Owen noticed me looking past him and turned to see what I was so interested in.

“Eva’s here with me and Jillian,” he explained, facing me once more. “We all rode over together with Phillip and Roslyn.”

I nodded. Finn had told me that Roslyn was coming to the exhibit with someone else, since Xavier, her significant other, had to work tonight along with Bria. I just hadn’t thought that someone else would be Phillip. Then again, Roslyn owned Northern Aggression, the city’s most decadent nightclub. She knew everyone who was anyone in Ashland, including all of the underworld players like Kincaid.

Finn must have felt me staring at him, because he glanced in my direction. He started to look away but stopped and did a double take just as Jillian had. He stared at her a moment, then at me, his eyes flicking back and forth between our identical dresses.

Owen hesitated. “Actually, the reason Eva, Phillip, Jillian, and I are all here is that Finn gave me several extra tickets for the gala. He said that someone had given a bunch of them to him at his bank and he didn’t want us to miss out on the exhibit. He also said to think of it as part of his apology to me for everything that . . . happened between us.”

That everything had included Finn holding a gun on Owen while I cut Salina’s throat. Needless to say, Owen had been plenty pissed about that, mostly at me, for asking Finn to do such a thing in the first place. Still, it didn’t surprise me that he’d talked to my foster brother and had taken the tickets from him. Finnegan Lane could be exceptionally persuasive when he put his mind to it. Besides, what had happened that night had been my doing, no one else’s. The responsibility, the burden of that, was mine to bear, and so was the guilt.

“Did he, now?” I murmured. “How considerate of him.”

Finn had been so insistent that I come to the exhibit that I hadn’t thought too much about exactly why he wanted me here in the first place. Oh, sure, he’d said that Bria was busy and that he wanted to get me out of the house and have some fun, but I was beginning to think he’d had an ulterior motive in mind. Getting me and Owen into the same space was exactly the sort of sneaky, underhanded thing Finn would do and then claim it was for my own good. I loved my foster brother, truly I did, but sometimes his cheerful meddling made me want to wring his neck.

This was one of those times.

“Well,” I said, giving Owen and Jillian a bright smile. “Please excuse me. I really need to go see what Finn is up to. Jillian, it was nice to meet you.”

“You too,” she replied.