It takes Bellamy a glass and a half of wine to calm down from my joke, and I feel a little bad. But it’s so lovely to see her face this shade of pink that, in the end, it’s worth it.

“Okay.” She swirls her fork into delicate angel hair noodles swimming in butter. “Here’s one rule. You have to be honest with me.”

“I’ve always been honest with you.”

“No, I mean—” She takes another bite. “God, this food is good.”

“It makes the cost of membership more than worth it.”

“I mean, I want to know you.” Her gray eyes sparkle in the candlelight. “I want to know you. I don’t want to pretend to know you. I want to actually...know.”

I laugh, and her face reddens at the sound. “What exactly do you want to know?”

Bellamy looks around the dining room—at the sexy red shade of the walls, at the spotless tablecloths, at all the tuxedoed gentlemen sitting at tables all around us, money in living and breathing form—and shakes her head. “Why would you ever leave the city if you had a place like this?” When she looks back at me, her eyes are filled with confusion and envy. “Did you have friends here?”

“I do have friends here.” The loud, raucous dinner they treated me to when I came back was, in the end, much the same as it always had been—only they’ve all grown up and found their great loves. My heart beats faster. Maybe I’ve found mine. “But my brother was taking over the city, bit by bit. He was a senator when I first moved here, and I found it...omnipresent.”

“Did you pick a place at random?” She spears a carrot with her fork and places it on her tongue.

“No. I had an idea for a business venture. I was going to start it in D.C. because that’s the best place to meet with potential candidates.”

“You’ve never said anything about this.”

Spikes of my old irritation shoot through my chest. “Because it’s been an exercise in frustration. Not exactly the kind of thing you want to impress a date with.”

Bellamy’s eyes light up. “Frustration? I can’t picture you—you know, struggling with a business. It always seems so easy when you talk about it.”

I want to laugh. I want to smile at her and say that, of course, it’s easy. Business to me is like breathing. But that’s not what Bellamy wants, so I look her in the eye. “Lots of my businesses are very, very successful.” I tear off a piece of roll, fresh and hot, and eat it. “It’s the ones I’m more personally invested in that always run into trouble.”

“Like this...candidate business?”

“It’s a political incubator. We find promising candidates and help them get elected.”

Bellamy frowns. “What kind of candidates?’

I take a deep breath. “People who want to change things. People with ideas, not just backers. I’m tired of the same people with the same PACs running everything. This country could stand to be better. That’s what I’m trying to do with the incubator.”

Her lips curve upward. “I never took you for an idealist.”

“Fuck ideals.” She laughs out loud. “I want real people. Passionate people. I’ve put a structure in place that can fine-tune the process, accelerate it—”

“Wait. Did you work on your brother’s campaign?”

“God, no.”

“He didn’t want you to?” Bellamy’s eyebrows might as well be on the ceiling. “If I had a brother—”

“He didn’t know I was into politics.” The old bile rises in my throat, the old disgust I’ve worked so hard to keep pressed down in a place nobody will ever see. “And once I told him, he didn’t care.”

Her forehead wrinkles. “I’m sure he cared.”

I take a look around the Swan to make sure there’s nobody close to Andrew nearby. He wasn’t a member at the club, but he had a web of people all over the city—and most of them were well-known enough to be recognizable. I don’t see any of those faces here. “All he cared about was winning the election. Since he’s been in the White House, he’s been dismantling my company, one person at a time.”

“That can’t be.”

“We said we were going to be honest.”

“How?” Bellamy’s face is twisted in disbelief. “He’s the president. He can’t possibly be after your job.”

“No, no. He’s not after my job.” I laugh, and it sounds all wrong. “He’s after my people. God, the hours I’ve spent building the perfect team—” My hand shakes around my fork and I still it, mastering the anger with a control that is as hard-won as anything I’ve ever earned in my life. “He poaches them for White House positions. Who can turn that down? Insider experience like that is priceless in the Beltway.”

She eats three more slices of carrot, dripping in butter and brown sugar, a thoughtfulness in every line of her face. “He must not know.”

“He must not know what? Trust me, Andrew is hardly ignorant.”

“How much it hurts you.” Her gray eyes meet mine and I am rocked backward. If I’d been standing, I would have fallen by the sheer empathy in those gorgeous eyes. It’s not pity. It’s understanding.

The weight of it is too much. “He knows what he knows.” I put on a smile, a real charmer. “What about you? What made you want to be a lawyer?”

Bellamy’s mouth presses into a thin line, and all my senses tingle.

I’ve hit a nerve.

She looks down at the table, then lifts her napkin to her lips and dabs at the corners.

“Bellamy?”

She raises her head again, as if she’s made her decision. “My mother.”

I nod. “Did she dream that for you as a kid?”

“No.”

That’s not what I expected her to say.

“Really? Then—”

At the next table, a man’s phone goes off. “Shit,” he says under his breath, reaching for it to silence the alert.

“Did you read it?” The woman he’s with, her red gown sequined and shining in the candlelight, is staring down at her own screen.

The murmurs rise around us.

“Bahara.” The word hits me from a table diagonal to us.

“What’s going on?” Bellamy watches as the dining room shudders to a start and hums with new conversation. She takes out her own phone. “Unrest in Bahara? Why does everyone here look so freaked out? It’s just a little country, right?”

My heart beats faster. “There’s a pretty crucial military base there.” I gleaned at least that much from the campaign trail.

This is it—the first real crisis of my brother’s presidency.

Bellamy and I blink at each other across the table.

“Do you want to go somewhere we can watch the news?”

She takes in the nervous energy of the room. “Let’s go.”