Page 52 of Smoke, Mirrors, & Misdemeanours

“It’s not that it sounds trite,” she said softly. “It’s that I’ve lived the other half of it.”

He went very still. His smile faded, as if something in her words had caught him off guard.

“I didn’t grow up with wealth or titles. I wasn’t given riches. But the ache’s the same, I think, whether you have too much or too little. Wanting to be seen. Wanting to matter. And hating that you care so much.”

His expression softened. “I used to hate it too,” he admitted. “That wanting. It made me feel small. Needy. Weak.” His eyes strayed, flickering over the gilded hall before returning to hers, the connection grounding them both. “It never quite goes away, does it?”

Cassia blinked. She hadn’t expected him to admit that. This wasn’t the guarded demon lord she’d been trading banter with all evening. This was someone else entirely.

She shook her head slowly. “No. It doesn’t.” She leaned forward. “But you see . . . The ache you hate? That’s where our soul lives. That’s not a weakness. That’s the part no one else can touch.”

There was a long silence after that, his golden eyes on her. She smiled first, because if she didn’t, she might say something she couldn’t take back.

“We really are a terrible match,” she said softly, voice laced with something wry. “You with your estate and titles and perfection. Me with my tiny bakery and emotional chaos.”

His mouth quirked. “Yet here we are.”

Her smile lingered, but her voice turned quieter. “Pretending to be in love.”

“Pretending,” he echoed, as though he was agreeing.

But his gaze didn’t waver.

12

ARK

Her words settled somewhere beneath his skin, a place he couldn’t quite reach. He hadn’t expected her to understand. Hadn’t expected to tell her—about the dog, of all things. The Halewick cleansing must be affecting him more than he’d realized.

Yet, she had not pitied him, or scorned him, but answered with something that felt like shared pain.

He had spent his whole life learning to hide. To deflect. To turn his vulnerabilities into weapons or bury them so deep no one could find them. His mother saw a project. His father saw an heir. Alderrath and his kind saw a target, or a stepping stone.

But Cassia . . . Cassia had looked at him, heard him admit to feeling small and needy and weak, and hadn’t sneered. She hadn’t used his admission against him, or filed it away for later leverage. She had simply met him on the same plane, in the raw, ugly truth of it, and lifted him up.

He cleared his throat and sat back, pushing the thought aside.

When the final course was cleared—a bland chocolate mousse that tasted the way he imagined wet cement would—a single chime rang through the Aetherium. Heads lifted expectantly. The ambient light dimmed, pooling into a focused beam on the central dais. The murmur of the crowd vanished.

The auction was beginning.

His gaze drifted to Cassia. She was leaning slightly forward, her expression holding the same intent focus he imagined she’d give a cake baking in her oven, just as a glass case floated down from the ceiling. Wards shimmered around the crystalline box, and within it, a gnarled, fossilized root lay coiled like a slumbering serpent, its petrified bark etched with sigils too ancient for any living soul in Meredith to decipher.

The auctioneer’s voice rang out. “Lot One. The Roots of the First Binding.”

Cassia sucked in a soft, sharp breath. “Wait—is that . . . real? From the Maleficia tree from the Convergence?”

“The very one,” Ark murmured.

Her brow creased. “I thought it was in the Meredithian Museum of History. I’m certain I saw it during a grade school trip.”

“That’s the official one. But over the years, scholars uncovered others. Some made it into museums, others into private collections. And a few”—his eyes flicked to the case—“onto auction blocks like this.”

“Are you planning to buy it?”

Ark chuckled and shook his head. “You’ll see.”

They watched as the bidding began—one hundred thousand gildens. An obscene sum for something once pulled from the roots of a dying forest. By the time Ark took his second sip of wine, the number had doubled. Then tripled.