Alex glanced toward the people surrounding them.
He had spent the evening feeding on their attention.
Now he seemed desperate to escape it.
The woman in silver folded her arms.
“You knew about this?” she asked the host.
The host hesitated.
“I knew a special guest connected to the estate was expected tonight.
I was instructed to make the formal introduction when she arrived.”
Alex stared at him.
“And you let her serve drinks?”
The host looked toward the woman in red.
She answered instead.
“He didn’t make me do anything.”
Alex frowned.
The woman continued.
“I arrived early.
The service staff was short-handed.
I helped.”
A few people looked down at their glasses.
The same hands that had accepted drinks from her had pointed phones at her minutes later.
Alex was still trying to rearrange the evening into something he could control.
“So what?” he said.
“You were pretending.”
“No.”
She closed the folder.
“I was carrying a tray.
You decided what that meant.”
The room went quiet again.
Alex’s eyes hardened.
He needed to attack something.
“And the dress? What was that supposed to be? Some performance?”
The woman in red looked down briefly at the gown, then back at him.
“You challenged me to enter your world.”
“My world?”
“That’s what you believed it was.”
The woman in silver shifted uncomfortably.
Alex’s arrogance returned in fragments.
“Fine.
You own half the estate.
Congratulations.
That doesn’t make you better than anyone here.”
The woman in red almost smiled.
“I never said it did.”
That answer landed harder than anger would have.
Because everyone in the ballroom remembered who had been treating ownership, clothing, and status as proof of superiority.
It had not been her.
Alex looked around and realized the room remembered too.
He pointed toward the folder.
“I want to see those papers.”
She held them out.
He seemed surprised by how easily she complied.
Alex took the folder and opened it.
His eyes moved rapidly across the documents.
The smile never returned.
The host stood nearby, visibly uncomfortable but no longer uncertain.
“The ownership information was confirmed before tonight,” he said.
