Chapter 1 - Poppy
The gala is in full swing, and I should have left hours ago.
I'm on my knees in the ballroom, making a final adjustment to a cascade of black dahlias that took me six hours to perfect.
Around me, the Dark Masquerade churns with bodies and sound and flickering candlelight.
Hundreds of guests move through the space in masks and dark finery—serpents, ravens, creatures with horns and hollow eyes.
The women wear gowns in black and deep red and bruised purple, jewels glittering at their throats.
The men are sharp lines and shadowed faces, anonymous behind their masks.
A string quartet plays in the corner, but something is wrong with the music. The notes bend in places they shouldn't, harmonies sliding into dissonance before resolving again. It makes my teeth ache. It makes my skin feel too tight.
I shouldn't be here. Ms. Schmidt was clear about the timeline: setup complete by seven, staff gone by eight. It's nearly ten now. The gala has transformed from preparation into something else entirely—something I wasn't meant to see.
But a vase shattered at the last minute, and an arrangement needed replacing, and I couldn't leave until everything was perfect.
My business depends on this. My reputation depends on this.
So I stayed, even as the guests began arriving, even as the masks came out, even as the music started its strange, discordant song.
Now I'm trapped in a room that doesn't feel like the same room I spent the afternoon decorating.
The ballroom was beautiful when I finished with it—dark and romantic, gothic elegance softened by the flowers I'd placed on every surface.
But candlelight changes things. The shadows are deeper than they should be.
The serpent motifs I noticed during setup seem to move at the edges of my vision, stone scales catching the flicker of flames.
The guests laugh and murmur, but the sounds don't quite match their movements, like a film slightly out of sync.
I tuck a final stem into place and sit back on my heels, surveying my work. The arrangement is perfect. I should feel proud.
Instead, I feel the unmistakable weight of someone's gaze.
It's strange, the way the body knows things the mind hasn't caught up to yet. The hair on the back of my neck stands up. My skin prickles. My hands go still among the petals.
Someone is watching me.
I look up.
And across the room, through the crowd of masked faces, I see him.
He's tall, broad-shouldered, dressed in a tuxedo that fits him like it was stitched onto his body.
His mask is more elaborate than the others—a serpent in black and gold, covering the upper half of his face.
I can't see his features, but I can feel his attention.
It has weight. Texture. Like a hand pressing against my chest.
The guests flow around him like water around a stone. No one bumps into him, no one blocks his sightline to me. It's as though the crowd knows instinctively to give him space.
He's not just looking at me. He's studying me. The way I might study a flower I've never seen before, cataloging its petals, its structure, its secrets.
Our eyes meet.
I should look away. Every instinct tells me to look away, to break whatever this connection is, to go back to my work and pretend I didn't notice. That's what normal people do when strangers stare at them. That's what smart people do.
I don't look away.
Neither does he.
The moment stretches, elastic and strange. The music fades to a distant hum—those wrong notes, those bent strings, suddenly muffled as though I'm hearing them through water. The masked guests blur at the edges of my vision until it's just him and me and the charged air between us.
I don't understand any of it. Why my heart is racing. Why my mouth has gone dry. Why some part of me wants to stand up and walk toward him even though everything about this feels dangerous.
Then someone touches his arm. A woman in a silver mask, her gown dripping with black pearls, claiming his attention. He turns away from me to greet her, and the spell breaks.
Sound rushes back. The discordant music, the murmur of voices, the clink of champagne glasses. The gala reassembles itself around me, and I'm just a florist on her knees, trembling for no reason she can name.
What the hell was that?
I force myself to focus. My hands are shaking slightly as I make a final adjustment to the arrangement, tucking a stray stem back into place. The dahlia petals are cool and soft against my fingers, familiar, grounding.
I need to leave. I should have left hours ago, before the guests arrived, before the atmosphere shifted from strange to something else entirely.
Ms. Schmidt was clear about the timeline: setup complete by seven, staff gone by eight.
It's well past nine now, and I'm still here because of a broken vase and a last-minute request, and my own stupid perfectionism.
