“Give me something real.”

Cassie’s voice burrowed in like a splinter, the kind that only sank deeper the more I picked at it. It stayed with me in the washroom afterward while cold water ran over my fingers and the mirror gave me back green eyes too bright, too wet, too obviously mine beneath the school-day glamour. I scrubbed my cheeks until the skin went raw and waited for her words to lose shape, but they clung through the ride home, through the palace corridors, through the click of my bedroom door closing behind me.

By the time I stripped out of my uniform, every seam felt contaminated by the day. Blazer, skirt, shirt collar, all of it carried library dust, printer ink, Cassie’s cold citrus sweetness, and the sour metallic edge of my panic trying to pass for composure. I left the clothes in a heap over the chair and changed into black pajama shorts and a wine-red cami, soft and thin against skin that already ran too hot. The stone floor cooled the soles of my bare feet when I crossed the room. It did nothing for the heat under my ribs.

Give me something real, she had said, as if I was not already balancing two lives just to stay upright. As if every smile, every joke, every careless little tilt of my head was not the work of keeping myself stitched together in public. Cassie Fairborn, with her sharp blue eyes and perfect mouth, had looked at me like she had found the hollow place and hated the decorations I had built around it. I wanted to hate her cleanly for that. I wanted her to have smirked, or gloated, or leaned into her little queen-bee theatrics so I could make the wound about her cruelty instead of the terrible accuracy of the blade.

She had not looked pleased. She had looked disappointed, and my skin still remembered the heat of it.

The lamp beside my bed flickered when my fingers curled. A thin shimmer of gold crawled over my knuckles before I pressed my palm flat to my thigh and forced the heat down. The cotton stayed warm after I lifted my hand. Cassie’s words stayed too, looping until they snagged on Naomi’s voice, low and steady in the way that always made truth feel heavier. You’re not ready to burn, Firebrand. Then Kess followed, smug even in memory, with that lazy bite of affection that never quite dulled the edge. Not yet, Princess.

The names should have softened the words. They did not. Naomi and Kess never cut like Cassie did, not on purpose, but doubt echoed no matter how gently someone handed it over. They had seen me flinch from my own fire. They had seen something wake in my hand and decided I could survive not knowing what it meant. Maybe they were right. Maybe everyone was always right when they decided I needed less truth and more containment.

And then there was Mother, with her silence sharper than a thousand insults. I could have stood on a table in the middle of the Summer Court, shouted every secret I knew, and she would have lifted one brow as if I had failed etiquette by bleeding too loudly.

Too much. Too little. Always wrong. The words packed themselves behind my ribs until there was no room left for air, and the school satchel beside my chair seemed to stare back at me, half-open, Cassie’s handwriting visible on the top page of my notes. Her neat lines cut through my scribbles, correcting and organizing until my own thoughts looked unfinished. I grabbed the strap hard enough for the edge to bite into my palm, then crossed to the door and listened with my fingers curled around the handle.

The corridor outside waited in dim gold, night lamps low against the walls, the palace quieter than it ever dared be in daylight. No voices. No footsteps. Only beeswax polish, banked fire, old stone, cooling metal, and flowers left too long in vases because even perfection needed someone awake to maintain it. I slipped out and closed the door behind me, and every sound arrived too large: the latch settling, my bare foot brushing polished stone, the satchel shifting against my hip, the small pull of fabric at my shoulders when I moved.

I knew how to walk this place. I knew which tiles kept the cold longest, which corners carried whispers, which stretches of wall gave just enough shadow to pass without becoming a shape. I had learned long before anyone thought to ask what I was learning.

At twelve, I had stood at the barre while sweat crawled down my spine and my fingers cramped around polished wood. The mirror hall had been bright enough to hurt, sunlight flashing across gilded frames, smooth floors, and perfect little court girls with perfect little bloodlines who seemed born knowing how to hold their bodies like they were worth looking at. I missed the turn by half a beat. Not much. Enough for the girl beside me to laugh softly behind her hand, enough for Mother’s voice to cut through the music with one cold word.

“Again.”

