A rope of pearls.
Her silver-blonde hair in a chignon that had never in my lifetime been out of place.
She looked like the last of some old dynasty, a woman who had spent seventy years bending the world into the shape she preferred and being obeyed.
“Auden,” she began, in that voice of exquisitely controlled maternal suffering, “do you have the faintest idea what you have done tonight?
The Wexleys are sitting in the conservatory.
The press is on the sidewalk.
Saskia is in tears in front of two hundred people, and Idris Wexley is threatening to pull his firm out of the European expansion entirely, and for what?
For a tantrum?
For—”
Her voice stopped.
She had come far enough into the apartment to see past the entryway, and her eyes had swept across the marble kitchen and found Yelena standing beside it, and for one single unguarded instant the mask came all the way off.
I saw what was underneath.
Pure, undiluted venom — a hatred so old and so complete it took my breath — before she folded it back under a layer of ice.
“You,” Viveca said softly.