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7

SEBASTIAN

The hardest thing I’ve ever done is keeping the professional distance required of me from Estella.

I want to go to her. It’s as if every feeling I’ve ever had for her has been dialed up to eleven, made impossibly hard to control by the suffocating weight of grief that’s surrounding us all. It’s as if my every desire is screaming at me that nothing matters anymore, that I should give us both what we want, what we need—because who knows what happens tomorrow? I should go and wrap my arm around Estella, pull her into me, and stay there by her side so that she knows she’s not alone in all of this.

Logic warns me that if I were to do that, I’d be fired in an instant, and then she wouldn’t have my protection or comfort at all—not even in the small ways that I can offer it.

So I hang back. The service, the burial, all of it hurt in ways that I’m unaccustomed to feeling. I’ve been lucky enough not to bury someone I cared about before, and I cared about Luis like a friend—brotherly, almost, though I wouldn’t dare to compare my own grief to Estella’s. But coating all of that is the pain of having to watch her go through it—seeing the look in her eyes, the tears sliding down her cheeks, the slump of her shoulders—and not being able to do anything about it but offer her my arm to and from the church and stay nearby.

It goes against every instinct I have to keep my distance from her right now, but what the hell else am I supposed to do?

Once again, I’m reminded that I’m not anything to her but a bodyguard. And while she and I might feel differently about what that means, I know what it means to her father.

It means I hang back, stay out of sight, and deal with threats if they appear.

Estella’s grief isn’t a threat I’m supposed to address.

The reception is tedious as hell. It’s just a somber business meeting, everyone who knows Antony Gallo or has some connection to him appearing to eat his food and offer platitudes, and make sure he sees them doing it so he knows that they made an appearance. It irritates me, because out of all of them, I’d be willing to bet that only a few actually care that Luis Gallo is dead. The rest just want to make sure that they do the socially appropriate thing and show up.

When I can’t take the oppressive weight of the living room gathering any longer, I check to make sure Estella is occupied and slip out to talk to Brick. He’s at the far end of the hall with two other men, and I can see from his face that he’s exhausted.

“Sinclair.” He greets me as I approach, and I nod. “Hanging in there?”

“Best as I can.” I glance around the hall, seeing several guests heading back to the dining room. “Anything I should know about? Security issues, anything like that?”

Brick shakes his head. “From what I’ve seen and the information I have so far, they’re not looking to strike here. They got what they wanted—the boss’s eldest son dead, and that shipment that he was overseeing. To what end, I don’t know.” He shrugs, and I can see from the tension in his shoulders and his jaw that it’s not the casual gesture he wants it to be. “If the bossknows, he’s not sharing that information. So I’m just doing my job.”

“Same here.” I stare out past Brick, not really seeing the people moving through the hallways and rooms. They’re all the same to me, anyway. The only one I really care about is back in the living room, pale as a ghost and looking like she might topple over at any moment. And if she does, I can’t catch her—not in public, anyway.

The thought makes my jaw clench. “I’m going to go check on Estella,” I say abruptly, and head back into the living room, where I see her sitting on one of the couches, clutching a glass of water that she doesn’t seem to have taken a sip from.

I can only make sure she’s taking care of herself in private. I can’t go up to her and urge her to drink right now. I can’t make sure she’s eaten. I can’t do anything other than make sure no one in this room hurts her, and I’m fairly sure the chance of that approaches nil.

But I watch, all the same, because it’s all I can do.

When the reception is finally,finallyover, Estella gets to her feet. I see her wobble slightly as the last person walks out of the door, and her father follows closely behind, leaving just her and me in the room. I cross the room to her quickly, reaching out to grasp her elbow as she stands.

“I’m fine,” she says, but a blind man could see that she isn’t.

“You should go upstairs and lie down,” I say quietly. “It’s been a hard day, princess, you need to rest?—”

“I want to go to the sunroom,” she interrupts. “You can come with me, if you want.”

As if I’d leave her alone for even a second, right now.

She tugs her arm away from my grasp—whether because she doesn’t want to be touched or because it’s not a good idea for us to be seen touching, I don’t know, but the latter is painfully true. I let my hand drop to my side, following her out of theformal living room and down the hallways to the sunroom that overlooks the gardens.

We walk inside, and I see the painting that she was working on the other day still sitting on the easel, her tools clean and in the roll of fabric that she keeps them in. Estella pauses in front of it, reaching out to run her fingertips over the raised ridges of paint.

“Luis was always so impressed by my paintings,” she says softly, her voice little more than a whisper. “He helped convince Dad to let me go to college for fine art. He said it would be a terrible waste if I didn’t get to become the best painter I could possibly be.”

She swallows hard, and I see tears brimming in her eyes as she touches the painting. “We used to talk about how I wanted to open a gallery. He said he’d be there opening night, that he’d tell everyone he knew to buy a painting. Once he was don, he said, he’d make sure that a piece of my art hung in every mansion of every family we ever did business with.”

“You’d hate that,” I say without thinking. “You’d want them to buy it because they love it, not because your brother made it conditional.”

Estella turns sharply to look at me, something that I can’t quite read gleaming in her eyes. “You know me really well,” she murmurs. “That’s exactly what I told Luis. I told him that I’d rather have a gallery full of unsold paintings than have even one of them go to someone who didn’t feel something when they looked at it.” She smiles sadly. “He always thought they were so beautiful, but he didn’t love art the way I do. It didn’t make him feel things the way it makes me feel things.”