Instead of sitting, Charles stepped down from the low stage, champagne still in hand, his polished shoes making a soft but decisive sound against the marble floor as he approached her, and those nearest could see the change in his expression from curated charm to something sharper, something proprietary.
“Take them off,” he murmured, the smile gone now, replaced by a tightening at the corners of his mouth. “You’re making a spectacle of yourself, and by extension, of me.”
“I won’t,” she replied, and there was no defiance in her tone, only a boundary stated as fact.
The slap came not as a wild swing but as a swift, controlled motion, almost businesslike in its execution, which made the sound all the more shocking as it cracked through the ballroom’s cultivated elegance and ricocheted off crystal and glass.
Lillian’s head turned with the force, a faint red bloom appearing against her cheekbone, and somewhere to the left a champagne flute slipped from numb fingers and shattered against the floor, the shards scattering like punctuation marks in a sentence no one had anticipated.
For a fraction of a second, time stalled in that suspended silence where disbelief wrestles with comprehension, and Charles’s hand remained midair as if even he needed a moment to register what he had done in front of an audience he had spent decades trying to impress.
It was Rowan who moved first, though “moved” suggests speed when in reality it was precision; he stepped forward and intercepted Charles’s wrist before it could lower, his grip firm but not crushing, controlled in the way that only someone intimately acquainted with force can afford to be.
“You will not touch her again,” Rowan said, his voice low enough that only the nearest guests heard the exact words, yet steady enough that the intent traveled farther than volume ever could.
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