lean in. No name. He has never needed one.

I know exactly what I am allowed to do. If I pull away from Pierce, tomorrow's headline is Ice Queen Snaps. If I correct him sharply, it is Unstable Heir.

If I play along, I become the prop my father is paying for. There is a fourth door, but I can't see it, and every strobe feels like an interrogation lamp.

A reporter in the front row sees his opening. "Pierce, any thoughts on your new teammate at the agency? Liam Knox?"

"Knox?" Pierce laughs, easy and warm. "Great guy, for a wrecking ball. I'd keep him away from the glass." The room laughs with him. "Scarlett likes a project, though. Don't you, darling?"

Something at the back of the room changes the air.

Liam is standing by the double doors, half in shadow. He isn't on today's call sheet. His next appearance in the planner is tomorrow at noon, as I told him in writing, and he hates press events with the energy of a man who has spent his career being photographed mid-collision.

Yet here he stands in a team polo, hair still damp from the morning's ice, arms at his sides.

He is looking at Pierce's arm.

I watch it land. A muscle flickers at the hinge of his jaw. His hands curl, slowly, into fists, and the tape across his knuckles pulls taut.

He doesn't move. He stands the way a dog stands when it has decided not to bite, and some part of me recognizes what that stillness costs.

Pierce leans in again and murmurs something about drinks after the conference. His breath smells of mint and expensive coffee. I don't hear a word of it.

I look up and find Liam's eyes across the whole bright room.

For a long second it's just us: the flashbulbs, the microphones, and a man at the back who isn't supposed to be here, holding a line I haven't asked him to hold. I think of the planner on my desk, of every box I filled in with a color so he would never have to improvise. I did not schedule this.

Don't, I think, as plainly as I can. It's what he wants.

He gives the smallest shake of his head. I won't.

Then he opens his hands, one finger at a time, and breathes out.

No reporter turns. No camera swings. Of two hundred people in the room, only two have noticed what nearly happened, and one of them is my father.

In the VIP box, his smile has gone still. My phone vibrates again: Who invited him? I don't answer. I can guess whose name is at the top of the message he's typing next.

I turn back to the microphone. "To answer the question about renewals," I say, to nobody in particular and everybody at once, "we expect ninety-four percent next quarter, and I'd be happy to walk anyone through the regional breakdown."

Pierce lifts his arm from my chair at last, with a small, amused sigh. The shutters slow. A hand goes up at the back for the next question, and the afternoon moves on as if nothing happened.

Rule seven covers touch, and Liam hasn't touched anyone. But he has kept his word in a place I never wrote down, and I notice it the way you notice a draft from a window you were sure was shut.

Something has shifted under my ribs, quietly, like a latch being lifted. For the first time in this room, I am not entirely alone in it.