Page 126 of Late Nights & Love Lines
I nod, scanning our surroundings while my mind replays the events of the last few minutes.
“Ready?” he asks. When I nod, he leads me through another set of double doors that opens to something straight out of Never Land.
Holy crap. It’s beautiful in here. Fairy lights twinkle from above, and delicate rows of ivy scale the walls.
“The sisters are part of the family that puts on the gala,” Seb continues, nodding toward an obscenely long table that runs down the center of the room. “They’ll all sit there.”
“That’s a big family.”
“You’re telling me.”
“We’re at table twenty-two,” he says, ushering me forward.
I almost stumble over my stilettos. Why? What have I done to the number gods this time? The number twenty-two hangs over my head—a flashing neon sign warning of bad omens.
Nothing good happens with the number twenty-two, hasn’t anyone else realized this? Someone really needs to ban it like they do the number thirteen on elevators.
“Here we are,” Sebastian says, oblivious to the bad omen clinging to me tighter than my dress. He pulls out my chair, and I sink into it with his hand on my shoulder, but when he doesn’t slide the chair in, I lean back to peer up at him.
His face is white, and the grip on my shoulder begins to ache. “Sebastian,” I whisper, attempting to lower my shoulder from his grasp.
He removes his fingers one at a time as though it’s taking him great effort to do so.
“Are you okay?” I place my clutch on the table and attempt to stand, but he holds me down in my chair. That’s when I realize he’s not even looking at me.
Following his gaze, I find the woman from the restroom, nervously fidgeting with a napkin next to me, and beside her is a man wearing a sneer so bitter I recoil.
“What did I tell you, Mya?” Sebastian’s words slice through the air as menacing as a murderer.
“I didn’t know you’d be here,” she says. Her hands shake more violently, and then his words hit me.
Mya.
As in his ex-wife?
“You spoke to him?” the man to her left hisses. “You fucking called him?”
Sebastian takes a seat to my right. His right hand is balled into a fist at his side, but he uses his left hand to drag my chair as far away from Mya as he can get it.
The man next to Mya snarls in my direction, but he barely registers as I tilt my gaze back to Sebastian. The muscles around his eyes are tight, and the vein in his throat throbs to an angry rhythm.
“Do you even care that Miles could have died?” Sebastian asks through clenched teeth.
Curiosity has me turning toward Mya, and I register the shock on her face. She didn’t know about Miles.
“You won’t get Coleman Industries back, no matter what you think you’re about to pull off here,” the stranger at our table chuckles.
“I’m not here to fucking talk to you, Nick.”
My heart flip-flops in my chest. The two people Sebastian trusted above all else. The two people who crushed his trust as if it were nothing sit glaring—Nick at Sebastian, and Mya at the table.
Placing my hand on Sebastian’s thigh, I squeeze, then squeeze again when he doesn’t look at me. It takes three more attempts before he registers the contact, and he glances down at me. His gaze softens a touch.
I lean into his chest, and he wraps a protective arm around me. “She’s sick,” I whisper. “Mya, she’s sick.”
His gaze snaps to his ex-wife, and I study him as he scans her features. Her cheeks are hollow, her skin tone a little gray, but it’s the wig that she didn’t bother to finish adjusting that gives her away.
A myriad of emotions play across his features, but he locks them all tightly behind a mask when an older man joins the table and takes the seat next to him.
