Chapter 13
CASSIA
The ladies’ lounge was a sanctuary of gilded mirrors and hushed sounds, a world away from the auction hall’s charged atmosphere.
Cassia leaned against the cool marble sink, her knuckles white as she gripped the basin.
She reached for a cloth to dab her hands—clammy, traitorous things—and caught movement in the reflection of the gilded mirror.
Two demon women stood near the settee against the far wall, half-concealed behind a filigree screen. Neither lowered their voices.
“She’s pretty, in a rustic sort of way,” one said, adjusting a diamond bracelet. “But not what I expected. I thought a Daemar’s son would have more . . . discernment.”
The second laughed, a sound like shifting ice. “I suspect this little romance won’t last beyond the season. A fling. A silly dalliance. Every Daemar should have one before settling properly.”
“And he plans to present that . . . thing to his mother?” A scoff. “The Daemaris would eat her alive.”
“It’s almost worth going to her Yulefrost ball just to see what the old battleaxe would do to her.”
They both chortled, a sound that carved a hollow space inside Cassia.
She wasn’t sure whether the two demons could see her past the privacy screen, but it didn’t matter.
This was not her first time being insulted within earshot.
It likely wouldn’t be her last. She’d known what it meant, stepping into this world beside Arkenoth.
She’d agreed to it, to the barrage of insults she knew would follow.
Chosen to shoulder them for Starlight, for the influence it gave her—however briefly.
But knowing they would come and hearing them said, as it turned out, were not at all the same.
Cassia took a slow breath, then another. She lifted her chin, checked her reflection—shoulders back, expression smooth—and emerged from the lounge with careful poise. Each step back toward the main hall felt like a deliberate return to the role she’d agreed to play.
But as she neared the dining hall, voices—low, male, unmistakably familiar—drifted from an alcove screened off by a heavy velvet curtain.
She paused, her hard-won composure freezing on her face.
“. . . you’ve grown surprisingly persistent,” Alderrath was saying, “and awfully invested in a minor property dispute. All this—for a crumbling orphanage?”
Cassia’s fingers curled into her palms. She should walk away. She should not stand here eavesdropping on yet another conversation she was never meant to hear. But her feet refused to move.
“I find it curious,” Alderrath went on, the disdain palpable in every syllable, “that you never gave Starlight a second glance until the little witch opened her mouth at The Ivory Club.”
Ark’s reply came low and cold. “I’d advise you to tread carefully when referring to her, Alderrath.”
“Why?” Alderrath asked lightly, with mock surprise. “You’re dragging a woman from the gutter into gilded halls and acting surprised when people notice the mud on her heels?”
The gutter. Cassia thought of her mother rising before dawn every day to knead dough for other people’s children.
Her father walking in the rain to work because they couldn’t afford a car and the bus was often late.
She thought of every knock on Starlight’s door in the dead of night—another bundled infant, another child with the wrong blood, the wrong parents, the wrong everything.
Half-blooded babies the great houses couldn’t acknowledge.
Illegitimate children the Echelons produced in secret and discarded without a backward glance.
Starlight had taken in every single one.
Had fought for every child to have a roof, a bed, a full belly—while the very society that created those children looked away and pretended they didn’t exist.
If that was the gutter, then the gutter had more dignity than this entire gleaming hall.
“She is my Chosen,” Ark said, his voice clipped, sharp as a blade. “She belongs anywhere I stand.”
“You’re choosing her over every viable choice set before you?” A scoff. “You could have had my sister. You could have at least chosen a demon.”
“I don’t want anyone else,” Ark said, the words simple and final. “Only her.”
Cassia pressed her back against the wall, her pulse roaring. This was the performance. This was what they’d agreed to: a convincing fiction, sold to the right audience. She knew that. She knew it the way she knew the recipe for her mother’s bread—by heart.
So why did every word feel like it was being pulled from somewhere deeper than strategy?
“You’ve always gone against the grain,” Alderrath said, his voice tightening. “But this? You’re dragging your family’s good name through the mud for an Untethered mongrel with a charity case and a clever mouth.”
