Chapter 2
Seraphina's POV
The party was already moving when I arrived. I handed Nadine her gift, got a drink, found a corner that wasn't too loud. It was fine. It was normal. I was fine.
Then the energy near the door shifted.
Kaston walked in. Violet was on his arm, her rose-and-copper scent cutting through the room before I even turned to look. He was leaning down, saying something close to her ear, and his face — I'd seen Kaston bored, annoyed, charming, dismissive. I had never seen him look at anyone the way he was looking at her right now.
The room noticed. I saw two people near the bar exchange a glance. Someone whispered something I didn't catch.
Kaston looked up.
His eyes found mine across the room, and he went still for a half second — genuinely caught off guard, which almost made me want to laugh.
"Seraphina?" His voice came out uncertain, almost confused. "What are you doing here?"
I looked at him. I looked at her. I looked at his hand, which had already moved off her arm the second he saw me — that small, automatic thing he did, like he could take it back if he was fast enough. Violet's expression went still for half a second. Then she smiled.
He crossed the room toward me, and I waited.
"I didn't think you'd want to come to something like this," he said, keeping his voice low.
I looked at him. "You didn't tell me about it."
"You don't usually enjoy these."
That was technically true. I'd never loved the Greymist social circuit — the posturing, the scent-checking, the unspoken rankings. But we both knew that wasn't why he hadn't mentioned it. He hadn't mentioned it because Violet was going to be here, and he'd wanted to keep those two parts of his life in separate rooms for as long as possible. I wasn't going to say that out loud. I just nodded and walked past him into the party.
Nadine caught my eye from across the room and smiled, but her gaze skipped almost immediately to Kaston behind me, then back. I'd known Nadine long enough to read that look. She was doing math.
Violet found me about twenty minutes later.
She came over with that easy, unhurried confidence of someone who'd already decided how the room was arranged and where she fit in it. Up close, her scent was thick — roses and something underneath that was sharper, almost metallic, the kind of sweetness that coats the back of your throat.
"You must be Seraphina," she said, warm and conversational, as if we were being introduced at a work event. "Kaston's mentioned you."
I didn't ask what he'd said. I just looked at her and waited.
She tilted her head slightly. "It's funny — our scents are a little similar, don't you think? I noticed it when I walked in. I wonder if Kaston ever—"
She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to. The implication sat there between us, wrapped in that pleasant, reasonable tone.
Kaston's face had gone completely still.
I'd been holding white tea for three years. Swallowing wolfsbane every morning, pressing down everything real about myself so I could be soft and easy and uncomplicated. And this woman had just stood in front of me and made that into a punchline.
"Your scent isn't as clean as mine," I said.
It came out completely calm. I wasn't even angry, which surprised me. I was just done.
The small cluster of people nearby went quiet for exactly one second. I saw someone glance at their friend. Nadine stepped in with a comment about the music, and the air started moving again, but the moment had already landed.
The gift situation was almost funny in a bleak sort of way.
Nadine started opening presents, and when she got to mine and Violet's at the same time, I watched her expression shift — the same moon-silver jewelry workshop packaging, the same ribbon, the same box. She opened them both. Same necklace, twice.
One of Nadine's friends — a woman whose name I'd never bothered to learn — looked at my box and announced, loud enough for the surrounding circle to hear, that the necklace ran over fifty thousand in human currency equivalent, and wasn't that a lot for someone in my position.
I felt the air change. Subtle, but I'd been around Greymist pack members long enough to recognize a scent-check — that slight collective inhale, people reaching with their instincts to see if I'd spike with embarrassment or anxiety. They wanted to know if I'd flinch.
I didn't flinch.
Kaston leaned close to me, voice low. "If money was tight, you could have just told me. I would have handled the gift."
I turned to look at him. "You think it's a fake."
He didn't answer. Which was an answer.
Here's the thing about three years — I'd built all of it on a salary that started at three thousand a month, working cases no one else wanted, eating lunch at my desk, wearing the same four blazers in rotation. Kaston had watched all of that and never once questioned it, never once thought to ask how I was managing. He'd just assumed I was fine because I never complained. And now, in front of a room full of people who'd spent three years treating me like a stray who'd wandered into the wrong neighborhood, he was telling me I should have asked him for help with a gift.
My father had reinstated my accounts the same night I called him from the cliff. Fifty thousand was nothing. It was genuinely nothing. But I wasn't going to explain that here, not in this room, not to these people.
I looked at Nadine and caught something in her face — quick, almost hidden, but there. A flicker of distaste she hadn't quite managed to put away in time. And something clicked into place that I'd been half-avoiding for a while. Nadine had run interference for me at a dozen of these events, steered conversations away when things got pointed, laughed at the right moments. I'd been grateful. I'd gone out of my way to find her something she'd actually love.
She'd never actually been in my corner. She'd just been polite about it.
Kaston told Nadine to return the necklace to me. He said he'd get her something else, and he said it in that tone — the one that meant he was managing a situation — and he called me careless in front of everyone. Not cruel, just dismissive, the way you'd describe a child who'd broken something without meaning to.
Nadine looked uncomfortable. I looked at her and said, "Give it to him."
She did.
Violet made a small sound beside him, something soft and ostensibly sympathetic, a few words on my behalf that I didn't catch and didn't need to. Kaston didn't respond to her either. He just stood there holding the necklace with that dark expression, and I had the sudden, clear thought that he had no idea what was actually happening right now.
