Before I left the building I paused in the service corridor and closed my eyes. The city hummed. The seal in the red-lined copy pulsed against the leather in her portfolio like a small, hidden heart.
I let myself feel it.
It answered with memory: sea cliffs and iron, braying wind, a torch passing over stone steps, a voice saying a name I had not thought to give anyone.
I slid the small disc back into my pocket. For the public record I was Lucian Vale, stabilizer.
For the court—my court—that wax was a whisper.
Outside, the street sounded like ordinary traffic. The gala-image rumors swirled in my mind like gulls. Someone had used optics to bend the narrative. Someone had the skill to splice light and intention together.
My phone vibrated. A single anonymous message: We have met.
The seal in the red-lined copy thrummed in my pocket in answer. The bond hummed under it like a tuning fork.
I had offered time and ink and a legal formality to buy markets a breathing room.
What I had planted in her portfolio was not a legal clause a regulator could read. It was a notice felt through bone and breath.
It pulsed.
I walked away knowing she carried it with her now. Knowing the pulse would not stay secret for long. Knowing, too, that whatever faction could make a blackout look like sabotage could also make a signed promise look like treachery.
In my throat, the command that had carried my ancestors chafed: protect, claim, secure. I answered it the only way I could—by making sure the mark stayed close enough for the bond to anchor us, and distant enough that she could choose.
The rune under the wax warmed against my palm as if it, too, were pleased by the agreement.
When she slid the portfolio back under her arm, the seal’s pulse found her pocket.
Something small and inevitable began to move.
3
VIVIAN PARK
The floor smells like wet stone and cedar. Lantern light gutters against oil-black water. I should be drafting graphs, not standing in a circle of people who move like tide-worn things. My pulse drums in my ears. In the center of the court, Lucien watches me as if I am the tide.
"You're out of your element," he says. The voice that pressed a wax seal into my glove at the gala—low, polished, threaded with iron—is the same here, only older, nearer.
"You're the one who brought me," I say. My voice is too small for this room.
He smiles, not unkindly. "I brought you because you deserve the truth."
That's the most dangerous sentence I've heard in months. Truth is a currency I trade in, always with limits and signatures. Here it smells like smoke and salt and a crowd of relatives with sharp teeth.
They call this the Night Court because it is honest when the city is not. Where my headquarters is all glass and gloss, this place is carved from old money and older vows. Statues of hounds flank stairwells. A flag with a rearing wolf beneath acrown—my glove's seal—hangs heavy on the far wall. Seeing it makes my ribs tighten.
We move through ritual steps I don't understand. Hands are washed. Names are offered and accepted. An elder with river-stone eyes tells me the House of Black keeps its own ledgers, but the modern world keeps other books. My company, he says, can write the ledger every court will one day read.
"Your systems," Lucien says later, when the elders thin and the air cools, "do more than encrypt streams and authenticate users. Your platform maps identity in a way our wards can be made legible to the city. It translates blood-marks to data signatures. It can lock a gate the same way our courts lock a grudge."
I don't let my face betray me. I know enough about our product to hear the pitch. Algorithms that map gait, scent, heartbeat—linked to access protocols and geofences. Add quantum keys and a biomimetic layer that recognizes pheromonal traces and you have a system that can declare who may pass and who cannot. For a court that hides in plain sight, that's currency. That's power.
"Which is why your marriage to the city matters," the elder murmurs. "And why enemies will make you a fulcrum."
My rings feel suddenly cold. "You dragged me into a secret nobility meeting to sell me on a strategic partnership."
Lucien bends close. Cedar and salt again. "I dragged you here because the mark you carry is not decoration."