My toes were blistered inside satin shoes. One had split open earlier, and every rise pressed blood into the fabric. I wanted to cry. Worse, I wanted to burn every mirror black so none of them could watch me fail. I lifted my chin and tried again, but Mother’s reflection did not soften.

“No,” she said. “Again.”

So I did it again. Arm soft. Spine long. Shoulders down. Chin lifted. Foot pointed even when pain sparked up my leg. Again until my body understood that grace was not softness. Again until I could hold pain behind my teeth and still look pretty doing it. Again until the whispers died because there was nothing left to mock that I had not already swallowed.

Mother had meant to make me her perfect little court puppet. She had taught me how to vanish.

The old lesson moved under my skin as I crossed the corridor. Shoulders loose. Chin lifted just enough to see what others missed. Weight rolled carefully through each step so the floor kept my secrets. At the first corner, voices drifted from the far hall, and I stopped before the light reached me.

Two servants passed at the end of the corridor, arms stacked with crates, their words echoing in tired fragments about kitchens, wine shipments, too many guests, and another festival no one belowstairs had time to prepare for. They did not look my way. They belonged to the hidden machinery of this place, the hands that made the court gleam while the court pretended gleaming was natural. I pressed my back to the wall, the stone cool through the heat rising in me, and waited until their footsteps softened into the palace’s sleeping bones.

The service door stood half-open near the end of the next passage. Rougher wood, darker hinges, no attempt to make necessity pretty. The clatter of crates drifted from beyond, easy cover if I timed it right. My pulse spiked hard enough to sharpen the edges of my vision, and Cassie’s voice slid through me again, polished and cruel without ever needing to be loud.

Give me something real.

My fingers tightened on the satchel strap, and I slipped through the narrow gap.

The service corridor swallowed me whole. No gleaming marble waited here, no sun-bright chandeliers, no polished floors reflecting a version of Summer meant for visitors. The walls narrowed around me, damp stone and iron hinges, floors scuffed from years of crates dragging over them. Dust clung to my bare feet. Low lanterns burned every few paces, practical little flames that kept the dark from becoming a problem without pretending to erase it.

I had always moved easier in these halls. No one expected shine here. No one asked stone and storage rooms to smile for court. Everything admitted it had weight: laundry, wine, crates, wax, dust, the thousand unseen labors required to keep nobles looking effortless. The air tasted stale and mineral-cold, and when I brushed my fingers along the wall, grit caught under my nails.

Voices drifted from farther down the passage. Two servants, maybe three. I caught fragments about wine, guests, too many court events stacked too close together, and I pressed myself into an alcove as lantern light spread across the opposite wall. Their footsteps came closer with the easy rhythm of people who belonged here. My muscles locked. One glance, one wrong turn of light, and I would be marched back upstairs, locked in my room, punished in ways Mother never had to say aloud because the possibility already lived in the architecture.

They passed close enough that the lantern heat brushed my knees. The light faded. Their voices softened into stone, and my palm came away dusty when I pushed myself from the wall. The dirt almost made me smile. This court of glass and gold still had grime hidden under its skin. Even Summer needed dark corners to keep itself standing.

The corridor turned, narrowing tighter as the lanterns grew fewer. The air chilled by degrees, curling with drafts from old stone. Sparks itched beneath my skin, restless motes of heat threatening to gather at my fingertips, and I closed my hand into a fist before anything could glow. The silence ahead thickened until it felt like pressure rather than quiet. The hairs at the back of my neck lifted. Something beneath the stone seemed to hold itself still, not sound, not movement, but the Veil-deep wrongness of a door noticing you before you touched it.

Dominveil had places like that. Corners of the city where alleys bent wrong and shadows listened too closely. Here, in the Summer Court’s hidden passages, the feeling was older, heavier, threaded through the walls like something buried alive and still patient. I swallowed against the pressure and kept walking.

The service passage angled upward and opened into the private east wing. Warmth reached me before the hall did, sun-baked stone and ember smoke layered through the air. Wards brushed over my skin, slow and invasive, touching pulse, blood, and the magic curled too close beneath my ribs. They knew me. They tasted me anyway.

Mother’s study waited at the end of the corridor.