I gather my tools—wire cutters, ribbon, the small emergency kit I carry everywhere—and stand on legs that feel less steady than they should. The ballroom is beautiful. My arrangements are beautiful. I should feel proud.
Instead, I feel like prey that's wandered into the wrong forest.
I make my way toward the service corridor, keeping my head down, trying to be invisible. The guests don't notice me. I'm just the help, beneath their attention. That's fine. That's good. I don't want to be noticed.
But I can feel his gaze on my back as I leave the room. I don't turn around to confirm it.
The service corridor is quieter, the noise of the gala muffled by thick stone walls. I take a breath, then another. My heartbeat begins to slow.
Get a grip, Poppy. It was just a man looking at you. Men look at women. It doesn't mean anything.
But it didn't feel like just looking. It felt like being seen through. Like he could read every thought in my head, every secret I've never told anyone.
I shake off the feeling and start walking. The service entrance is at the end of this corridor, then left, then straight until I reach the door to the gravel lot where my van is parked. I've walked this route three times today. I know the way.
Except for the corridor branches, where I don't remember it branching. And the left turn leads to a staircase I've never seen. And suddenly nothing looks familiar.
I stop. Turn around. The corridor behind me looks different than it did thirty seconds ago.
That's impossible. Corridors don't change.
But this house—this estate—doesn't follow normal rules.
I've felt it all day, the wrongness underneath the beauty.
The way the sounds echo strangely. The way the staff move like they're following choreography that no one else can see.
The serpents carved into every doorframe, watching with stone eyes.
My phone has no signal. Of course it doesn't.
I pick a direction and walk.
The corridor leads to another corridor, then another. Stone walls, iron sconces, those endless serpents. I pass doors—some locked, some slightly ajar. I don't open any of them. I don't want to know what's behind them.
But I can't help seeing through the gaps.
A room with candles arranged in a pattern on the floor, shapes that might be symbols. Masked figures standing in a circle, their heads bowed. A library where a man sits alone, staring at nothing, his hands covered in something dark.
I walk faster.
My mother's voice echoes in my head, the conversation we had three weeks ago when I told her about this job. The Ambrose family. They're very powerful. The way she said "powerful" like it meant something else entirely. The fear in her voice that she tried to hide, but couldn't.
Just be careful, she said. Promise me you'll be careful.
I promised. I thought she was being paranoid, the way she's always been paranoid, jumping at shadows that exist only in her mind. I thought I was the rational one.
Now I'm lost in a labyrinth that shouldn't exist, and I'm starting to think my mother knows things she's never told me.
I turn a corner and see a door at the end of the hall. It's slightly ajar. Candlelight flickers through the gap, warm and golden, and I feel a wave of relief so intense it almost makes me dizzy.
Someone's in there. Someone who can tell me how to get out.
I approach the door. Raise my hand to knock.
And then I smell it.
Copper. Thick and metallic, coating the back of my throat.
I know that smell. I've cut myself enough times with wire and scissors to recognize it immediately.
Blood.
I should turn around. I should walk away, find another route, pretend I never came down this corridor. That's what a smart person would do. That's what a person who wants to survive would do.
Instead, I look through the gap.
The room is a study, lined with bookshelves and heavy furniture. Candles burn on the mantelpiece, casting long shadows across the floor. An antique rug covers the center of the room, deep red with gold patterns.
The red is spreading.
There's a body on the floor. A man, face down, one arm twisted at an angle that makes my stomach lurch. The blood pools beneath him, soaking into the rug, black in the candlelight.
And standing over him, perfectly still, is the man from the ballroom.
He's removed his mask. It sits on the desk beside him, that elaborate serpent in black and gold, discarded like it no longer matters. Without it, I can see his face.
He's beautiful. That's the first thing I think, and I hate myself for thinking it.
He has sharp cheekbones, a jaw that could cut glass, dark hair pushed back from a face that belongs on magazine covers.
I've seen this face before. Not just tonight, across the ballroom.
Everywhere. Charity galas, society pages, the side of a hospital wing.
Gabriel Ambrose. The philanthropist. The saint.
His hands are red to the wrists.