And with every ounce of my power, I left her there with those sharks, knowing she could hold her own and hating that she had to do it alone all the same.

My mind whirred with fury and spite as I worked on the table. The only way I survived was a continuous reminder that I wasn’t going to make this table look spectacular for Natasha Felix. But for Lila, I’d do anything. Even make that eel’s birthday look good.

I watched her move around the room, never still for longer than necessary. She greeted the Felix Femmes as they arrived with entourages in tow, directed her interns, fielded interruptions from the caterer, the DJ, hotel employees. And she did it all with that cool confidence, the control and command she ruled her environment with.

When the banquet table was set up and the garlands hung, I made my way around the room under the guise of double-checking the centerpieces. With Lila directing her interns, I had no doubt that they’d been done to the letter. But it gave me the opportunity to get closer to the Felixes and that fucking asshole Natasha had brought to parade in front of Lila like a prized pony.

I hated him, deeply and unreasonably. I didn’t even know the guy, and the honest truth was that I had no place to call him an asshole. All he’d ever done was hurt her.

But by that measure, he was irredeemable.

The Felix women quieted when I neared, shifting things on a nearby table without purpose. The men excused themselves for the bar, and the second they were gone, rustling whispers fluttered at my back.

“Excuse me,” one of them said. “I think this one’s wrong.”

When I turned, three-fourths of the Felix sisters eyed me hungrily, along with their mother, who I’d been sure I was going to marry when I was a kid, and I had a stack of Sports Illustrated with a bikini-clad Sorina Felix on the cover to prove it. The men of the pack gathered near the bar, sipping amber liquid from crystal glasses with flat, bored faces that said nothing short of, If we’re here, we might as well drink.

Sure enough, it looked like the centerpiece was missing one of its candles.

“I see,” I said with the smile I used to get women to smile back, belying my annoyance. No way had that candle not made it onto the table. Which meant one of the Femmes had taken it.

“I wonder if it’s back there,” Sofia said with a flick of her hand. “Maybe one of those interns lost it in the green stuff.”

The “green stuff” was fern, a spray of it large enough to hide a candle, it was true. Nestled in its fronds were three lanterns—one of them devoid of its lighting—filled with flowers and moss.