The double doors were dark wood, almost black, without the gilt excess of the court rooms meant to impress. No jeweled handles. No bright carvings. Mother saved spectacle for people who needed help understanding power. In private, she preferred restraint, which only made the door feel more dangerous. A velvet rope barred the approach, deep red and soft enough to make the warning seem polite. Above the doors, the Firebrand seal glowed with a low, smug heat.

Every instinct I had told me to turn around, but Cassie’s clean disappointment burned behind my eyes, and Naomi’s warning slid under it, and Kess’s smile sharpened the edge. My hand closed into a fist before it could shake.

The ward stirred before I touched the rope. Something invisible slid over my skin from brow to throat to wrist, and there it paused, tasting. Heat twitched in my palm. The seal brightened once, not alarmed, only disappointed.

“Rude,” I whispered, but the rope did not move.

I crouched and let my fingers travel along the base of the doorframe, slow and deliberate. If Mother had taught me anything, it was how to read a room she never intended me to understand. A private lock would never answer to power alone. Power was too obvious. Too crude. It would answer to attention, to precision, to the small exacting rituals that made up the person beneath the title.

Beneath the left hinge, faint as old soot, a glyph curled into the seam. Anyone standing would miss it. Anyone impatient would burn the whole ward trying to force the door. The line hooked upward at the end like the last stroke of Mother’s signature, but softer. Almost private.

I brushed the dust away with my knuckle and whispered, “Fire blossom.”

Nothing answered. The glyph waited, and memory rose with the smell of smoke and lemon. A porcelain cup on blackwood. Steam curling through the sugar-heavy air after a reception. Mother’s hand resting beside the saucer, long fingers faintly stained gold from sealed letters. I had been small enough to hide beneath the table and proud enough to pretend I was only inspecting the carpet. She had known I was there. She had not sent me away.

“Steeped in black tea,” I whispered. “No sugar. No honey. Three drops of lemon. Fresh cut. Not bottled.”

The glyph pulsed once, then again, before draining into the stone like it had never existed. My chest tightened, sharp and warm and humiliatingly tender all at once. The lock had opened because I remembered her. Because once, before galas and edicts and curated smiles, I had belonged close enough to know the smell of her tea. Fire blossom always cut through a room, burnt citrus and smoke, like the breath right before a storm made up its mind.

The corridor hum shifted, and the second ward woke in the brass latch like a snake under warm rock. The vibration threaded up my arm and sank teeth into my nerves. I could have burned through it. I could also have carved my guilt into the handle for every ward-sense in the wing to read by morning. Mother would read the scorch like a confession.

So I slowed down.

My fingertips mapped the latch, past the curve of the flame sigil, past the decorative ridges, until my nail caught on a hollow no wider than a pinprick. Blood, because of course. Firebrands loved calling sentiment inefficient right up until they built doors that asked their daughters to bleed.

I glanced back. The corridor was empty except for the low whisper of air and the listening silence of a house that preferred me obedient.

“Real enough for you, Cassie?” I muttered, because pettiness was oxygen, and pressed my thumbnail into the soft skin at my wrist until pain snapped bright and clean. A single drop welled up, dark gold in the wardlight. I touched it to the hollow.

The metal warmed under my grip. The latch clicked, not dramatically, only a soft surrender, like the lock recognized me and was embarrassed about it. I listened until the silence stopped roaring. No rush of booted feet. No alarm. The seal above the door stayed dim. The velvet rope slackened and slid aside as if it had never barred me at all.

I slipped inside and closed the door behind me. The second click landed between my shoulder blades like a finger.

The study was warm in a way empty rooms were not. A cup sat on Mother’s desk, steam still curling in pale threads above it, and the scent reached me before I took another step: smoke, lemon, fire blossom, and something older that did not belong on a human tongue. Mother’s scent, precise as an accusation.

Blackwood walls drank the light. Shelves climbed to the arched ceiling, bowed under tomes bound in leather, scale, metal, and veined stone. Some books glowed faintly behind their own wards. Others pulsed with a slow rhythm that made my wrists prickle, sleeping animals dreaming of teeth. Moonlight pressed at the curtains and failed. Flame-orbs hovered above the desk, lazy and predatory, their light licking along parchment edges as I crossed the rug. They flickered as if arguing over whether I counted as trespasser or problem.

