As Leo says lights the tree illuminates. Thousands of lights. Tens of thousands. The tree seems to burst into life, becoming gorgeous and glittering and larger somehow. A collective gasp goes up from the room, and people are clapping, and it’s so simple, this thing. It’s such an easy delight to watch the lights on a Christmas tree turn on. Anyone could enjoy it. Constantine. Morelli. Leo holds me tighter and I twist in his grasp to see his face.

Eva was wrong. He’s not trying to hide his smile. He’s grinning like a fool, his eyes reflecting the million starry pinpricks in the branches. I catch Daphne watching him from her spot a few yards off. She’s smiling, too. She notices me looking before I can figure out what the look in her eyes means. Daphne gives me a little wave over her champagne glass. Then her parents come by and she’s swept into their wake on the way to dinner.

People move all around us. Some of them come forward to see the tree in all its lit-up glory. Some of them seek out partners and friends on the way to their tables.

I take a deep breath and look back at the tree.

Leo has a small library in his bedroom at home. One wall is taken up with windows. They look over the curve of his driveway and the trees on either side of it. We were sitting in a chair by those windows when he told me how, when he was growing up, he would look forward to birthdays, vacations, and holidays. It broke my heart. When he said it, it sounded so much like a part of his past he’d given up. Like those things had been ruined for him forever. I thought they were too tangled up in all the sadness and fear and pain of those years for him to feel anything but resentment.

“How?” I ask.

“How what?”

“How do you love this so much? After everything.”

“It’s mine,” he says. “No one takes what’s mine. My father could ruin everything else if he wanted to, but not holidays. You heard the people in this room when the lights turned on. In that moment, nothing could be wrong.”

He tightens his grip around me.

My lungs become breathless. Useless. Leo’s legendary temper might be mostly myth, but that doesn’t mean he’s not deadly. It doesn’t mean he won’t hurt me in all the ways I want him to. It doesn’t mean he wouldn’t make an enormous fucking scene to embarrass Victoria Lowell. He slides his arm up to my elbow and turns me toward the exit. Ever the gentleman to anyone watching, but I feel the impatience in his grip. The promise, too.