Page 56 of Smoke, Mirrors, & Misdemeanours

. . . trust.

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.”