Lila looked up from the grill, her violet contacts catching the overhead light. She looked at Harrison across the dining room, then back at Alexis, then back at Harrison, and made a face like she’d bitten into something sour.

"That guy? They’re marrying you off to that guy? He looks like a LinkedIn profile picture came to life."

"That’s remarkably accurate," Brooke said.

"He looks like he’d explain crypto to you at a party you didn’t want to attend," Lila continued. "He looks like he refers to his personality as ’grindset.’ He looks like—"

"He can hear you," Alexis snapped. "Not that. But he could. If you got louder."

Lila got louder.

"He looks like he’d cry during a Ted Talk about disruption!"

"Oh my god."

Kumiko was giggling into her hands. Even Chloe’s mouth twitched. And Jordan, the absolute menace, leaned back against the booth and folded his arms and watched Alexis’s face like it was the most interesting thing in the restaurant.

"You okay, princess?"

Alexis wanted to scream.

She was not okay. She was standing in a Korean barbecue restaurant in a dress she’d chosen specifically because it made Harrison look at her with something close to interest, and instead she’d walked directly into Jordan McKnight’s harem, and Jordan was looking at her with more warmth in one glance than Harrison had managed across three excruciating dinners, and her heart was doing the stupid embarrassing thing again, and she hated all of it.

She hated the goth girl for being funny.

She hated the crimson-eyed one for being right about the char.

She hated Chloe for watching her like a hawk watching a mouse.

She hated Kumiko for being sweet.

And she hated Jordan.

She hated Jordan most of all, because he’d changed everything, because he’d walked into her orbit as a joke and turned into the one variable her carefully controlled life couldn’t account for, because he had four women looking at him like he hung the moon and he still had time to notice the twitch in her jaw and ask if she was okay.

"I’m fine," Alexis said.

"You’re doing the thing," Kumiko said helpfully.

"What thing?"

"The jaw thing. Jordan does it too when he’s stressed. It’s cute. You two match."

"We do not match."

Chloe set her wine glass down.

The sound was soft. But it landed like a gavel.

"Alexis," Chloe said. "How’s your night going?"

The question was innocent. The tone was not.

Alexis had spent eighteen years learning to read subtext. She heard everything Chloe wasn’t saying. The reminder that Jordan was Chloe’s. The warning wrapped in politeness. The invitation to leave.

And Alexis, who could hold a room by walking into it, who could end a social career with a single Instagram story, who had never in her life backed down from another woman staring her down, felt her carefully maintained composure develop a hairline fracture.

Because she couldn’t win this.

She couldn’t stand here and match Chloe’s territorial silk with her own, couldn’t stake a claim she didn’t have, couldn’t do anything except stand at the edge of a booth full of people who belonged together while Harrison waited by the table she was contractually obligated to sit at.

"It’s going great," Alexis said.

Her voice didn’t waver. She made sure of it.

"That’s Harrison. My parents set it up. It’s a whole thing. Very traditional. Very old money. He owns a shipping company. Or his father does. Same thing eventually."

"Sounds romantic," Lila said.

"It’s a merger."

"Even less romantic."

"It’s how things are done," Alexis said, and she heard the words come out of her mouth in her mother’s voice, in Catherine Van Der Berg’s cool aristocratic cadence, and she hated that too. "In certain circles. You marry for legacy. Position. It’s not about—"

She stopped.

She didn’t finish the sentence.

Because the end of the sentence was love, and she wasn’t going to say the word love in front of Jordan McKnight while he sat there with two girlfriends and a business empire and a look on his face like he actually felt sorry for her.

She didn’t want his pity.

She wanted a lot of things she couldn’t have, and his pity wasn’t one of them.

"Alexis." Jordan’s voice dropped. Low. Warm. And she felt it land somewhere behind her sternum, because she’d started to suspect his voice did something to people, something unnatural, and she was tired of pretending it didn’t. "You don’t have to marry him."

"You’ve said that before."

"It was true before. It’s still true."

"It’s easy for you to say when your family owns three convenience stores instead of a shipping corridor."

She regretted it the second it left her mouth.

Not because it was cruel, though it was. But because Jordan didn’t flinch. Didn’t shrink. Didn’t apologize for existing the way he used to.

He just looked at her.

"My family works twelve-hour days," he said. "My dad built those three stores from nothing. My mom’s been on her feet since she was younger than us. Nobody handed them a shipping corridor. They earned every inch of what they have."

"That’s not what I—"

"And you know what they never did?" Jordan continued, and his voice stayed even, stayed calm, which somehow made it worse. "They never told me I had to marry someone for a business deal. They never treated me like a merger. So maybe convenience store money is worth more than I thought."

The booth went quiet.

Kumiko had stopped giggling. Lila had stopped tending the grill. Even Brooke was watching now, her crimson eyes moving between Alexis and Jordan with the focus of someone recording data.

Alexis stood there in her expensive dress and her expensive shoes and her expensive pearls, and for one horrible second, her eyes stung.

She would not cry.

She was Alexis Van Der Berg. She did not cry in restaurants. She did not cry in front of scholarship students and goth streamers and boys who lived in loft apartments with their two girlfriends.

She blinked hard. Once. Fast enough that no one saw.

"Alexis?"

Harrison’s voice, from across the room.

"They’re ready to seat us."

Alexis turned her head.

Harrison stood by the hostess, checking his watch, a Patek Philippe worth more than Jordan’s car. He wore a navy suit with no tie, the top button of his shirt open in the calculated casual style of a man who wanted you to know he was relaxed and also very rich. He was handsome. Objectively. The kind of handsome that came from three generations of good marriages and better dermatologists.

And Alexis felt nothing.