Because in the midst of masked individuals, the one who betrayed us will have no choice but to return. The whispers about the masquerade—the ones that circulate through Savage Knot’s underground channels like smoke through ventilation, fragmented and partially reliable but persistent enough to constitute intelligence—suggest that the ball is more than a ball. It’s a gathering. A convergence. A night when those who have sold loved ones like stock and enjoyed the clean slate that sale purchased are drawn back into proximity with those they sold—either by obligation, by ego, or by the particular gravity that guilt exerts on people who thought they’d escaped it.
Damien will be there.
Masked. Hidden. Blending among those who’ve done what he’s done and justified it the way he justified it.
But masks don’t change scents.
And we know his scent the way we know our own.
Because at one point, before the betrayal, it was as familiar as breathing.
This was truly a privilege. The chance to attend, the connection to Violet’s network, the invitation itself—each element a door that opened onto a corridor that leads to the room where Damien’s immunity expires. But the mechanism that grants us entry—the Omega, the bond, the Cinderella-with-a-dose-of-the-unknown arrangement that Violet constructed with the architectural precision of a woman who builds impossible things from improbable materials?—
The Omega.
Victoria.
She’s intriguing enough to tickle my interest.
I replay the meeting in my mind—frame by frame, the way I replay every significant encounter, searching for the details that the initial viewing missed and the nuances that only emerge upon review. Her entrance. The hand-holding. Theblank expression that wasn’t blank at all butfullof a specific, cultivated nothing that took more effort to maintain than any display of emotion would have. The brass knuckles on her fingers. The leather jacket that didn’t belong to her but that she wore with the particular ownership of someone who has claimed another person’s possessions as extensions of herself.
She sat next to me.
By choice.
When the safer option was clearly Cassian—my mirror, my complement, the version of me that doesn’t smile with teeth and doesn’t probe with endearments and doesn’t test people’s defenses for the sport of watching them hold.
She chose the dangerous twin.
And when I asked if she was afraid I bite?—
Those storm-gray eyes found mine.
Measured me.
And told me she could bite back.
—
I blink.
The cigarette is near my lips.
Cassian’s cigarette. Held between his fingers, extended toward my mouth with the casual precision of a twin who has crossed the room without my noticing because I was deep enough in my own thoughts that my environmental awareness—normally calibrated to detect movement at the periphery with the sensitivity of a system designed for survival—failed to register his approach.
He’s next to me.
Standing close enough that our shoulders nearly touch, his gray-blue eyes studying my face with the particular intensity that he deploys when my silence has lasted long enough to concern him. We process silence differently: mine is rare and therefore alarming; his is default and therefore expected. WhenI go quiet, Cassian investigates. When he goes quiet, I give him space.
He arches an eyebrow.
“When you think too deeply,” he says, his voice carrying the measured cadence of someone delivering an observation that doubles as a diagnostic, “I have to determine if you’re plotting one’s murder or prevail.”
I smirk.
My eyes soften—an involuntary response that I permit only in his presence, the relaxation of the performative sharpness that I maintain in every other social context because sharpness is armor and armor is essential and vulnerability is a luxury that Lucien Marchetti extends to exactly one person on the planet.
My younger copy.
