Frozen Vengeance: The Last Meal

Chapter 15

# Chapter 15: The Engagement Party

The invitation arrived by courier on a Tuesday, embossed in gold foil expensive enough that Rafi knew before he opened it exactly whose handwriting he'd find on the card inside.

*The Dela Fuente and Aranzanso families request the pleasure of your company in celebrating the engagement of Marco Antonio Dela Fuente and Cristina Isabel Aranzanso. December, at the Manila Polo Club.*

Rafi turned the card over twice, half-expecting some kind of trick, before he understood that there wasn't one. Marco genuinely hadn't thought to leave him off the guest list — or worse, had thought about it and decided that inviting the ex-husband of his soon-to-be-exposed mistress was exactly the kind of casual cruelty that suited him. The Dela Fuente family had known Rafi for nine years as Bel's steady, unremarkable husband, a man who showed up to obligatory functions and left early. There was no reason, in Marco's calculus, that this occasion should be any different.

He hadn't accounted for what nine years and three hundred forty million pesos could do to a man's calculus in return.

"You're actually going," Domingo said flatly, the morning of the party, watching Rafi adjust his cufflinks in the hallway mirror with the particular disapproval of a security chief whose job had just gotten considerably harder.

"I am."

"Sir, we still don't know who the man in the electrical crew was working for. Walking into a room full of the Dela Fuente family's entire social circle three days after we confirmed someone's had eyes inside this house is—"

"Is exactly where I need to be seen," Rafi said, meeting Domingo's eyes in the mirror. "If someone wants to understand what I've become, they can watch me do it in front of everyone who spent nine years underestimating me."

Domingo didn't look happy about it, but he didn't argue again. He simply doubled the men assigned to the venue and rode in the car behind Rafi's the entire way to the Polo Club, saying nothing, watching everything.

The ballroom was exactly as Rafi remembered such gatherings being — chandeliers doing their best to compete with the collective self-regard of everyone standing beneath them, a string quartet playing something inoffensive near the bar, women in gowns that cost more than most Filipino families earned in a year discussing nothing of consequence with the particular intensity reserved for people who'd never had to worry about anything that actually mattered.

He felt every head turn as he crossed the threshold.

Word had clearly spread beyond Mahogany Street. Whispers followed him across the room in a wave, faces he vaguely recognized from nine years of forgettable dinners now watching him with the sharpened, hungry curiosity of people recalibrating exactly how much attention a person deserved. Rafi accepted a glass of champagne from a passing waiter and let the attention wash over him without reaction, the way he'd learned to let far worse things wash over him in a life these people had no idea he'd already lived.

He found Marco near the center of the room, arm looped possessively around a young woman Rafi recognized instantly from the society pages — Cristina Aranzanso, pretty and poised and utterly unaware, judging by the easy way she laughed at something Marco murmured against her temple, of exactly what her fiancé had spent the last several years doing on the side.

Marco saw him a half-second later, and Rafi watched something complicated cross his face — surprise first, then the fast, practiced calculation of a man deciding how to play a scene in front of an audience.

"Rafi." Marco extended a hand with a smile that didn't reach his eyes. "Didn't expect you to actually come."

"Wouldn't have missed it." Rafi shook the offered hand, gripping it exactly one second longer than was comfortable, and turned to the woman beside him. "You must be Cristina. Congratulations."

"Thank you!" Cristina's smile was genuine, unguarded, the smile of someone who had no reason yet to be careful. "Marco's told me so much about his old friends. I don't think he's mentioned you, actually — how do you two know each other?"

The pause that followed lasted only a second, but Rafi watched Marco's grip tighten fractionally around his fiancée's waist, watched the practiced charm flicker at the edges like a screen losing signal.

"We go back a long way," Rafi said, letting the silence stretch just long enough to make Marco visibly uncomfortable before he continued, mild and unhurried. "Family friend, you could say."

Cristina laughed, delighted, entirely missing the tension humming beneath the surface of the exchange. "That's sweet. Marco doesn't talk about his family much."

"No," Rafi said, holding Marco's eyes, "I imagine he doesn't."

Marco's jaw tightened, and for one dangerous second Rafi thought he might actually say something reckless in front of his own engagement party, in front of a room full of people whose opinion mattered more to Marco than almost anything else in his carefully curated life. Then Elena's voice cut across the ballroom, sharp with performed delight, and Rafi turned to see her approaching in a gown clearly purchased for an occasion she'd expected to attend as triumphant mother of the bride, not as a woman three weeks removed from watching her daughter's entire marriage collapse into scandal.

"Rafael." Elena's smile was a masterclass in social armor, brittle at the edges but holding. "I didn't realize you'd be joining us tonight."

"Marco was gracious enough to include me," Rafi said, watching her flinch almost imperceptibly at the name. "Where's Bel? I'd have thought she'd want to be here, given the company."

The flinch this time was visible.

"Isabel isn't feeling well," Elena said, too quickly, too smooth. "She sends her regrets."

Rafi let the lie sit there, unchallenged, savoring it the way he'd once savored nothing at all in nine years of a marriage built on exactly this kind of careful, collective pretending. He was midway through composing his exit — a graceful excuse, a drink refreshed, an early departure that would leave the room buzzing for days — when Domingo's voice crackled low and urgent through the earpiece he'd insisted Rafi wear despite his objections.

"Sir. We have a problem at the east entrance. The man from the surveillance footage — the electrician — he just walked in."