Chapter Four: What No One Saw Coming
The push was not rough in the way that violence is rough. But it was sudden and it was hard and it had no warning, and the result was that Sophie stumbled backward, her heel catching the edge of her train, and she went down — a short, undignified fall onto the parquet, the train spreading around her, her elbow catching first and her breath leaving her in a startled sound that was not quite a scream.
The music stopped.
It stopped the way music stops when someone pulls a power cable — instantly, mid-phrase, leaving silence where sound had been.
The guests made a collective sound. Several people rose from their chairs. Someone at a table near the back said what happened loudly enough to carry. Near the entrance, Marcus’s aunt made a sound that was entirely involuntary and that she would later describe, in the car home, as the most frightened she had been since 1987.
Sophie sat on the floor in her grandmother’s lace and looked up at Marcus, who was looking not at her but at the floor approximately two feet from where she had been standing. His jaw was set. His posture was the posture of a man placing himself between something and someone else.
She followed his gaze.
The scorpion was perhaps three inches long, black and precise and moving with the unhurried confidence of a creature that does not recognize its own incongruity. Its tail was raised in the curve that means business. It had been, one moment ago, directly behind her left heel.
Sophie looked at it for a long moment.
Then she looked at Marcus.
He turned to her, and his face, now that the immediate thing had been handled, was doing several things at once — the residual adrenaline, the checking of her for injury, the particular stricken expression of someone who has just frightened the person they love most and knows it even though it couldn’t have been otherwise.
“Are you —” He was already moving toward her, already reaching. “Did you —”
“I’m fine,” she said. Her voice sounded strange to her. Farther away than usual. “I’m completely fine.”
He got her up — one motion, his hands on her arms, lifting her the way you lift something you are afraid of damaging — and pulled her against him and stayed there.
Behind them, the room erupted.
