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"Too late. It's out. You can add it to the list of things you're furious about."

My parents showed up earlier than expected with Denis and Février, all dressed in impeccable custom suits. They are all standing here drinking champagne and laughing at something one of the Novak men is saying to them. Every so often I catch my father's face in the half-second before he laughs, when his expression hasn't changed, and there's nothing decipherable in it at all. No clue as to what he's thinking or feeling.

About an hour later, my father raises his glass and the whole room goes quiet. Thirty, forty conversations killed in a split second. The man has a knack for walking into a room full of dangerous men and making every single one of them shut up by lifting his hand. It never stops being terrifying, even when you're his daughter. Especially when you're his daughter.

Which is why this is all the more mind-boggling. That he's fine with whatever's happening with me and Laszlo today. True, I insisted on honoring my agreement, but that’s not the point.

He's put together really well, not sporting the rolled shirtsleeves and open collar he wears when the mask is off. This is the charming Henri Valmont he shows in social circles.

"I have known the Novak family for thirty years," my father says.

That's a polite way of putting it. Other ways of putting it include: two blood feuds, a warehouse fire, a thing that happened in 1997 that nobody in either family is allowed to mention, and my father's cousin who moved to Argentina and has not come back.

Somebody on the stairs laughs, a short, nervous sound, the kind people make at funerals when the priest says something accidentally honest. My father doesn't react. He just waits, glass in the air, until the silence comes back to him on its own.

"I have a daughter who left this family at eighteen and told me she wanted nothing to do with any of it." He pauses. Not for effect, because that's still a wound and he often reminds me of it. This is no exception, of course. He’s got an audience to boot. "She became a doctor. She saves lives. I don't know where she gets it from. Not my side. Certainly not her mother's."

Another random laugh goes round the room. My mother catches my eye, and she looks dead serious.

He turns and finds me, then lifts the glass an inch.

"Manon. Mon cœur."

That's all he says. Just my name and the term of endearment he's always used with me, and it is the cruelest thing he has ever done to me in public, because it sounds like love and everybody in this room believes it.

The room erupts with cheering, so many glasses in the air. Denis roars something in French, and somebody makes a whistling sound on the landing. My father crosses the floor. He takes Laszlo's hand in both of his and shakes it, nothing on his face but delight.

That's the performance, although I’m not sure now what’s real and what isn’t. That's what Laszlo bought. My father, smiling, in a great suit, shaking the hand of a man he'd happily bury if the terms were different. But the man doesn’t appear put out at all. He agreed to everything, after all—the only changes requested were more about his reputation than my wellbeing. Now he's standing in the man's house calling me his heart.

I clap and smile, do everything I'm supposed to do while all these guests toast the worst thing that's ever happened to me.

CHAPTER 7

Manon

Laszlo appears at my side. I don't know how he materialized here so fast, but his hand is on my back again and my body reacts of its own volition around him, which I refuse to acknowledge.

"Enjoying yourself?" I ask.

"Enormously. You?"

"I'm at my own engagement party, being chained to a man I didn't choose, watching my father shake his hand like they're old friends. I'm having the time of my life."

"That's the spirit."

No sarcasm in his tone, and that has me itching to slap him.

It's a quarter to ten when Marcus Whitlow finds me by the window, and for a moment I'm delighted to see him, then I realize he's had way too much to drink.

He's got a glass in each hand and appears clueless about it. His tie has gone loose. He was my attending for four years, showed emotion when I passed my boards. I think he is the least dangerous man in this building right now.

"Valmont." He hasn't called me that since I was a resident. "Look at you. You're a stunner. Don't tell my wife I said that. She's by the cake."

"You came."

"Of course I came. The whole department came. Barnes is drunk. Barnes is drunk in a funeral home, Manon. I want something catchy like that on my headstone." He hands me one of his glasses. "Now. Before I lose the ability to walk, I need to find the Halsted people and thank them properly, because I made a mess of it in March and I've felt sick about it since. Where have they put them?"

"Who?"