Twenty minutes earlier her hand had rested on his arm like a claim, like a flag planted on territory.

Now, with security closing the aisle and the folder on the lectern, she was already stepping back, already drawing a careful line between his crimes and hers, already becoming a woman who’d simply happened to be standing nearby.

It told me everything about what had actually held the two of them together, which was not love and not even lust but mutual advantage — each of them useful to the other’s ambitions, and neither of them, when the advantage curdled into liability, willing to go down for the other.

I would see it confirmed within the hour, when Lucan snapped be quiet at her across the ballroom and she flinched.

But I saw it first right here, in the speed of that step backward.

They had betrayed me together.