Chapter Thirteen
Beauty and the Beast
Time perfects men as well as destroys them.
- Chanakya
KAT
Tampa, Florida
Present Day
I was going to be sick. No, I was definitely sick.
My makeup was running. My hair was going to s**t, and my dress was twisted up all wrong. If you had asked me right then, I’d say that my jewelry had lost all of its luster, because at the moment? I was losing my ever-f*****g-loving mind and nothing about my night could go right because he was here.
The crash of ’29. My emotional Titanic.
Fingers braced along the bathroom marble, my head hung nearly to my elbows, I braced myself against the restroom counters in the Mandalay Hotel, trying not to faint. Something had told me not to come to this summit, but I had ignored it. I had ignored that funny feeling, the
