“…he’ll lose control eventually?—”
“Of course he will,” the other replies, faint amusement threading through their tone. “It’s what he does.”
“Maltos won’t allow it to go unchecked.”
“No,” the first agrees softly. “He won’t.”
The words settle more heavily than they should, not because of what they say but because of how easily they’re said, how certain they sound, and I keep moving before I can linger on them, lowering the tray onto the indicated table with careful precision before withdrawing my hands.
“Don’t linger,” the overseer says without looking at me.
“I won’t,” I answer quietly, already turning away, because I never do.
I fold myself back into motion, into anonymity, into the outer edges of the gathering where servants move like shadows and are remembered no more than the air itself, but even here something feels different, something just beneath the surface that doesn’t belong to the careful language of the gardens.
It isn’t visible. It isn’t spoken. But it’s there.
The shift announces itself through sensation more than anything else, in the way movement subtly tightens, in the way voices grow more deliberate, and my gaze lifts before I can stop it, drawn toward the center of it where Verr stands.
He doesn’t demand attention. He doesn’t reach for it. The space simply bends around him, his stillness holding a kind of tension that feels more dangerous than movement, as though something violent is being contained so tightly it might split under the pressure.
Kholara stands beside him, composed and smiling, speaking with that effortless ease that always feels slightly too practiced, while a royal figure lingers nearby with the quiet certainty of someone who has never had to question their own authority.
I should look away.
Instead, I watch.
“…your family has always struggled with control,” Kholara says, his voice smooth, almost conversational, but the words land with a precision that cuts cleanly through the surrounding noise, and even from this distance I can feel the shift that follows them.
It isn’t immediate. It isn’t dramatic.
It’s worse.
Verr stills.
Not freezes. Not reacts.
Stills.
The kind of stillness that pulls everything inward instead of outward, that tightens rather than releases, and I recognize it before I fully understand why, because I’ve seen what happens when something like that breaks.
“Careful,” the royal adds lightly, though there’s an edge beneath it now, something sharper than before. “You’re pressing a known fault.”
Kholara’s smile doesn’t falter. “I’m observing, not pressing.”
“That’s not how it looks.”
“Appearances are rarely the truth.”
Their voices continue, but the moment has already shifted into something else, something narrower, something more dangerous, and I realize with a sudden, sinking clarity that no one here intends to stop it.
They’re waiting.
My hands are empty before I remember setting the tray down, and I’m moving before I consciously decide to, pushing forward through the crowd as irritation rises around me.
“Watch where you’re?—”
“Move—”
