“I will tell him you gave it your very best shot.”
“Excellent. That is payback enough.” The chairwoman squeezed Lila’s arm and led her into the blessed coolness of the lobby. The room stood as a monument to marble, gold trim, and Renaissance paintings. The line outside continued inside, stretching to the ballroom’s entrance. Each heir waited impatiently to be announced.
“Such a horrid line in horrid weather. Why didn’t you come earlier?”
“Work,” Lila fibbed.
“You should take a vacation, darling. You look tired.” The chairwoman led her to the front of the line as if she were prime once more and gave her a quick wink. “Once you’re announced, we’ll talk about tomorrow’s council meeting. I’ll find you in the ballroom directly.”
Lila watched Chairwoman Masson walk away, years of ballet training in every step.
The rest of the heirs looked at Lila as though she’d cheated at cards.
Lila ignored them.
The teenage boy standing at the ballroom door turned to face Lila, his back straight, his chest open. “Elizabeth Victoria Lemaire-Randolph,” he announced over the tittering in the ballroom and the clinking of champagne glasses. Though the boy’s breeches, tailored jacket, and accent placed him in the upper echelons of highborn society, the tremble in his voice betrayed his true class, marking him as far too overwhelmed with the crowd around him.
A well-trained and beautiful lowborn, then, putting on airs.
Lila couldn’t blame him for being overwhelmed. The crowd in the ballroom might have been composed of vultures, glamoured by Puck himself for his own amusement. Every heir within two hundred kilometers had assembled, all to bid on items the Randolphs had seized from the Wilson compound. LeBeau’s staff hadn’t even placed chairs inside the ballroom, knowing all too well the whims and the fancy of their kind. It wasn’t often the heirs had a chance to gather en masse outside of the season.
The fall of the Wilson family had brought them all out for business with a side of gossip. The sea of whitecoats and silvercoats and bold family colors churned like a raging sea, with groups breaking away to join other groups that then broke apart again, a shifting foam of rich indigos, bold blues, hunter greens, and monarch oranges. The matrons and their daughters bid with upraised paddles or discussed business amongst themselves in the lull between items. Designer dresses marched back and forth over the polished oak floor, whisked back and forth on missions of scandalous importance. The occasional male from the great families dotted the crowd, whispering in hushed tones, smoothing over proposals, or laying the groundwork for new deals, hopeful to bring his matron another for consideration.
Of course, wherever highborn women ventured, the senators congregated as well. New Bristol and Saxony senators alike had crowded into the ballroom. The New Bristol senators wore their silver city medallions with pride, puffing out their chests in their tailored burgundy coats, black breeches, and black boots, the last polished to a fine gleam. Not to be outdone, the Saxony senators wore their hard-won black coats and gray vests, prowling around the ballroom as kings on a hunt. Both groups of men had likely arrived early, all to flirt for as long as possible with the heirs, all under the pretense of legislation and society, all trying to make a match before the season had even begun.
It was not a vain hope. A man did not attain a position in the capitol by accident. These were among the most beautiful, charming, intelligent, and well-spoken senators in the state.
And many of them had shifted to their gaze to Lila the moment she’d been announced.
Wrongly.
“That’s Chief Elizabeth Victoria Lemaire-Randolph,” Lila correc
ted, a note of annoyance entering her voice. Introducing her incorrectly was not only a snub, but it might make the senators inside overeager. A few jaws had already dropped at her dress and family colors. Hope strained in their breeches that perhaps tonight, Lila Randolph would retire from the militia and take her place as prime and president of Wolf Industries, elbowing her baby sister out of the way at last. Perhaps tonight the childless heir would select a senator for the season, intent on providing Chairwoman Randolph with her first granddaughter and carrying on the Randolph legacy to another generation.
Whoever seeded such an heir would have his career handed to him on a silver platter, propelling him all the way to the Saxony senate or perhaps to the nation’s capital.
All on the strength of his cock.
And should Lila have a boy, the senator responsible would retain full custody of the child, for the firstborn sons of heirs became the sons of Bullstow.
But Lila’s plans didn’t include any of that. She didn’t want a place at Wolf Industries, she didn’t want a senator for the season, and she sure didn’t want a child.
Lila didn’t just shoot the overeager senators a look of daggers—she shot them a look of scissors snipping off their precious, sperm-giving balls.
The men looked away. Quickly.
So did the boy at the door, who gulped when Lila’s gaze turned back to him. He turned his head to Ms. Olivia LeBeau and helplessly looked for guidance. Like the boy, she’d been coiffed far above her station, a fine lavender dress covering a highborn who strained at the fringes of high society, forever wanting more.
Unfortunately for Lila, Olivia ran the auction house. This woman, one of her oldest friends from university.
Olivia grinned, showing her teeth.
Oldest friend did not mean current.
“Try not to confuse the boy needlessly, Lila,” Olivia drawled, raising a brow. “It’s not his fault that you insist on slumming it up as a militia chief. You were born the prime heir, for oracle’s sake. Don’t you have any pride?”
Lila narrowed her eyes and returned the woman’s smile, glad that Olivia’s auction house had been selected for the heist. The fallout from this break-in would pay her back for…