LOGIN“You are an interesting woman,” he says finally, as though he has been collecting sentiments about me like curiosities. “I am not for your amusement,” I say. “Amusement is a generous way of putting it.” He turns his face to me and finally, which is nothing like mercy, he kisses me. It is a small t
“You will come with me tonight,” he says suddenly, and when I look at him the certainty in his eyes is a rope. “Where are we going?” I ask. I do not like the sound of my own voice in the dark halls. “To the club,” he says, as if the clubs he owns are nothing more than rooms he has arranged for his
The dinner goes on without ceremony. I wear a dress that fits like a promise and is less comfortable than anything else I own. The woman who dresses me fusses at the strap and at the hem with an intimacy that is practiced, like a ritual done daily for decades. The room where dinner is served is a pl
“You should not have broken a tray,” he says in that voice that is silk wrapped around steel. It makes everyone quiet because it is a voice that is treated like currency in this house. The words are simple but the way he says them says a thousand more complicated things. He is not angry the way I am
I come back from the memory to find sunlight in my eyes and orange juice dried on the carpet like the outline of a wound. My hands are trembling now for reasons I cannot name. The house clock in the hall ticks the way a heart does when it is being measured. There are noises behind the walls, small h
Oh God, I hate him. He is the center of everything I cannot control in this place. He is the reason doors close and keys rattle and the nights feel like traps. He is the reason my throat tastes like metal at dusk. He is also the reason, absurdly and against my every better judgment, that sometimes
~~AURELIA~~ “What do you want?” I don’t even look as Marco enters my cage of a room with a tray of food. He comes in the way the guards always do, with the soft, habitual footfall of people who have been instructed to move like they belong in the same room as monsters and not make it obvious. He w
In the end, everything we did was a preparation. We made feints and we prepared for strikes. We lay snares and we created illusions. The city breathed around our machinations and carried on with the business of being indifferent. People drunk on their own sorrow kept living in the light while we arr
We would be ready. We would move Aurelia in shifts. We would tighten the circle around her. We would hire men whose faces smelled of debt and loyalty and make them stand where they needed to stand. We would make safe houses and safe lies. We would do the work of putting concrete around a fragile thi
Keeping Aurelia safe became a plan as much as a thought. Saying it aloud assembled obligations. If Romano was about to wear a title that connected him to the council’s favor, he would start looking for ways to consolidate that gain. Power makes people hungry for consolidations. He would see Aurelia







