Chapter 4
Kaston's POV
She was still in the house when I got back.
I half-expected her to be gone. Seraphina was always doing something — working a case, running errands, filling the hours in ways that made her easy to overlook until she wasn't there. That sounds worse than I mean it. It's just the truth.
I found her in the walk-in closet off the master bedroom, folding clothes into a cardboard box. Shoes pulled from the lower rack. A few books. Methodical. No music, no mess.
"What are you packing?" I leaned against the doorframe.
"Thought I'd go see my parents." She didn't look up. "It's been a while."
She wasn't making it a thing. No questions about last night, no dragging the party back into the room between us. Seraphina never pushed. Rex was always telling me I didn't appreciate that enough. He wasn't wrong.
"That's good," I said. "When are you leaving?"
"Day after tomorrow."
I nodded. Two days. Violet's return from the hotel was scheduled for Thursday. The timing was almost too clean, and I didn't let myself think about that for more than a second.
"You want me to come?"
She looked up. Those amber eyes, steady and unreadable. "Do you want to?"
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
"The project's at a bad point," I said. "I'll have the driver take you to the airport."
"It's fine." She went back to folding. "Someone's picking me up."
"Who?"
"A car service." Her voice was even. "Don't worry about it."
I watched her a second longer than I needed to. Something was off — not in what she said, but in how she said it. Too settled. Too unbothered. Seraphina was usually a little softer when things were tense, a little more careful to smooth things over. This wasn't that.
But she was still here. Packing for a family visit, not a breakup. She'd be back in a week or two, and by then the Violet situation would be cleaner. That was the word Rex used. Manage it. He'd said it over drinks the night before, leaning back like it was nothing. Buy her something. Keep her happy. Don't let it blow up.
I took out my phone and messaged my assistant: [Go find something at that jewelry place on Fifth. Necklace, whatever's nice. Send it to the house.]
That would help. It always helped.
On my way out I stopped at the doorway and told her last night was on me. I said it the way you say things when you mean them but don't want to make a production of it. She said okay. I told her to text when she landed, that I'd pick her up when she got back, that she should be careful on the road. She said okay again. She didn't look up from the box.
Then her phone buzzed on the shelf beside her. She glanced at it, and something shifted in her face. She set the phone face-down and went back to packing.
My own phone rang. Violet's name on the screen.
I picked it up and walked into the hallway, already halfway down the stairs before I'd said two words. I didn't look back.
Seraphina's POV
He was gone before the front door finished closing.
I stood in the closet for a moment, holding a sweater I'd already folded twice, listening to the sound of his car pulling out of the drive. Then I set the sweater down and picked up my phone.
The message was from Cassius. Short, no preamble, the way he always wrote.
[The cuff has been sent to the Sterling Port drop point. Stop by when you have time.]
I read it twice. The cuff. I'd agreed to the arrangement less than a week ago, and the thing was already made, already here, already waiting for me. That wasn't a rush order. That was something that had been in motion for a long time before I ever said yes.
I didn't know what to do with that, so I just typed back: [Okay.]
The drop point was underground, off a side street near the financial district — one of those places that didn't have a sign and didn't need one. The craftsman was older, unhurried, the kind of person who treated every object in the room like it had feelings. He brought the cuff out on a cloth-lined tray and set it in front of me without ceremony.
I didn't touch it right away. I just looked at it.
Top-grade moon-silver, he said. Deep blue ice-crystal at the center, silver-powder diamonds around the band. The inside was engraved — old runic script, and beneath it, a mark I didn't recognize at first, until he explained it: the two bloodlines fused. Mine and Cassius's. Cast directly into the metal.
"It was sized from a reference," he said. "But you can tell me if it needs adjustment."
I picked it up and slid it onto my wrist. It fit. Of course it fit. And there was something — not warmth exactly, more like a low, steady hum — that moved from the metal into my skin and settled somewhere behind my sternum.
Cassius, my chosen match, had been carrying this around for months. Maybe longer. He'd had someone draw my bloodline, get my measurements, commission a piece that took weeks to produce — and he'd done all of that before I'd agreed to anything, before I'd even picked up the phone. He'd just waited. Quietly. Without making it a demand.
Three years, and Kaston never once asked what size ring I wore.
I was still looking at the cuff when the door opened.
I knew before I turned around. The smell hit first — rose and something metallic underneath, the kind of sweetness that coats the back of your throat. Then Kaston's voice, flat and hard: "What is that."
Not a question.
I turned. He was standing just inside the door, Violet half a step behind him, her hand no longer in his but her eyes already on my wrist. The smile on her face didn't reach anything above her cheekbones.
"I'm picking up a piece," I said. "Is there a problem?"
Kaston's eyes were locked on the cuff. His jaw was working. I'd seen that look before — the one that meant he'd decided something was about him when it wasn't.
Violet stepped forward, smooth and unhurried, and said she was there on Monica's behalf — Kaston's mother — just to get a sense of things, just to stay informed.
I raised my wrist slightly and let the cuff catch the light. "Monica's welcome to get informed," I said. "So are you."
Kaston stepped toward me. His voice dropped. "Take it off."
"No."
"Seraphina." The way he said my name — low, warning, like I was a problem he was about to solve. "You're embarrassing yourself. You don't know what you're getting into. This is not your world."
I looked at him for a long moment. This man who'd spent three years deciding I was convenient.
"We haven't formally ended anything," I said. "And you brought her here. You want to talk about what that looks like under Pack Law, or are we done?"
The color in his face shifted. Violet went very still behind him.
He said something else — louder, angrier, the kind of anger that comes from not getting the reaction you expected. I didn't raise my voice. He left. Violet followed, and the door swung shut behind them.
The craftsman reappeared from the back room. He looked at me, then at the door, then back at me. He didn't say anything.
I looked down at the cuff on my wrist.
Then I took out my phone and photographed it — just the wrist, just the band against my skin — and sent it to Cassius.
[Does it look okay?]
Three dots. Then: [It looks good. Do you like it?]
I sat down on the edge of the display bench and typed back. We went back and forth — four messages, maybe five, nothing heavy, just easy. He asked if the fit was right. I told him it was. He said he'd had the runic inscription checked twice because the original draft had a character error. I told him that was very him. He sent back a single punctuation mark that I was almost certain was the closest he ever got to laughing.
His last message came after a pause: "You deserve the best. Don't settle."
I read it twice. Then I put my phone in my pocket and stood up.
Outside, through the window of the shop next door, I saw a display of men's accessories — clean lines, dark stone, moon-silver edging. I thought about Cassius: the silver-blue eyes in the photo my father had sent, the sharp angles, the way he wrote like every word cost something and he'd decided I was worth the price.
I walked in. Pointed to a wrist guard with deep-blue starstone set in a silver frame. The clerk wrapped it without asking questions.
I tucked it under my arm and turned toward the door.
And then I heard a voice behind me.
