I took Malcolm’s hand, and I turned, and I faced two hundred people under the bright blue light.

Damian stood where I had left him, and the gray had come into his face now, the specific gray of a man watching a structure he believed permanent come apart in real time.

Camilla had stepped a full pace away from him.

In the stage light her red gown no longer read as power; it read as the single most visible thing in the room, and she seemed, for the first time all evening, to understand that being impossible to overlook was not the same as being safe.

She had dressed, that night, to be seen, and she had succeeded beyond anything she intended.