We certainly looked the part of the perfect, pretty power couple: Stellan in a classic tuxedo, having perfected the look of I'm too good for this place, his blond hair mussed just enough to keep up the illusion. My dark hair contrasted with his, and my four-inch heels brought me just a little closer to his height, though he still towered over me. I was wearing some designer or another- Colette and Elodie had taken care of it. The dress was high-necked and black. It was beautiful, I supposed. A month ago, I would have had fun putting on something gorgeous and coming to some fancy party. Now my mom was dead and nothing else mattered.
"You doing okay?" he said. "I know being here is probably-"
"I'm fine." Maybe I was feeling a little tense, but nothing that was going to get in the way of what we were doing here.
Stellan twirled me. We'd rehearsed for tonight-for the politics and the Circle business and exactly what we needed to find out. But the dancing didn't require practice. Stellan always knew just how to guide me in the direction he wanted to go, and I knew just how to respond to his touch. I wasn't even that good a dancer, but I fell easily back into his arms at the end of the turn.
He brought my hand up between us, and his fingers skimmed my knuckles. They were red and raw. Hitting something was the only way I'd found to blunt the sharp edges of the things that lived in my chest. It turned out that wrapping my hands with athletic tape didn't work very well.
I snatched my hand back.
"We could find you something softer than a heavy bag to hit when you don't have gloves."
"Or you could mind your own business," I said with a sweet smile, but I wasn't surprised that he knew what I was doing. At least it wasn't Jack who had caught me. He would have posted guards outside my room so I could no longer leave at night, just in case I got murdered on the way to the hotel gym.
"Having your hands look like you're part of a back alley fight club doesn't exactly go with formal wear," Stellan said. "Next time, tell me and I'll hold some couch cushions for you to hit."
When I said nothing, he pressed, "Or you could get a new hobby. Knitting? Crossword puzzles. I bet you're a crossword puzzle girl. Or"-his eyes flicked to my mouth and his lips curled up in a sly smile-"I could help you release stress another way."
In the past, that might have gotten a rise out of me. Now I was just annoyed that he thought he had license to hear my innermost thoughts because we'd made out once. We'd twirled too close to some cousins of the Wang family, so I giggled like I was playing along. "If you really want me to punch you, I'll punch you," I murmured. "Can you please drop it?"
"Actually, no. You've hardly said more than ‘pass the salt' for weeks, and now I have you here and you can't run off." He curled a hand tighter into my waist to prove the point. "I'd like to at least know that inside that pretty little head you're not planning to murder me."
"Not currently."
I pushed away from him, following the steps of the dance, and he caught my opposite hip. "Kuklachka-"
"While we're at it, don't do that," I said. "The little doll thing. I'm not. Not yours, despite this arrangement, and not the Circle's, either."
"Avery," he said pointedly.
Over the past weeks, I kept thinking I'd pushed him away enough that he'd stop trying to draw me out, but he was persistent. Jack knew how it felt to not want to talk. Elodie was distracted and busy lately. But Stellan had zero boundaries. I pulled him down like I wanted to whisper something sweet and romantic. "If you have a problem with how I'm playing the role of your wife, tell me. Otherwise, I don't care, I don't want to talk about it, and I don't need your help."
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Miguel Reyes approaching. "Time to play thirteenth family," I murmured.
There was a master of ceremonies for tomorrow who had been gathering information from everyone's records and putting it together into this initiation ritual, but we couldn't talk to him. We couldn't ask anyone directly, in fact. It would look too suspicious. There were a couple of families we could count as allies, but most still looked at us with a mix of awe and skepticism that we-this small outsider girl with strands of pink in her hair and her "husband," who had been a Keeper for the Dauphin family for years-had suddenly become the Circle's saviors. The fact that we were suddenly pumping them for information wouldn't make them less wary. Luc had told us that some of the families were more thorough about passing down history than his, and might know specifics about the initiation, so we had a plan.