I opened the door and my stomach forgot how to be a stomach.
Pink hair, simple hoodie, black jeans, scuffed white sneakers. Jade eyes like cut glass. No crown, no cloak, no stagecraft—just Alyssara standing in the hallway of my penthouse as if she weren't the most hunted woman on the planet.
For one useless heartbeat I thought: she looks ordinary.
Every other sense corrected me. The wards along the jamb trembled, then flattened as her presence wrote itself under their skin. The air thinned the way it does at altitude. My Grey reared like a horse that's seen sunlight on a blade—every instinct screaming now—and the part of me that has survived this long answered not here.
Even with Luna on my right and five fiancées at my back, starting a fight in this room was a sentence with only one ending. Alyssara had gotten stronger; the fact didn't arrive as an idea, it arrived as gravity.
"Hello, Arthur," she said, cheerful as a neighbor returning a borrowed pan. "May I come in?"
