Parents.
Dead.
Two Months Later
From the passenger seatof my car, I trace the rim of my compact mirror with a steady hand, reapplying my lipstick in a soft, demure pink that whispers innocence. The scent of jasmine oil, dabbed along my pulse points, curls through the air and mingles with the rich leather of the seats, anticipation coiling tight beneath my ribs.
Two months of carefully curated grief have led to this moment. A chance to prove what I’ve known since I was twelve, when I was dissecting my first rabbit with Father’s spare scalpel, marveling at the seamless intricacy of living things. The memory of my sister finding me that day intrudes without permission. Her swift cover when Mother walked in, and the way she helped scrub the blood from my hands even while her gaze flickered with apprehension. Aria had buffered me from scrutiny, but I wasn’t looking for protection. Icravedacknowledgment.
And no one exemplifies that more than Alexander Darkmoor.
I’ve spent years observing him. Cataloguing how he commands a room without force, how authority coils around him like a second skin. People obey him, not because they fear him, but because defiance feels irrelevant in his presence. Father had worshipped his brilliance, his vision.
“Alexander Darkmoor sees the bigger picture,”he’d say, eyes gleaming with reverence. “He understands what progress demands.”
I understood too. Always have. Even when Father was too busy with Aria’s training to notice how I’d documented every experiment, procedure, and precise cut that advanced my knowledge.
While my sister had collapsed inward, drowning in suspicion and sorrow, I’d transformed my pain into purpose. Aria squandered every advantage by slipping out of labs, and refusing to comprehend the symmetry of our parents’ research. All that access to Darkmoor Industries, and she’d spent them rebelling, while I broke into Father’s study after curfew.
I’d traced the inked schematics of his restricted files, my hands steady as I experimented on whatever specimens I could find. The neighborhood’s missing pets became invaluable subjects, each one teaching me more about essence conductivity, and the way blood magic laced itself through living tissue like a second nervous system.
Not that anyone noticed. They never do.
The Enchanted Lotus rises before me, a masterpiece of the Blackwood entertainment empire. Towering trees wrapped in prismatic lights stretch toward the heavens, their branches intertwining to form natural archways. It’s beautiful, but aesthetic beauty pales beside the anatomical elegance of a circulatory system. Nothing rivals the perfect symmetry of a living heart.
I’d been top of my class at the Academy, my thesis on blood-magic enhancement through biological manipulation awarded highest distinction. Yet Father and Mother had still tethered their hopes to Aria. Her untrained instinct always eclipsing my methodical brilliance. They never saw how I learned to replicate her raw results through calculation, precision, and work.
I smooth the front of my pale pink dress, the charmed silk rippling beneath my fingers with the calm sheen of tempered water. The fabric adjusts to body temperature with uncanny accuracy, warding off the evening chill before it can bite. A subtle buoyancy enchantment stitched into the hem makes it hover a breath above the ground. Another offering from Alexander, like so many gifts in recent weeks. Each one chosen to remind me of what he could offer. What doors he could open.
My heels strike the path in even tempo, their echo mirrored in the tower-high windows ahead. My reflection stares back; blond waves artfully disheveled, makeup just delicate enough to sharpen youth into an advantage, and the protection spell laced through my bracelet thrumming with quiet vigilance at my wrist.
The reflection wavers into an older memory of Aria, guiding my hand as I fumbled with eyeliner. “There,”she’d said, “you look just like Mom.”That praise had meant everything once. Now, I watch my sister with a colder gaze. Not to remember, but to study. The way she tilts her head when calculating, how her fingers fidget with rings when unsettled. Her tics, habits and imperfect tells I’ve catalogued and begun to refine. I’ve mimicked her for so long, I’m not sure which parts belong to me anymore.
“Miss Ellis.” The doorman bows low, recognition flickering behind his eyes as he gestures, and The Lotus’s enormous doors swing open without a sound. This is my eighth private dinner with Alexander Darkmoor since the funeral. Each one a careful dance I’m not quite sure I know the steps to.
But I’m learning.
The maître d’ greets me with a polished smile. “Mr. Darkmoor is expecting you. This way.”
I drink in every detail of the main dining room, my heart quickening at the display of wealth and power. Ethereal vines wind up crystalline support columns, their leaves edged in golden filigree, and pulsing with slow, deliberate enchantments. There is no ceiling, only the sky above, domed in layered ward-glass that reveals the auroraborealis spilling across it like a celestial wound. Phantasmal birds, crafted from pure arcane energy, wheel through the air in radiant spirals, bursting into particulate light with each beat of their wings.
The competing scents make my head spin. Night-blooming jasmine—Mother’s favorite—folds into rare eastern resins and clove-salted smoke, undercut by the heady, electric scent of influence and dominion. It sticks to the air like a drug and I inhale deeply, because I crave it more than breath itself.
People turn as I pass, their attention thick with curiosity and calculation. Most faces are familiar. Council members and corporate titans. Old bloodlines that believe their lineage makes them untouchable. They perceive exactly what I want them to. Ellis’s younger daughter. Polished, slightly adrift, mournful in the way only legacy daughters are allowed to be. Haunted by the weight of loss, and still lingering in her sister’s wake. That last part, at least, requires no performance.
I’m led deeper into the restaurant’s interior, past charmed flora and enchanted crystal, into the hushed belly of the beast. Private alcoves nestle between the roots of living trees, their carved walls pulsing faintly with life. Flowers dance on invisible currents, their petals sharp enough to draw blood if you look too closely.
The light intensifies as we descend, calibrated to expose only what’s useful and let the rest rot in shadow. It reminds me of Father’s research rooms, and the surgical way he controlled every detail, down to the kelvin of the overhead glow. This place is no different. It’s another theater built for the dissection of influence. A sanctum where whispered deals unfold, and elegant ruin is served alongside wine and rare meat.
Alexander Darkmoor rises as we approach, and something in my chest flutters traitorously. He possesses the kind of authority that demands nothing to prove it. The midnight suit he wears molds to his frame with dangerous elegance; broad shoulders, lean waist, and the unhurried poise of someone who’s never had to chase anything in his life.
I straighten, the way Aria used to when bracing for Father’s critiques, but temper it with a practiced warmth she never mastered. I used to tell myself he was nothing more than a peer of my parents. One of their allies, and another name in a long ledger of associations I could use when needed. A means to an end. But somewhere along the line, that certainty cracked.
Because nothing about Alexander Darkmoor is ordinary.
Power bends around him, drawing everything closer the way a star pulls at its orbit, and he doesn’t simply enter a room—heconsumesit. Lately, I find myself fighting the part of me that wants to be consumed along with it.
His brown eyes latch onto mine, peeling away pretense with a single look, a gaze that doesn’t merely see, but dissects. For a moment, I can’t tell if he’s seeing me at all. or only the shadow of the sister I’m still fighting to outshine.
