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The intimacy of Elise's greeting did not match the recent history.
Elise Hargrove had been comprehensively beaten in the Mist Relic core just hours earlier. Luke had wiped out her three-card formation, snatched the tournament's grand prize, and forced her to forfeit. Convention dictated that she should be giving Luke the cold shoulder, or at minimum, the carefully professional distance of an opponent who had lost gracefully.
What she should not be doing was greeting him like a long-awaited friend.
A few of the more imaginative attendees considered, briefly, whether the entire fight in the Mist Relic might have been staged. They dismissed the theory almost immediately. Elise had deployed her ace combination from the opening exchange. Luke had brought out a Seven-Star dragon-knight fusion. The damage exchanges had been real. Capital pride alone made it impossible that the Capital Association would surrender a tournament victory to a satellite city; losing to Ashenvale openly was bad enough as an honest outcome, sandbagging it deliberately would be unthinkable.
Which left only one explanation. Whatever this was, it wasn't theatrical.
Even Luke was caught off guard. Their relationship was distant at best. He'd met her exactly twice before this, and Lily had been the connecting thread for both encounters. Lily and he were also barely acquaintances. The chain of social proximity didn't justify this level of public familiarity.
Then he caught the look in Elise's eye.
A subtle flicker. Quick. Almost imperceptible. A signal one professional sends to another when a script is being read and the receiver needs to play along.
Luke understood instantly.
"Sorry I'm late," he said smoothly, matching her tone. "Got held up."
"Let's grab something to eat first." Elise hooked her arm through his without missing a beat and pulled him toward a quiet corner of the banquet, leaving the rest of the room blinking after them.
-----
In the corner, behind a tall floral arrangement that obscured them from the broader floor, Elise turned to Luke with a small grin and lifted her hand in a peace sign.
"Nailed it."
The grin didn't match her usual public composure. It was younger, brighter, and considerably less polished, with a hint of mischief that her glasses didn't hide. Combined with her baby-fat cheeks, the effect was almost startlingly girlish.
Luke stared for a second. He'd been categorizing her as the cool, intellectual type since they'd met. The current expression was filed under a different mental folder entirely.
He shook off the surprise.
"You used me as a shield."
"I used you as a fellow professional," Elise corrected primly. "Big difference. There were predators out there." She glanced past the floral arrangement at the swirling crowd. "I just lost the tournament, Luke. The last thing I want is two hours of consolation networking from people I barely know. And as the Hargrove heir, I can't just leave like a normal guest. I need a polite reason to be unavailable."
"And I'm the polite reason?"
"You're the most convenient polite reason in the room. Talking to you is something I can plausibly do for an extended period without raising eyebrows. Anyone else trying to interrupt has to interrupt the tournament's two highest-profile competitors, which is socially much harder."
Luke had to admit the logic was sound.
He glanced around the corner himself. The banquet's broader population had paused after their dramatic exit, but the pause was wearing off. Several clusters of attendees were already adjusting their trajectories to drift toward the corner. Targeted approaches were imminent.
"Where's Lily?" he asked. Lily would have been a more natural shield for Elise than him. He wasn't trying to dodge the role, just curious.
Elise's expression shifted into the polite blankness of someone biting down on irritation.
"Lily 'doesn't enjoy these settings,'" she said with audible quotation marks. "She showed her face for ten minutes and left."
The unspoken subtext was vivid. Lily, having been eliminated by Elise during the three-way fight, was extracting petty revenge by leaving Elise alone to handle the entire post-tournament social burden. Elise's pursed mouth confirmed she'd correctly identified this as Lily's intent.
Luke nodded slowly. "And Serena?"
"Hasn't been seen all evening. She didn't even bother showing up."
"Smart."
"I hate her." Elise sighed. "I should have skipped too. But the Hargrove family hosts these things. I can't not attend."
"Mm." Luke considered his own options. Following Lily's example and slipping out early was tempting. He was a guest, not a host. Nobody could complain too loudly if he excused himself.
Then he caught Elise watching him with the faint suspicion of a person who had read his thoughts and disapproved. She shifted her weight subtly, just enough to angle her body between Luke and the path back toward the exit.
"Don't even think about it."
"I wasn't."
"You absolutely were. Your eyes drifted toward the door."
"Is escape really off the table?" Luke asked plaintively. "You have your own social capital. You don't actually need me to function as a shield."
"I just told you I do." Elise narrowed her eyes. "If I were in your position, I'd be running. So I'm pre-emptively blocking the exit."
Luke laughed despite himself. The "demure intellectual" framing he'd been using for her cracked further. There was a streak of stubborn mischief beneath the glasses that hadn't been visible during their fight.
"Fine. But we need to relocate." He nodded toward the floral arrangement. "I'm counting four separate groups currently navigating toward this corner. Standing here longer is going to result in being surrounded."
Elise glanced past him and confirmed his count. Several wine-glass-toting attendees were closing in with the strategic patience of people who'd waited an entire evening for this moment.
"Where do you propose we go?"
Luke smiled, took her hand, and led her toward the banquet's central feature.
-----
"This was your plan?"
Elise's voice was wry as Luke spun her into a turn at the edge of the dance floor. The Capital Association's banquet hall featured a large central dance area, polished marble lit from below by soft amber light, currently sparsely occupied by a few couples maintaining classical waltz patterns.
It was also, conveniently, an area where two-person occupancy was the social norm. Anyone trying to interrupt a dance was breaking a fairly clear etiquette rule, and even the most ambitious networker would think twice before doing it to the tournament champion and the Hargrove heir simultaneously.
"It's working, isn't it?" Luke completed the spin and led her into a step pattern. He'd taken dance lessons in his previous life, a skill that sounded useless until you needed it. "The vultures stopped advancing the moment we reached the floor."
"It's working." Elise admitted reluctantly, following his lead with a fluidity that betrayed her own training. "But I feel like I lost more in this trade than I gained."
"You can switch partners if you'd prefer."
"Don't you dare."
Luke laughed again. Elise's grip on his shoulder tightened a fraction in mock indignation.
As they moved through the next sequence, Luke's attention drifted to other observations. Their proximity made certain things harder to ignore. Elise's frame, beneath the elegant gown, was considerably fuller than her professional silhouette suggested. The dress's tailoring concealed it well, but with her hand on his shoulder and his hand at her waist, the truth was unavoidable. Slender-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside, a figure that took genuine effort to disguise.
Mana would actually have a credible rival on this front, eventually. Currently, Mana's anime-bred proportions edged out Elise's, but Elise was still developing. Given a few years of growth, the comparison would become genuinely competitive.
He kept that thought firmly internal.
The two of them styled differently anyway. Mana ran on pure-cute energy, soft and bright and inviting. Elise ran on the intellectual-elegance vector, glasses and composure and quiet confidence. Different markets entirely.
"Don't even think about it." Elise's voice had shifted from playful to suspicious. Her eyes had narrowed behind her glasses. "Whatever you're thinking right now, stop thinking it."
"What makes you assume I'm thinking anything?"
"Your face. Specifically, the corner of your mouth."
Luke composed his face. Elise watched him with the deeply skeptical expression of a person who had grown up around men who lied about exactly this.