PROLOGUE
NICOLO CELESTINI LEFTwith the file still open on the table between them, and for a long moment, Alexei did not move.
The party continued around him. Laughter and champagne and the delicate chime of enchanted crystal that the Fae artisans had crafted specifically for tonight’s celebration. Somewhere to his left, Ada was still apologizing to Nicolo’s stepmother about the shattered Bellecourt vase, her voice carrying across the courtyard in that uniquely breathless way of hers, as if every sentence was a small emergency she hadn’t quite figured out how to survive.
“I’m so sorry,” Ada was saying. “I was just trying to take a selfie with it because it’s literally the prettiest vase I’ve ever seen and I thought Maryah would want to see it up close since she’s still doing the baby thing, but then this waiter came by with those tiny quiche things, and I haven’t eaten since breakfast because I was so nervous about the party, and—”
“It’s perfectly fine, dear.” Maude patted her arm. “Accidents happen. Especially around you.”
None of it registered.
Alexei reached for the file and drew it closer.
He had already memorized every word inside it. Every data point. Every metric. He could have recited the contents in his sleep, and the fact that he knew this about himself—that he had read this particular file enough times to have committed itto memory—was something he had chosen not to examine too closely.
Until tonight.
Tonight, he had handed the file to Nicolo and said, “I pick her.”
Three words. Spoken with the same flat calm he brought to treaty negotiations and trade disputes and the sort of geopolitical maneuvering that kept the preter world from descending into chaos every other Tuesday.
Three words that betrayed nothing.
Nicolo had opened the folder. Had studied the photograph, the background report, the compatibility scores. And then his former Oxford classmate had turned to him with a frown and the two observations that the rest of the world would also make, in approximately that order, once the news became public.
“She’s been rejected.”
“Yes.”
“By her fated mate.”
“Yes.”
“This is going to cause a scandal.”
“I certainly hope so.”
Nicolo had given him a long look at that—the look of a man who wanted to ask more but knew better—and then he had left to check on Maryah and the baby, taking his perpetual glare with him and leaving the evening air noticeably more pleasant.
And now Alexei was alone with the file.
Again.
THE PHOTOGRAPH WASa standard identification portrait, the kind taken for university records. Unremarkable lighting. Plain background. The subject had been instructed to face forward, and she had—obediently, it seemed, because everything about the girl in the photograph suggested a person who did as she was told and expected nothing in return.
Dark hair. Not black like his, but a deep warm brown that would catch the light in ways she probably never noticed. It fell past her shoulders, tucked behind one ear with the carelessness of someone who had more important things on her mind than how she appeared to the world.
Her eyes were what held him.
An unremarkable shade of brown by any conventional standard. Eyes that most people would glance at and forget. But there was something in them that the camera had caught without intending to—a quiet intelligence that coexisted with something softer. Something bruised.
She was smiling in the photograph, but only just. A smile offered by someone who wasn’t sure it would be welcome. As if she had learned, somewhere along the way, that expecting too much from other people was a luxury she could not afford.
Zia Morgan.
Twenty-two. Human. Fresh graduate of the University of Colorado with a degree in product development and a GPA that was respectable without being remarkable. Her thesis had been on sustainable packaging for preter-human trade goods—a subject that had earned her a single mention in an industry newsletter and precisely zero job offers in her field.
She had taken a barista position at a coffeehouse near campus three days after graduation.
