A third snowflake was falling from the domed crystal lights of the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan.
Leah Winters stroked the pearl waist chain of her Dior couture gown, her diamond manicure tapping softly on the rim of her champagne glass. She stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the snow falling, the Christmas lights in the Fifth Avenue windows reflected in her pupils like crumpled stars falling into a frozen lake.
"Look out!"
The waiter's shriek pierced the string quartet. On the black velvet tablecloth, the twelve-tiered champagne tower was pouring in slow motion, three thousand crystal glasses exploding into a galaxy at Leah's feet. The light gold liquor spreads over the tips of her red-soled shoes, twisting her shadow into a winding river of blood.
Lukas Graham paused as he tugged loose Tom Ford's bow tie. The youngest king of mergers and acquisitions on Wall Street looked like he'd been hit with a pause button at the moment, his pupils reflecting the mess-and the woman kneeling in the debris.
Chestnut curls, blue-gray uniform, quivering shoulder blades raised in sharp angles under the fabric. When the waiter looked up to apologize, Lucas suddenly pressed his temples. Some kind of tingling that had lain dormant in his nerve endings was awakening, as if he'd seen a dusty plaster statue in a museum suddenly blink its eyes.
"Dispose of it." He trailed off with an odd trill as he signaled the security guard.
Instead, Leah leaned down to help the wretched figure up. Van Cleef & Arpels' blue diamond wedding band slashed across the waiter's wrist, branding an ethereal light on the skin." A little accident should happen on Christmas Eve, shouldn't it?" Her sweet voice was wrapped in champagne breath, but her fingertips skimmed the other woman's pulse like viper's mail.
Emma Wilson bit her tongue behind her gag.
The rusty taste of blood mingled with Leah's Jo Malone peony scent and brewed into a poisonous brew in her nostrils. After five years, the pair of dogs hadn't even changed their perfume-Lucas still wore absinthe-infused Artisan on his sleeve, the scent she'd handpicked for him after they'd been tangled up all night at the Ritz in Paris.
"Need a medical kit?" The banquet director hurried over.
The miniature camera in the wig cover was still running when Emma shook her head. She stared at the eight-carat blue diamond on Leah's ring finger, her memory like a pried-open coffin panel-the same style ring that had sparkled on her glove on Christmas Eve, 2017, when Lucas had gotten down on one knee at the Central Park skating rink, the same style of ring in the heart-shaped circle cut out by his skates.
Only that one ended up melting in the fire, along with the skin of her left arm.
"Your eyes..." Lucas suddenly closed in, a storm of cologne sweeping over him. He clamped down on Emma's chin, his thumb grazing the end of her eye heavily. The contact lens shifted in the violent friction, revealing a very faint gray-green stain on the iris - like melted emerald seeping into amber.
The tips of Leah's heels crushed over the crystal shards that littered the floor.
Emma let tears fill her eyes at the right time. It was an expression she'd practiced 238 times in the mirror: a slight quivering of her lower eyelids, a reddening of the tip of her nose, a vulnerability at the corners of her mouth that she had to strain but didn't dare to push too hard. When the first tear hit the back of Lucas's hand, the man let go with an electric shock.
"Sorry." He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his fingers, "You're a lot like..."
"Like the picture in the dark compartment on the third floor of your study?" Emma sneered mentally. In that framed picture with enameled irises, the woman who had once been her was laughing at Hampton Beach, her left shoulder tattoo not yet engulfed in flames into twisted vines.
The ballroom suddenly erupted in alarm.
The pouring champagne was flowing along the marble veins, converging into an eerie pattern at Leah's feet. At a certain angle, it actually looked like a burning iris - such a metal brooch had been clutched in the charred palm of the firefighters when they had lifted her from the fire.
"Take her to change her uniform." Leah suddenly raised her voice, her manicure pinching into Emma's arm. The mask of celebrity peeled off instantly as the lock on the locker room door clicked down, "Who sent you?"
Emma slowly and methodically removed her mask. The rippling scars from the implants spread from her jaw to her collarbone, like treacherous reliefs under the dim overhead lights." Key data from the Graham Group merger," she licked the blood stain off the corner of her lip, "how about trading it for your fiancé's real medical records?"
A waiter urged from the door.
Leah knocked over the coat rack as she stepped back, the Valentino gown hooked and ripped like a sneer." Noon tomorrow, Rockefeller Center observation deck." She slammed her diamond clutch into the dresser mirror, and in the splatter, Emma saw the black irises blooming in her pupils.As silence returned to the dressing room, Emma pulled the test tube from her Bra. Residual champagne foamed eerily in the reagent - enough beta blocker to give an adult male arrhythmia - and was seeping through the pores of Lucas's hand, which had wiped away tears.
She applies lipstick to the shattered mirror, Chanel No. 99 in a deep red like a fresh wound, tearing away the pale camouflage. The security camera shows the panicked waiter fleeing to his death while Veronica Stone straightens her spine from the ashes.
Outside the window, the snow falls heavier and heavier, engulfing the last Christmas carol on Fifth Avenue.