PROM OF THE DAMNED: THE QUEEN WANTS HER CROWN

Mara had exactly six hours to save a ruined couture gown and roughly no chance of surviving the man who'd ruined it.

The dressed had arrived at the Hotel Moreau's service entrance at eleven o'clock, torn along its beaded spine, with a terse note attached: *Fix it before the Founders' Ball or the account closed.* Mara recognized the handwriting before she recognized the account name. Lucien did not send apologies. He sent instructions, the way other men sent flowers, and expected both to be received with equal gratitude.

She set up in the mending room off the ballroom kitchen, rain lashing the balcony windows above Royal Street, and got to work with the particular fury of a woman who needed this account far more than her pride wanted to admit. Pride was the cheapest thing she owned. It was also, currently, the only thing keeping her upright.

She was three hours in, thread between her teeth, when the door opened without a knock.

"You're still here," Lucien said, as if her presence were a personal inconvenience rather than the direct result of his own demand.

"You wanted the gown by dawn. Dawn requires someone in this room until dawn." Mara didn't look up from the seam. "Was there something else, or did you just come to watch me work?"

He came further in, devastating in unrelieved black, and the small mending room seemed to shrink around him the way every room in this hotel eventually did. Below them, faintly, the ballroom orchestra played three bars of a waltz and abandoned it, as if even the music couldn't commit to finishing anything under this roof.

"You keep treating my money like a weapon," Lucien said.

"Because men like you keep swinging it." Mara bit off the thread and held the repaired seam up to the light, checking her own work rather than his face, because his face asked questions she didn't currently have safe answers for. "You could have sent this to literally any atelier in the city. You sent it to mine at ten o'clock at night with a threat attached."

"I sent it to the only seamstress in the city who wouldn't lose her nerve about the deadline."

"Flattering. Still a threat."

"An observation." He crossed to the window, watching the rain instead of her, which felt, obscurely, like a kindness. "I don't apologize for how I get what I need, Mara. I've found it wastes time better spent making sure I actually get it."

"And what exactly do you need from a torn hem at midnight?"

Lucien turned back, and for one unguarded second the ruthless calculation dropped out of his expression entirely, replaced by something considerably more dangerous to her composure. "Company," he said. "Though I confess the hem was a convenient excuse."

Mara's needle stilled in the fabric. She had built her entire fragile business on never mistaking a rich man's convenience for genuine want — Hotel Moreau was full of men who paid for things and called it affection — but something in the way he'd said it, low and almost reluctant, made the old rule feel suddenly, recklessly negotiable.

"I finish the dress first," she said. "Then we can discuss what else you think you're owed tonight."

"Fair," Lucien said, and settled into the chair across from her to wait, watching her hands work with an attention that felt considerably more intimate than anything a torn hem had a right to earn him.