The ballroom smelled of wax candles and old money — a scent Eleanor had come to associate with deception. She adjusted her mask, a gilded confection of peacock feathers and lies, and descended the staircase with the practiced grace of a woman who had learned to hide every tremor of uncertainty beneath silk and smiles.

Across the glittering floor, Thomas Hartwell stood by the window, his back to her. Even from this distance, even in the chaos of three hundred masked strangers, she would know the particular set of his shoulders, the way he held his champagne glass like a weapon he hadn't decided whether to use.

She should leave. She had told herself exactly that for the last four nights, repeating it like a prayer in the dark hours before dawn when the house settled and groaned around her and she could hear, or imagined she could hear, footsteps in the corridor outside her room.

She didn't leave.

"You came." His voice reached her before she'd crossed half the distance between them. He hadn't turned. "I wasn't certain you would."

"I almost didn't." The truth, for once. She stopped at his shoulder, close enough to speak without being overheard by the couples drifting past in their silks and pretenses. "Your note was rather cryptic, Mr. Hartwell."

"Thomas." He turned then, and she had half a second to arrange her expression before she saw his eyes — that particular shade of grey she had been trying, with limited success, to forget. "I thought we'd established Thomas."