2026-08-19 12:32:08
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380 Love in the Air
The ballroom heard Ivy's dedication and lost its mind."Ivy Solaris finally found someone? She's been single by choice for years!""Who is the lucky guy?""It has to be another bigtime celebrity.""It's that actor from the billboards. They've been together since spring, it was in the paper.""No. It's the tennis player."Eight hundred people guessed out loud, and every one of them had a famous name in it.They did not look at Tyler Grant, sitting up at Don Camilla's table with a chicken bone in his hand. Nobody in that ballroom knew he existed.Ivy lifted the microphone and sang.Tyler put down his chicken and left it down. It was a slow song, and her voice filled the hall to the ceiling, and the audience went so quiet you could hear the ice melting in the glasses.Annika watched Tyler through the entire song. She was waiting for a smile, a flush, a swallow, anything a man's face does when a woman sings to him in front of a city.She got nothing. Ivy Solaris was singing to the whole c
379 Fried Chicken
Tyler pulled the fried chicken toward him and kept eating, but he ate with his eyes on the doors Camilla had gone through.Her remaining men had noticed her leaving too.Twenty of the goons in dark suits stood up from tables across the front of the room and drifted in until they'd made a loose ring around Tyler, facing outward.Nobody had told them to.A heavy man with a shaved head spoke to the others without turning round."Don Camilla brought him home tonight. Whatever he is to her, nobody gets near him until she's back.""He's more than a guest," said the man beside him. "She walked him in on her arm, and she bolted her door with him behind it last night. Do the math.""I did. That's why my mind is made up."Tyler heard every word and went on eating. Twenty gangsters had decided he was their future boss, and the only thing he wanted from them was that they stayed out of the waiter's path.Across the ballroom, Annika Salvatore was having the worst night of her year.Her grandfather
378 The Apology
Tyler came through the doors of the Grand Meridian ballroom on Don Camilla's arm, and eight hundred of the richest people in Sapphire City stopped talking at once.The room was the size of a football field. Chandeliers as big as cars hung from a gold ceiling, a stage stood ready under a bank of lights at the far end, and waiters moved between the tables with towers of champagne."Who is the handsome hunk with Don Camilla? Her boy toy?""A gangster woman like her probably uses and discards men like tissues."Camilla leaned toward Tyler's ear."My table's at the front. The food's already on it, and I ordered double of everything.""Then why are we standing here?"Before she could take a step, Vivian Anderson came out of the crowd in a white gown, looking stunning. Men's eyes turned towards her just like they did for Camilla.She was heading straight for them.Camilla looked the heiress up and down once, then let go of Tyler's arm. "Don't be long, the food's getting cold."She walked off
377 Heads Held High
Dewey knelt on the red carpet, holding his arms together and shaking so hard his teeth were going.It wasn't only the whip. His forearm was laid open, and his face had swelled up red as a tomato where she had hit him, and neither of those was why he couldn't stop shaking.Tyler Grant was Don Camilla's date.Dewey said it out loud to nobody at all. There's no version of this world where that was possible.Dewey had spent eleven years on that door learning to size up a man in three seconds, and he'd put this one down as a beggar. He had offered him leftovers at the service entrance. He had promised to put him face down on the road in front of six thousand people.The kid in the cheap shirt was the date of the woman who ran half of Sapphire City.Beside him, Rodney Cooper had gone the colour of a dead fish."Oh, God. Oh God, oh God."His father had one standing rule and had said it to him so many times that he could hear it in his sleep.Never go near Dorian Vex. Never go near Don Camill
376 My Date
Huxley stood in the middle of the red carpet and couldn't make his legs work.Eleven days ago he had taken fifty men and a roadblock out onto the north road to collect the Salvatore heiress for Rodney Cooper. He had watched this same young man drink a juice box while it happened.Then the water came.Huxley had gone a quarter of a mile down that road inside it, upside down, with cars going past him in the flood. Two of his men were still in hospital. One of them wouldn't walk properly again."Go on," Rodney said behind him. "What are you standing there for? Take him apart."Huxley didn't move.Tyler looked over at him and gave him a thin smile."I hope you boys dried off all right. Sorry I didn't stop to say a proper goodbye."That did it.Huxley made a sound six thousand people heard, a high strangled squeal, and he turned and ran.Eleven men went with him. They shoved past photographers, knocked over a whole section of the barrier rope, and didn't stop until they were round the corn
375 Leftovers
The limousine door opened and Annika Salvatore stepped out onto the carpet.She stood six feet tall barefoot, and her heels were adding another four inches to that. Dark red dress, bare shoulders, black hair all the way down her back. The crowd at the barrier made a sound like something had been taken off them."That's the Salvatore girl!""Look at the height of her. She's like something off a mountain."Four hundred cameras turned away from the doors and went off in her face.Annika was used to it and she walked past all of it, and then about ten feet from the entrance she stopped dead.There was a young man at the gate with four security men closing in around him.She knew that face. She had driven that face six hundred miles out of an ice prison eleven days ago, and she had watched him raise a wave of water out of a juice box and wash fifty armed men down a road.Annika changed direction and walked over."What's going on here?"Dewey turned around and his whole body changed shape.
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