The lights snap back like someone flipping a switch. The room floods with brightness and the board’s applause ispaper-thin. The financier raises a brow as if nothing happened. Cameras flash for effect. Security sweeps through with practiced faces.
A practical part of me wants to scan the crowd for the stranger who touched me, to unmask him as people unpeel a vine. But when I look, he is not in the foreground. He melts into the edge of the ballroom—half in shadow, half in a tux he did not arrive in. His profile is clean as a heraldic cut. He holds himself like someone used to command.
When the crowd thins to the important people—investors, counsel, the board—I find my hand going beneath the cuff on instinct. My glove feels heavier. Where the signet rested there is a faint circle, an impression warmed into the leather. It looks ordinary enough—a raised oval, a carved crest. But I read signs differently.
An aristocratic seal pressed onto my glove in the middle of a gala is not a business card.
I slip fingers inside the glove and feel the emblem through the lining: an animal—maybe a wolf—rearing around a crown. There is a tang of iron and cedar beneath it. There is also, absurdly, a faint heat that travels like a promise through skin.
Someone taps my elbow. My CFO. A human voice, dry with questions. “Everything all right with the blackout?”
“Yes.” My reply is flat, controlled. Inside, circuits cross. Outside, I am crystalline. “We had a minor issue. Security’s checking. Continue the report.”
The board accepts that. They must. Panic is bad for valuations; stability prints well on quarterly forecasts. I shepherd their confidence back into place with the same careful touch I use on investor presentations. I am a conduit for control.
But the seal burns a private mark on the inside of my glove and something about it is not merely symbolic. In the world I have herded into investor decks and risk matrices, symbolsare currency. A stamp is a signature. A signature is power. The thought pricks the scar beneath my sternum—scar tissue formed from betrayals and empty partnerships. I learned to trust contracts because people break.
Contracts don’t press themselves into leather.
I do not know his name. I do not know his title. I do not know what power he claims. I know two dangerous things: whoever left that seal in the dark knows how to cross my defenses without shouting; and whatever this mate-bond is—whatever this preternatural recognition—it answers before I decide to.
“He marked you,” the thought arrives in my head with no courtesy. It is not a sentence spoken to me. It is something I inherit, like a temperature reading.
I check the seal again as the gala dissolves into polite small talk. People orbit me, hungry for reassurance. My board wants me to be their oxygen. My instincts want to tear the room apart and find the man who left an emblem on my sleeve. Practicality wins. I smile at cameras. I motion to the CFO to handle follow-up.
But when I leave the glass tower in the early hours, the city is a ribbon of light and I feel the seal like an ache. It presses into my mind and my body the same way a clause presses against a deal—you can ignore it, but the margins will always remember.
There are simple rules about marks in the whispered half-worlds that touch ours. I learned one through a contact at a security conference—a dinner conversation people assume is small talk: a pressed seal among shifter courts is notice. It is not a legal encumbrance in human courts—yet—but it announces lineage, claim, recognition. It says, in language older than corporations: I have found you.
That knowledge sits between my shoulder blades like a warning and a provocateur.
I should be enraged. I should be terrified. Instead I am calculating: How likely is exposure? Who can weaponize this? Which enemies have access to both ritual knowledge and our servers?
Underneath the calculations, something unwelcome and electric—an obsession with the feel of his fingers against mine and the cool metal imprint now belonging to me.
I built an empire from scarcity. I built rules to keep love out of ledgers because attachment costs you leverage. I do not hand over ownership. I do not surrender control.
Tonight, in the dark, something else wrote itself onto my glove.
When I reach into my clutch for keys, my fingers brush the leather and the crescent seal kisses my skin. The symbol is warm. The scent that detained me in the ballroom flickers through me again: sea, cedar, iron. It is a claim and an invitation. I fold my hand on top of the emblem and my heart, traitorously, answers.
Someone calls for an elevator. A group of investors cluster under the lights. My phone buzzes—a reporter’s feed drafting a headline about a “minor technical difficulty.” I should be shaping that into a press release. I am not.
Because the man who left the mark is gone.
And the seal on my glove is not merely decor. It is a footprint in a place I do not yet have maps for.
I am very good at damage control. I am very good at contracts.
I am not good at being found.
Outside, the city smells like rain and power lines. In my glove, the emblem coils like a question.
Someone is circling my company. Someone has the finesse to sabotage a gala and the knowledge to press an aristocrat’s claim into my skin.
The night has just become an asset I cannot value.
I lift my hand to the light, and for one precise, dangerous breath I feel the imprint pulse against my palm, like an answer to a summons I didn’t order.