Mongrel. That word seared. That was the word they used when they stopped the polite pretence.
The word that stripped away the bureaucratic language of the rejection letters and the Society’s regretful correspondence and said what they all really meant: You are less than us. You will always be less than us.
But before the burn could fully settle, the air changed.
Even from behind the curtain, Cassia felt the sudden, crushing weight, as if all the light in the corridor had been swallowed.
The temperature plummeted. A glass shattered somewhere nearby.
Even without looking she’d wager it wasn’t dropped, but cracked from pressure, because the very air had tightened around it like a fist.
When Ark spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper, but it carried the weight of something ancient and absolute. “Call her that again, and I will gladly forget we are in public.”
The ensuing quiet was not merely a pause in conversation. It was the silence of a man who had realized he’d stepped too close to something that could destroy him.
When Alderrath spoke again, his voice had shifted—the bravado thinner, more careful. “She’s changed you.”
Ark’s reply was quiet, controlled, the darkness receding as quickly as it had come. “You don’t know me. Only what you think I should be.”
Alderrath hissed, “This will cost you. The Daemar will not be amused. Nor will your mother.”
“Let them choke on their expectations.” Ark’s voice had dropped to a near whisper that somehow sounded more threatening than any shout. “Because I will not change my decision.”
Cassia froze, her heartbeat thunderous in her ears.
Her composure, so carefully rebuilt in the ladies’ room, lay in shards at her feet.
He had nearly unleashed his Nocturne power in the middle of the Aetherium.
Over a word. Over her. A man who wore his glamour every day to avoid attention had been seconds from tearing the shadows off the walls because someone called her a name she’d been called dozens of times before.
She pulled the velvet curtain aside before either man could speak again, forcing her features into a mask of mild curiosity. Her gaze found Ark first, then drifted to Alderrath.
“Oh—my apologies,” she said lightly. “I didn’t realize you had company.”
Ark turned toward her, his face composed, but a storm lingered in his golden eyes. His voice was softer now, a shield lowering. “It’s quite alright, Starling. We’re finished here.”
Alderrath held his stance for a beat longer, silver eyes cold with unspoken warning. Then, with a faint scoff and without any incline of his head, he turned on his heel and left.
The velvet curtain settled into place, sheltering them inside the quiet alcove. Cassia didn’t move. Couldn’t.
Ark turned toward her fully. “Do you want to stay for the rest, or shall we vanish and leave them wondering?”
She didn’t answer right away. Part of her wanted to stay, to prove she could sit through the entire auction with her shoulders back and her head high. But that part was tired now, worn out.
If she had anything to prove tonight, she no longer cared.
And maybe—just maybe—she wanted to give herself the small kindness of leaving before the fragile thing blooming in her chest could be crushed.
Her gaze met his with a steadiness she didn’t feel. “Can you take me home?”
Ark didn’t argue, simply offered his arm without hesitation.
Outside, the carriage door shut with a soft click, sealing them away from the murmurs and gilded cruelties of the Aetherium. The streets blurred past in gold-streaked silence. Ark didn’t speak at first. He sat beside her, hands clasped loosely in his lap, gaze lowered.
Then, at last, he looked up and met her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It was harder than I thought it would be. The whole thing was . . . unfair to you.”
Cassia blinked. She hadn’t expected an apology, hadn’t needed one. But the fact he’d given it anyway meant more than she wanted to admit.
She offered him a soft smile. “It’s nothing I can’t handle.”
She made sure to say it smoothly—graceful, composed, unaffected. And he nodded, as if reassured. But when his gaze slipped toward the window again, she dropped the smile and looked away.
She had held her ground, played her part, and done it well. But in the dim safety of the carriage, her hands wouldn’t stop trembling. She pressed them flat against her thighs, willing them to still, but they betrayed her anyway.
Because what she hadn’t expected, what scraped deeper than she’d allowed herself to fear, was how much it had meant when he defended her. The words echoed in the hollow places she rarely let herself acknowledge, wrapped around her like silk steeped in wine, staining everything.
He didn’t mean it. He couldn’t have.
But for the first time, staring into the passing darkness, she desperately wished he did.