Chapter 15: Turn It Up

The speakers did not go off.

Lawson looked at the black curtain, and the black curtain stayed silent.

Behind it, the man Jonas had put at the booth sat with his arms crossed and did not touch a switch.

"I said turn them off!" Lawson shouted, and for the first time in three years I heard his voice break.

Nobody in the ballroom looked at the curtain.

They were all looking at him.

The woman in green silk, the one who had said my dress looked rented, stood up from her chair.

"Lawson Draper," she said clearly. "Is it true?"

"This is a stunt," Lawson said. "A sick woman with a grudge."

"I can hear the man's voice," said an older donor at table two. "I've known Rowan since he was fifteen."

"Then my pledge is withdrawn," the woman in green said.

"So is mine," said the man beside her.

"And mine."

The sound moved from table to table in a rolling wave.

Chairs scraped, and napkins fell.

A woman near the front pushed her husband's hand up with his phone in it and said, "Get all of it."

At the end of the aisle, the reporter held up her camera.

"We're live," she called out. "Everything you've heard is going out right now."

Two of Lawson's security men climbed the steps of the stage.

One reached for my arm, and the other for the microphone.

I did not move.

"Jonas," I said, not loudly.

He was on the other side of the stage, forty feet away.

I held up my hand, palm out, so he could see it.

"You may," I said.

It was the first time I had said it to him in front of anyone.

He crossed the stage at a run.

He caught the first man's wrist and turned it, and the man went to his knees with a cry.

He put the second one against the wall of the podium and held him there with one forearm.

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