POV: Seraphine Vale
The ballroom is drowning in light.
Crystal chandeliers hang from the ceiling like captured stars, and beneath them, a thousand people move in careful circles. Music plays. Laughter rises. Champagne glasses clink. It is all perfectly beautiful, and every bit of it is a lie.
Seraphine knows this because she has been smiling through the lie for the past two hours.
Her father's hand is warm on her lower back as he steers her through the crowd. Viscount Harlan Vale moves like a man still pretending to matter in the empire — chin up, shoulders back, the posture of nobility that wore thin about three years ago when his debts started becoming impossible to hide. He slows their pace near a cluster of men in dark coats. Foreign men. Seraphine knows them by sight now. They have been circling her family since winter.
Her stomach tightens.
Her father bends his head toward the man with silver at his temples. The one with cold eyes. Viscount Vale's voice is low, careful, the way he speaks when he does not want anyone else to hear. Seraphine keeps her face forward. She watches the reflection in a nearby mirror instead — her father's lips moving. The silver-eyed man listening. And then.
The nod.
It is small. Just one movement of the head. But it lands in Seraphine's chest like a stone dropped in still water, sending ripples through everything.
She is not here as a guest.
The realization comes with a clarity that makes her dizzy. This is not a celebration of the empire's greatest families. This is a marketplace, and she is the merchandise. All the careful preparation her father insisted on — the white gown that cost money they do not have, the jewels that were her mother's, the way he told her to smile and hold still and be perfect — it was never about her. It was about making her look good for the buyer.
Her father's hand presses slightly against her back. A signal. An ownership.
"Smile, Seraphine," he says quietly, not looking at her. "You are making a excellent impression."
She forces her lips to curve. The smile is muscle memory by now. She has been wearing versions of it her entire life — at dinners where her father gambled away their crops, at social events where people looked through her rather than at her, in quiet moments alone when she thought no one could see how much she wanted to scream.
But this smile is different.
This smile is the moment everything breaks.
The foreign man is still looking at her. Evaluating. The way a merchant might assess livestock before making an offer. Seraphine's hands curl into fists inside her white gloves. She can feel each breath now, sharp and careful, because she is standing on the edge of understanding something that cannot be undone. If she lets this moment pass. If she stands here and smiles. If she lets her father walk her away from this group with some kind of agreement made, then—
Then she belongs to someone else.
Not metaphorically. Not in the way women always belong to someone — traded from father to husband, value measured in what they can produce or attract. This is different. This is immediate. Concrete. Sold to foreign powers who want something she has. Blood, probably. Her name. The bloodline her mother never discussed and her father never explained but which clearly means something to men desperate enough to buy.
Seraphine's eyes find the exit.
The side door is twenty steps away. Past two clusters of talking guests. Past a waiter holding a tray of champagne. Past the orchestra pit. She could move now. Right now. While her father is still holding his smile for the foreign men. While the attention of the room is split between a hundred different conversations and not on one pale girl in white who is about to run.
The weight of her father's hand on her back grows heavier. A warning. Or a grip.
"Do not move," he whispers, so quietly only she can hear. "You will ruin everything."
But that is the thing about being trapped your entire life. Eventually, you stop asking permission to breathe.
Seraphine steps forward, away from his hand. The movement is small enough that no one watching would call it dramatic. Just a young lady adjusting her position. Polite. Acceptable. She turns slightly, as if she has spotted a friend, and begins to move through the crowd. Slow. Unhurried. The way a guest might move when she has every right to walk anywhere in this ballroom.
Her father's voice follows her, tight with anger now. "Seraphine—"
She does not turn around.
Ten steps to the side door. Her heart is hammering against her ribs. The music is too loud. The lights are too bright. She can feel eyes on her — not from her father, but from the foreign men. Wondering why she is moving away. Wondering if they need to follow. Wondering if the merchandise is damaged.
Eight steps.
The waiter with the champagne tray moves slightly to his left, opening her path.
Six steps.
The orchestra swells into a crescendo. Perfect. The moment when everyone's attention is pulled toward the music. The moment when a woman in white can slip away without anyone truly noticing she is gone.
Four steps.
The side door is so close now she can see the brass handle catching the light. So close she can already feel the cool air of the corridor beyond it. So close she can taste freedom like champagne on her tongue.
Two steps—
A hand closes around her wrist.
Not her father. Someone else. Someone she has not seen approach. Seraphine spins, her breath catching in her throat, ready to pull free, ready to run, ready to do whatever it takes to get away from this room and this deal and the life her father is trying to lock her into—
And stops.
The man holding her is young, maybe twenty-six, with sharp features carved from stone and eyes so dark they look black in the chandelier light. He wears a black uniform with silver insignia. A king's uniform. His grip on her wrist is not rough, but it is absolute. The kind of grip that says you cannot move unless I permit it.
Seraphine's blood turns to ice.
Every person in the ballroom has frozen. The music stops abruptly, as if the orchestra members realized in the same moment what everyone else just understood. The man holding her is not just anyone. The man holding her is the reason conversations go quiet. The reason guards stand straighter. The reason even her father, who fears very little, looked the way he did when the foreign buyers mentioned this man's name with worry in their voices.
King Darian Ashvael.
The Crimson King.
The man who took a throne at sixteen and has kept it through fear. The man who ended his own brothers to seize power. The man every story agrees on: whoever catches his attention usually ends up destroyed.
And she has just tried to run directly in front of him.
His eyes move over her face with the kind of attention that makes her feel like her skin is being read. Searched. Understood.
"Well," he says softly, and his voice is the most dangerous thing she has heard in her entire life. "This is interesting."