No one else seemed surprised.
The crowd fell into lazy applause, drank to the toasts, and turned back to their individual conversations.
My eyes darted around, taking in the scene around me in stunned silence. Children? Cosmo was pressuring Dante to have children already?
The quiet chatter was interrupted by the loud scraping of a chair leg against the tiles. Dante was on his feet, jaw clenched so tightly, I feared his teeth might shatter. He threw his napkin onto the table. Its decorative ring clattered loudly against the porcelain plate as he whirled and stormed from the hall.
Everyone stared after him in silence for a moment, then Olympia and I stood at the same time.
“I should see to my partner,” I said slowly, glaring at her in challenge, channeling Myrine in tone and formality. “Please, continue to enjoy your meals.”
Some of the tension seemed to ease at my words, though Milo cleared his throat uncomfortably and loudly moved his place setting about. A few of the girls our age descended into harsh whispers, likely about what had happened, as I left the room.
Dante,I reached out as I headed for the doors.Where are you?
He didn’t answer. But I didn’t need him to.
I found him at the edge of House Viper’s property, right up against the ledge of the First Ring itself, staring over the pinnacle at the Second Ring below and the Third and Deck below that.
“For a spoiled, rich boy,” I started, coming to a stop at the edge with him, the skirts of my dress tangling around my legs and whipping out around me in the breeze, “you don’t seem to know much about proper toast decorum.”
Despite his anger, he snorted. He nudged my shoulder with his but kept his gaze firmly on the citizens of the Second Ring below as they went about their business, unaware of the man watching them from above. His chest was still heaving with some long-buried emotion.
“You want to tell me what that was about?” I nodded in the direction of the estate.
Dante frowned and stared at a servant taking the trash from a lower estate down to the chute, jaw ticking with barely restrained rage. “I'm to be bred like a dog.”
My shoulders fell. I’d understood as much from Cosmo’s words and the hints the entire family had been dropping for the past few months, but I hadn’t wanted that particular suspicion of mine verified.
“Why?” I asked.
“My mother got farther in the Trials than anyone has in two centuries. You and I have already made it past three in hardly any time. The expectations are high. They want to see us succeed. But if I fail, they at least intend for me to continue a bloodline that appears to foster relative success.”
“With who?”
He shrugged as if it didn’t matter, as if it didn’t bother him, but his jaw kept ticking and even if it hadn’t, I could feel his rage simmering just beneath the surface, threatening to boil over at any moment.
“Ideally, you.” Dante didn’t look at me. His tone was indifferent, unaffected, but he cleared his throat and shifted on his feet, betraying his true discomfort. I took a breath, suddenly aware of how close we were standing and how much closer we’d been barely an hour ago. “It’s common practice for partners in the Trials to become partners in life, to have children who go on to reach at least the levels they did together. But we don’t know exactly what creates success in the Trials. This whole rule of being unable to speak of them to one another makes it difficult to acquire knowledge, even over generations.”
I nodded. That made sense given the importance the major houses placed on partnering their children up young.
He turned so suddenly I jumped. Then his hands were on my shoulders, holding me in place as those green eyes bore into mine.
“What happened earlier, that had nothing to do with any of this,” he told me. His tone was so serious I found myself nodding even before I’d decided to believe him. “I swear, Adrian. I canhearyou doubting how attracted I am to you. I need you to know that anything that happens between us is real. And it’s my choice. That’s why I’m being honest about all this now. So you know, if I make a move, it’s me making it.”
I held his gaze for a moment and didn’t nod again. Despite how sincere he seemed in the moment, I couldn’t ignore the nagging doubt in the back of my mind.
“He told me to seduce you,” he confessed, and I couldn’t help the laughter that burst out of me. His own lips quirked up into a smirk, amusement dancing in his bright eyes.
“I hate to break it to you,” I replied, still laughing, “but you’re shit at it.”
He laughed then too, a loud burst that had me grinning.
“I told him seducing you would be like trying to seduce one of the ancient serpentine beasts. But he only said that made you a true Viper.”
I snorted.
“I don’t want children,” he said, holding my gaze as his tone became solemn again. “No matter what he’s planning in there, it doesn’t matter anyway. Because I don’t want the great-grandchildren he’s decided on. I don’t want to bring them into a world where their lives are arranged at birth. I don’t want to watch them run around this ancient estate, drilling with my mother, practicing at the Mitte, like a hamster on a wheel, all while knowing that it probably won’t matter in the end. No one makes it past all ten.”
