The invitation arrived on bone-white card stock, embossed in a shade of gold that made her think of teeth. No time, no dress code—just an address in Mayfair and a single sentence in a hand she knew too well.Come hungry. — N.
Lila turned the card over twice, as if the other side might confess what the front didn't. It didn't. The city outside her window wore its early evening like perfume: a thin shimmer on glass, a taxi horn laughing too loud. On her table, the envelope from that morning sat where she'd left it, edges softened by how many times she'd slipped the second photograph in and out. Proof. Or a hinge, at least. Noor had sent it to three accounts and two reporters with a caption as sharp as a paper cut. The first post had already begun to creep, measured and relentless, like ivy.
Nothing stopped the feeling that someone had taken a bite out of her day and left the teeth marks visible.
She stood in the doorway of her wardrobe and stared. The choices grinned back. Black could be armor or cliché. Red was a flare gun. White begged for stains. In the end, she chose something that pretended to be simple: a navy silk dress that moved when she did and flats that wouldn't betray her should running become necessary. She braided her hair and pinned it low. The trick to rooms like Nico's, Noor had once said, was not to dress like prey even when you felt it.
The townhouse on Upper Brook Street looked like it was born knowing secrets. A line of trees out front shivered in place, leaves whispering as if conferring. The door opened before she rang—a butler whose expression suggested he had never, in his long career, been surprised by anything.
"Ms. Prescott," he said, as if confirming a theory, and ushered her into a hall where the light was soft enough to lie.
Nico was waiting in the drawing room with his back to her, speaking low to a woman who wore diamonds like punctuation. When he turned, the room tilted around the axis of his smile.
"You came," he said.
"You asked," she answered, which wasn't the same thing.
He took her hand, and for one treacherous second she felt the echo of last night at the Savoy: his fingers closing, the bar's molten glow, the camera she hadn't seen. Then he released her, and the memory folded itself back into its envelope.
"Tonight will be… instructive," he said. "You'll meet people who think of appetite as a virtue."
"And what am I?" Lila asked lightly. "The amuse-bouche?"
His smile didn't move, but the corners of his eyes warmed. "You're the person who listens differently."
"Differently from what?"
"From the hungry."
A footman announced dinner in a tone that made it sound like a verdict. The dining room glowed the way expensive rooms do, light bowing off gilt frames and crystal stems. The table was set for twelve. You could tell a lot about a host by the place cards. Lila found hers between Lady Isobel Ravenscroft—who everyone called Iz and whom no one corrected—and a man whose name had three syllables of Old World and two new ones of tech fortune. Across from her sat a Cabinet Minister pretending to be retired and his wife, who had perfected the art of looking bored in a flattering way.
The courses came like rehearsed compliments: something delicate in a spoon, something smoked under a silver dome, a dish that required funereal silence while the sommelier recited its origin story. Conversation pitched and rolled. Names were lit matches tipped into dry leaves: The Fund, the infrastructure bill, the founders, her newsletter. Nico said very little, which was how you knew he was listening.
"So," Iz said to Lila, turning the italic of her attention. "You're the girl with the photograph."
The table sharpened. Lila's mouth cooled. "There are many girls," she said, "and many photographs."
"Ah, but not many that make him look—" Iz held up her glass and peered through it, as if to check for sediment, "—almost human."
The Minister's wife smiled without showing teeth. "I thought the angle was rather kind," she murmured. "A little wrist, a little proximity. Suggestion is the gentleman's scandal."
Nico's mouth ticked. "We do try to be gentlemen."
"On odd Tuesdays," Iz said. "When the moon approves."
Lila touched the base of her water glass and felt the cool steadying her fingers. She could meet the gaze or break it; either choice said something. She met it.
"I left early," she said. "And alone. The camera didn't think that part mattered."
"Cameras never do," the tech man said cheerfully. "They're all appetite. They eat whatever you put in front of them."
"Like this table," Iz purred, and the laughter loosened, relieved to be told where to go.
The waiters changed plates as if performing sleight of hand. Across from Lila, the retired-not-retired Minister asked a question about her work that suggested he had read just enough to weaponize it. She answered in the grammar of detours, the way you speak when truth is a limited commodity and you're paying cash.
"Publishers love a woman who doesn't apologise," he said. "It gives them a hook."
"Men love it too," his wife said dryly. "Until the bill arrives."
"Hooks are messy," Iz said, swirling her wine. "I prefer a net. So much more civilised."
Nico watched Lila over the rim of his glass. The room around him arranged itself into implication: a young MP at the far end leaning too hard into laughter; a philanthropist admiring her own bracelet with the concentration of prayer; a hedge-funder's wife texting under the table, thumbs making crumbs of silence.
Lila took a bite of something delicate and smoky that tasted like the memory of a river. Hunger, she realised, had nothing to do with food. It was all mouth here, all small bites and big appetites, people nibbling at the edges of each other until only the most plated version remained.
"Tell me about leverage," the tech man said to Nico, because men asked other men for definitions and then called it a conversation.
"Leverage," Nico said lightly, "is the difference between what someone says aloud and what they'd pay to keep quiet. It's the delta that matters."
Iz laughed once, like a bell tapped with a fingernail. "You do love your maths."
"And your metaphors," Lila said before she could decide not to. Her voice sounded cleaner than she felt. "But sometimes the simplest equation holds: two people meet, gossip eats its own tail, and the rest of you performs dinner until the story gets bored."
Eyes slid toward her, interested now. Iz's mouth smiled without letting it know. The Minister's wife tipped her head, like a bird considering a shine.
