2. BLUE EYES

♣️XAVIER♣️

My father found me in the training room before I'd even had the chance to sit down, still in the shirt I'd worn to dinner, my knuckles wrapped from a session I hadn't finished yet.

"You stared at her the entire meal." He shut the door behind him instead to knocking, which told me exactly how serious he intended this conversation to be.

"I stared at my new stepsister. Forgive me for noticing the person joining this family."

"That's not what that was, Xavier, and you know it." He crossed his arms, the same stance he took whenever a warrior under his command needed correcting instead of praising. "I saw your face when you walked in. I've seen that face before, on you, and I didn't like it then either."

I unwound the wrap from my knuckles slower than I needed to, giving myself something to do with my hands instead of answering him right away. "You don't actually know anything about that family. Debt up to their necks, a sick daughter in the hospital, and a mother who needed a husband with money more than she needed one she actually wanted. Doesn't that sound like something to you?"

"Careful." His voice dropped, flat and final, the tone he used on warriors right before he stripped them of rank. "I know exactly what you're insinuating, and I won't have it. I chose Elena. I chose this marriage with my eyes open, and I will not stand here and let my own son call her family gold diggers before the wedding has even happened."

"I never said the word."

"You didn't need to." He stepped closer, close enough that I had to look up slightly to hold his gaze. "Whatever you think you noticed at that table tonight, you will not investigate her family, you will not look into her daughter, and you will stay away from Violet. Do you understand me?"

“Yes sir.” I told him I understood him, and I meant it when I said it, and then he left the room. I stood there with the wrap still hanging loose in my hand, and understanding him did nothing to loosen the knot sitting behind my ribs.

Blue eyes.

I had seen a hundred pairs of blue eyes in my life and none of them had ever made my chest tighten like that, made something in the back of my mind claw for a memory it couldn't quite reach. I told myself it was nothing. I told myself a woman's eyes were just eyes, and I had a wedding to plan for my father and a pack to help run and warriors to train, and none of that left room for whatever this was.

I told myself that for exactly four hours, sitting alone in my study with a glass of whiskey I never drank, before I gave up and let myself think about the other blue eyes.

Angel's.

Angel, who danced like she was solving a math problem instead of performing, who counted her steps under her breath like the counting itself was armor. I had told myself I wouldn't go back to that club. I had told myself the money I left her was a closed transaction, the kind of thing a man does and then forgets, except I hadn't forgotten a single detail of her face, what little of it the mask allowed me to see, and now I was sitting in my study with my own stepsister's eyes stitched into the same memory.

It didn't make sense. It didn't need to make sense. I had built my entire life on trusting my instincts over what made sense, and every instinct I owned was telling me those two women were connected somehow, whether by blood or coincidence or something I hadn't figured out yet.

I picked up my phone and called Dorian before I'd fully decided to.

"It's late," he said, when he picked up.

"I need you to bring someone to the house."

A pause on the other end, the kind Dorian gave when he already knew he wasn't going to like what came next. "Who?"

"A masked dancer from The Ember Room. Goes by the name Angel." I said it out loud and something in my chest eased just from hearing the plan take shape. "Not tonight. Tomorrow night, once she's finished her shift. To my house."

"You want me to grab a dancer out of a club and bring her to your private house."

"I want you to bring her here so I can talk to her." That wasn't the whole truth. I didn't know what the whole truth was yet, only that I needed her in front of me,I needed to see her face without the mask, needed to know whether the thing clawing at the back of my mind had any real shape to it or whether I was losing my grip on something I used to have complete control over.

"Your father know about this?"

"My father doesn't need to know about this."

Another pause, longer this time. "Xavier. Think about what you're asking me to do here."

"I've thought about it." I hadn't, not really, not the way I should have, but saying it out loud made it feel decided, made it feel like the only reasonable next step instead of something reckless. "Tomorrow night, Dorian. Whatever it costs, whatever it takes, I don't care. Just get her here."

"And if she doesn't want to come?"

I looked at the glass of whiskey sitting untouched on my desk, at my own reflection stretched thin across the surface of it. "Then make her want to."

Dorian didn't answer that right away, and I could hear him weighing it, weighing me, the way he always did when I asked for something that sat wrong with him.

"This isn't like you," he said finally.

"Nothing about tonight has been like me." I stood up, paced the length of my study once, twice, my knuckles aching under the wrap I still hadn't finished removing. "Just do it. I'll deal with my father if it comes to that."

"You always say that right before it becomes a problem."

"Then it'll be my problem." I ended the call before he could argue further, before he could talk me down the way he usually managed to when I got like this, because I didn't want to be talked down tonight. I wanted her in my house. I wanted to stand in front of her without a mask between us and finally understand why a stranger's eyes and my stepsister's eyes had somehow become the same pair haunting the inside of my skull.