I stood up straight.

I adjusted the strap of my dress, slowly, deliberately, giving my hands something steady to do while the heat behind my eyes resolved itself into something colder and more useful.

Heat is useless in a moment like that.

Heat makes you loud and clumsy and easy to dismiss as hysterical, which is precisely the reaction a man like Damian is counting on, because it lets him be the reasonable one.

So I did what I had trained myself to do across twenty years of rooms designed to make me feel small: I let the heat pass through me and out, and kept only the cold clarity it left behind, which is the thing that actually wins.