Rupert had spent eight years assuming I heard nothing.

In fact I had heard everything.

I had simply been waiting, without quite admitting it to myself, for the one sound that was wrong enough to get up for.

The kiss was not that sound.

The kiss was theater.

The sound I had been waiting eight years for, I had already found, months earlier, in a safe he was certain I couldn’t open.

Chapter 2 — Eight Years

To understand why that ballroom went the way it did, you have to understand how Rupert Brandt came to be standing under that banner at all — because he did not climb there.

He was lifted.

When I met him, eight years earlier, he was a mid-level manager with an expensive haircut and a talent for being in the right doorway when someone important walked through it.