Chapter 4 (Sera)

I do not wake up. I am dragged out of unconsciousness by Mrs V, which is a very different experience. One moment I am somewhere warm and horizontal and very far from awareness, and the next I am vertical in my bathroom with water hitting my face, still wearing the Prada dress from the night before. I look down at the wet black fabric clinging to my legs and feel something that belongs firmly in the grief category.

The dress, I think. My beautiful dress.

Mrs V is already gone. She appears, performs the necessary function, and leaves. I stand under the shower and let the water run too hot and think nothing useful for a while. The hangover sits behind my eyes with the patient certainty of something that knows it has all morning.

Then I think about the men from the street.

They surface without any invitation, the way things do when you have spent real energy not thinking about them. The tall one first. The murky green eyes, cold and assessing, the rings on his fingers, the single word he threw at me like I was a thing that warranted no further effort.

I replay the encounter with the sobriety that last night did not allow. I could have pressed myself against the adult store window and given them space. I could have gone inside the adult store entirely, which would have been bat shit crazy but functional. There were options I did not take.

But here is what I keep circling back to. They could have simply laughed. They could have said, politely, excuse us, and waited two seconds, and I would have moved and the whole thing would have been nothing. A hot mess nobody recalls by the following afternoon. Instead one called me a putána and another shoved me and the main one walked away like I was too mid to bother finishing a conversation with.

The fury is cleaner in the morning. More focused, less tearful. I am cooked on forgiveness where those men are concerned. They are going to be living rent free in my head for the foreseeable future and I resent every square inch of the space they are taking up.

If I ever see either of them again, I will stab one of them. I am flexible about which one. The universe can decide. They will not ghost me from my own memory that easily.

I dry off. I pull on Leander's biggest dark grey hoodie, which I took from his room two years ago and have not returned and will not return, and my most comfortable leggings, and I take my sunglasses from the nightstand. Inside. I will be wearing them inside the house. Mrs V has left painkillers on my dresser and I love her for it in the specific way you love someone who has known every version of you. I take a moment to touch grass in the most metaphorical sense possible, standing barefoot on the cold bathroom tiles, breathing deliberately, reminding myself that I am twenty-five years old in a life that does not permit excessive wallowing. Bet. Let's go.

My father's office smells like cedar and old books and the cologne he has worn for every year of my memory. He is at his desk when I push the door open and he looks up, and then his eyes move to my sunglasses, and one corner of his mouth tries hard not to become a smile.

"Good morning, Seraphina," he says.

"Óchi," I say in Greek, dropping into the chair across from his desk. "It is not a good morning. Please don't call it that."

"Mrs V tells me you were still in your dress when she found you."

"Mrs V should expand her interests."

My father smiles fully then, and I hate how much I love it because it makes it impossible to stay properly grumpy. "Your future husband," he says in Greek, easy and warm, "will need the patience of a saint."

"Patience alone won't cut it. He'll need survival instincts. Base-level ones."

This makes my father laugh, a real one that fills the room, and for a moment everything is just that: his laugh, the cedar smell, the light through the tall windows, and my sunglasses pressed against my nose because the morning is conducting a personal attack.

Then the moment shifts and the other thing is there.

I am not a delulu girl. I understood from the time I was old enough to understand anything that my brother would inherit this world and I would be the bridge between it and another one. I never argued against it. The women before me did not argue against it.

But I have one ask. One non-negotiable ask. I want a say in who I marry, because my father loves me, and the love of a man who would give you anything should extend to not handing you to someone who will make you miserable.

"I want a voice in this," I say. I look at him with the sunglasses on and say it plainly.

My father leans back slightly. "You may express preference," he says. "The final decision is mine, Seraphina."

I pull the pushback back and hold it.

"Does he have to already be a leader? Can he be an heir?"

"He must be an heir to an organisation. I will not marry you below your station. You are my princess." He says those last two words the way he said them when I was seven, sitting on this floor with a book while he told me stories about kings and the women who stood beside them. "You deserve a king."

Something in my chest pulls in a direction between grief and longing and the ache of wanting something unlikely. I nearly say it. I nearly say: then let me find him myself. Let me fall spectacularly in love with someone who makes the world feel new.

I stop myself.

I have always been a romantic. This is the most private fact about me, the one nobody would guess because I project the energy of someone practically assembled with no time for nonsense. But inside the part of myself that belongs to no one else, I have always wanted the sweeping kind. The breathless kind. The kind where someone looks at you across a room and the whole thing is immediately obvious. I am not fangirling over a delulu fantasy. But I hold onto the hope quietly, with no announcement to anyone.

Iykyk.

When I was eighteen, my father and I made an agreement. He would not rush me. I would not resist when the time came. That window gave me university, an English Language degree, and the years I spent building Lyra Press from nothing. Named after my middle name, Lyra, deliberately separated from the Sorano weight, because I needed to know whether I could create something entirely mine. It does not flex the way my father's operations do. But it is mine, brick by brick, and that is not a small thing.

Now the window is closed.

"We'll continue at breakfast," my father says.

I nod. I stand. I feel the full weight of his love in the room, real and enormous and exactly the problem, because it would be so much easier to be angry if he did not love me the way he does.

I take my sunglasses off at the door. Then I put them back on. Then I go find Leander.