Chapter seventeen: Wrong name

She put her phone face down on the bench and stood up.

Her first set had gone well. The crowd was good, that loose easy Friday energy that made the job feel less like work, and she'd come offstage feeling almost normal for the first time all week. Almost. She'd changed into her between sets clothes and sat down with her water bottle and her practice exam and forty minutes of quiet and she'd been fine. She had been completely fine right up until Marcus appeared in the doorway wearing the face she didn't have a name for.

She followed him down the corridor without asking questions.

The bar was busy the way it always was on Fridays, bodies packed three deep in some places, the amber lighting doing what it always did to everyone's faces, making strangers look like softer versions of themselves. Asha scanned the room automatically the way she'd learned to do, reading the crowd before the crowd read her.

She found the woman without trying.

She was sitting slightly apart from everything, one stool pulled back from the bar, a glass of water in front of her that she hadn't touched. Late twenties maybe, elegant in a quiet understated way, wearing a coat that cost more than Asha's rent. She looked like she'd walked into the wrong building and decided to stay anyway. Nothing about her matched Ember. Not the coat, not the posture, not the patient composed way she was waiting.

She looked up when Asha approached and something in her expression shifted. Recognition, maybe. Or the particular look of someone who had been given a description and was confirming it against the real thing.

Asha stopped a few feet away. "I'm told you're asking for me."

"Asha." Not a question. Just her name, said gently, like the woman had been practicing it. "Yes. I'm sorry to come here like this. I know it's not ideal." She had a soft voice, unhurried, the kind that made you lean in slightly without meaning to. "I just needed to give you something. In person."

She reached into her bag slowly and placed an envelope on the bar between them. Plain white. Asha's name on the front in neat careful handwriting.

Asha looked at it but didn't touch it. "Who are you?"

"Someone who thought you deserved to know the truth." The woman's eyes were steady and warm and completely unreadable underneath that warmth. "About the man who found you here a week ago."

Something moved through Asha's chest. Not the warmth. Something cooler than that.

She picked up the envelope.

The photograph was inside. No note, just the image, thick paper, slightly glossy, two people standing close together in what looked like a formal setting. The man's hand at the woman's waist. His face turned toward hers. Present. Attentive. Like there was nothing else in the room worth looking at.

She recognized him immediately.

The jaw. The dark hair. The particular way he occupied space without seeming to try.

Kadence.

The woman beside him was beautiful in a way that looked completely effortless, polished and composed, the kind of person who fit naturally into rooms like the ones in that photograph. His hand at her waist looked easy. Familiar. Like it had been there before and expected to be there again.

Asha turned the photograph over.

*He already made his choice. Don't be her mistake.*

She stood there for a moment, the photograph in her hand, the noise of the club pressing in from every direction, and felt something in her chest do something quiet and final that she didn't have a name for yet.

She slid it back into the envelope.

"Who is she?" Asha asked. Her voice came out steadier than she had any right to expect.

"Someone his family chose for him a long time ago." The woman said it gently, like she was sorry to be the one saying it. "He's been expected to make it official for years. What happened here last week, whatever you felt, whatever he made you feel." She paused just long enough. "You're not the first."

Asha said nothing.

The woman stood, smoothing her coat, unhurried. She picked up her untouched glass of water and set it back down. Then she looked at Asha directly, something shifting slightly in her expression, something that almost looked like genuine concern.

"Just be careful," she said quietly. "And watch your back."

She held Asha's gaze for a moment. Then she smiled, soft and slow, and walked out without looking back.

Asha stood at the bar and watched her go.

The goosebumps came without warning, moving across her arms and up the back of her neck in a single wave, and she didn't know if it was the woman's last words or the photograph still in her hand or something else entirely, something she couldn't locate or name, just a feeling that settled over her like a change in temperature.

She stood there for a long moment.

Then she folded the envelope once, put it in her back pocket, and went back through the curtain to get ready for her next set.