"You think stories get bored?" Iz said, amused.
"Everything does," Lila said. "Even hunger."
Across the table, something like satisfaction flashed in Nico's eyes, quick and wick-like.
They moved to the cheese course and then—the dessert was a gold-leaf joke Lila didn't find funny—to coffee in the library. The walls were book-spined and masculine; the air smelled like citrus and money. A server offered small dark chocolates on a tray, and Iz lifted one delicately between thumb and forefinger.
"Walk with me," Nico said to Lila in the tone of a man making a suggestion that knew it would be obeyed.
She didn't trust the balcony. Balconies in houses like this were built for overhearing. He led her instead to a painting of a storm at sea, all muscle and foam, ship a thumbprint of insistence.
"Iz enjoys making a meal of people," he said. "Don't mistake her appetite for venom."
"She sank her teeth in," Lila said. "She just smiled while she did it."
"You drew blood back." He looked almost proud. "It suits you."
"I'm not here to bleed."
"And yet here you are." He shifted so they were out of the sight-line from the main room. Softer now: "Show me you understand the terms."
"Of tonight?"
"Of the city."
She thought of the photograph, of the second one, of Noor's dagger-heart reply and the Savoy girl's hands shaking as she passed over the envelope. Of Ryan's voice threading old tenderness through new warning. Of Iz calling her the girl with the photograph like a role written for a very specific kind of ruin.
"I understand that appetite writes invitations," she said, "and that the menu doesn't list the price."
He smiled, but it didn't make it to amusement. "Come by tomorrow," he said. "No champagne. Coffee. Ten o'clock."
"To be cornered in daylight?" she asked lightly.
"To learn why you're dangerous." A beat. "Not to me."
Her pulse picked up the way it does when you step into cold water. "You assume I'm staying in your orbit."
"You came hungry," he said softly. "Even if you think it was for the wrong thing."
She didn't answer. The door at the end of the library opened and Ryan stepped in like he owned his own entrance. For a moment her name was a coin balanced on his tongue. He didn't say it.
"Minister," he said, offering his hand past them, smile angled, attention calibrated. "I didn't know you'd be here."
Which meant he had known exactly.
The room pivoted toward him the way rooms do around men who make fortunes and scandals with equal grace. Iz's eyebrows lifted in a punctuation Lila couldn't read. The Minister's wife smiled with relief, as if the plot were finally catching up to itself.
Ryan's eyes found Lila and then moved on, polite to the point of insult. In the quiet between one remark and the next, she could almost hear the decision happen: he would treat her like furniture in a lovely room. It was the most elegant way to wound.
Nico's hand hovered in the space between her elbow and her waist and did not touch. "You know everyone," he said to Ryan with friendly dryness.
"Only the ones who try to know me," Ryan said, and took a chocolate from the tray. "Isn't that the game?"
"Games require rules," Lila said, surprising herself. "This feels more like weather."
Ryan's gaze sharpened with interest he clearly hadn't planned to show. "Weather can be predicted."
"Only if you're very far above it," she said.
For a heartbeat he looked like the boy she'd known on cheaper streets. Then the face he wore now—a handsome certainty hard-won and well-kept—slid back into place.
"You shouldn't be here," he said mildly, as if commenting on the canapés.
"And yet," she said, matching his tone. "Here we both are."
He turned to Nico, offering a toast with his coffee cup as if the liquid were worth breaking a promise for. "To appetite," he said.
"To the bill," Iz murmured, drifting by, and grazed Lila's arm with the sort of touch that could be mistake or warning.
They left in waves, good-byes perfumed and choreographed. Outside, the night had grown a spine: the kind of wind that carries rumours from one end of a block to another without losing their heat. The butler saw to a waiting car for Iz; the Minister vanished in a whisper of chauffeur and leather. Ryan stood under the portico for a moment, alone except for the rain stitching the edges of his suit, then got into a car that didn't look like it came when called.
Nico offered Lila his arm. She declined with a smile she hoped didn't show its bones.
"Tomorrow," he said.
"Or never," she said, lighter than she felt.
He laughed, and it sounded delighted, which made it worse. "Ten," he said, and the door closed behind him like a decision.
Lila started down the steps. A girl in a black dress and white collar detached herself from the shadows near the gate—the Savoy uniform again, the bun again, the same nervous courage.
"Ms. Prescott," the girl whispered. "They were here."
"Who?"
The girl's eyes flicked toward the house. "The ones who sold the first photograph," she said. "Different face tonight, same teeth. They asked about you, whether you'd stay for the after-after. I told them you don't."
Lila didn't, but the girl's mouth tightened as if she did.
"Be careful," the girl said. "Wolves get friendly when they've eaten."
The rain came a little harder, a little truer. Lila pressed a note into the girl's hand that was more than it needed to be and less than gratitude required. She walked the length of the street with her coat open, letting the weather find her. Above, windows glowed like eyes, making up their minds.
At the corner, she stopped and looked back. Through a slit in the curtains, she could see the movement of people in a room built for deals: the lift of a glass, the bend of a head, the turn of someone's shoulder as if to block a view. The townhouse held its silence like a knife.
Lila tucked her hands into her pockets and found, by touch, the hard rectangle of the envelope. Not salvation. Not absolution. A hinge.
She turned toward the darker part of the street and kept walking, her hunger was no longer for approval or for the room's temperature shifting toward her, but for something more honest and less safe: a way to choose her own mouthfuls, to set her own table, to refuse to be served.
Behind her, a car door clicked. Ahead of her, the rain wrote its own story on the pavement, line by line, as if it had all the time in the world.