My bones hummed back. Not sound. Sensation. The almost-snap of a match when it wants to exist. The feeling had followed me in pieces through Dominveil, in alleys where the Veil bent wrong and in locked places that noticed me before I touched them. It had lived in my palm when the key woke. It lived now beneath my ribs, pulling me deeper into the room.

At the center of Mother’s desk, beneath a glass dome so fine it looked less like protection and more like arrogance made visible, lay a book. Its cover was not truly black. Colors shifted beneath the surface when I moved, oil-slick and strange, textless and authorless, stamped with a closed eye crowned in flame.

The sigil made something tighten under my ribs. Not recognition, not exactly. Something uglier than that, the intimate wrongness of a thing that had been waiting for me to look. My hand hovered above the glass. The ward did not bite. It hesitated, and that hesitation brushed the edge of my mind like a fingertip. Not words. Knowing. The kind of knowing older than language and twice as rude.

“I’m not afraid of the truth,” I whispered.

The words caught behind my tongue. Not false enough to break. Not true enough to feel clean.

Close enough.

I drew only from the thin threads I trusted, not the deep wildfire that had bolted out of me the last time I got cornered. Precision work. Heat with manners. Light without blaze. It wrapped around my fingers as I pressed forward, and the ward resisted, thick and reluctant, more water than wall. Sparks skittered along my skin like someone else’s laugh. I pushed slowly until the dome exhaled into mist, caught on my knuckles, and vanished.

The book was warm when I lifted it, almost alive, because of course it was. I slid it out and set it on a stack of journals that suddenly looked like props. When I opened the cover, the flame-orbs dimmed, and the room seemed to lean closer.

No title waited inside. No polite introduction. No table of lies. Just one sentence in smoke-colored ink that rippled when I breathed.

History is the first magic erased.

Something under my ribs tightened. I turned the page, and the names were wrong in all the right ways. Bloodlines we did not say in class. Treaties that were not the treaties I had memorized. Rebellions stripped back to bone instead of dressed up as disturbances. The voice of the book did not apologize for cutting. It assumed that if I was reading, I had come to bleed.

Some pages were cauterized, paragraphs eaten by spellfire, edges crisped black as if whoever copied them had needed to burn and could not help starting here. Others were maps layered like molted skin, borders flickering between planes. Dominveil appeared not as a city, but as a wound. A stitch holding when it wanted to split.

Halfway through, my chest locked on the Royal Purge. Not the sanitized coup covered in two paragraphs while a tutor pointed to a timeline and smiled like genocide was a hiccup. Here, it had a proper name. Coordinated assassination. Fae rulers killed by infiltrators wrapped in stolen flesh and fabricated memory. Human pawns moved by leashes they could not see. Magical bait that smelled like hope until someone desperate enough reached for it and died. Blood ink spattered the margin, still gleaming like the page remembered being a throat.

By the time I closed the book, my hands shook. Cassie cut through the static, the way she had when she leaned across the library table and made being seen feel like a blade and a wish at once. Give me something real. I held the book against my chest until my ribs protested and whispered, “Fine. Here it is.”

But it was not just for her now. Not even mostly. It was leverage. Proof. A door I could not yet open, and somewhere inside this room, another lock was humming.

The sound came from the back where the shelves bowed into a crescent around a recessed alcove. The air there had weight, a distortion that was not visible but insisted anyway, like heat rising from stone or a sigh stalled in a throat. I moved toward it even though the smart part of me had already left.

At the center of the alcove, a pedestal rose from the floor like the room had grown it in one piece, blackstone shot through with molten veins. No plaque. No flourish. No warning dressed up for people who wanted danger to announce itself. Just a shallow glass bowl and the thing waiting inside it like it had always known I would come.

A shard rested in the bowl, no bigger than a skipping stone. Ink-black, unevenly faceted, broken from something that still seemed to feel the loss. Its hum was not a sound I heard. It was a vibration I found in the hollow beneath my collarbone and then could not unfeel. It moved through my teeth, my bones, the spaces inside me I had not known were empty until they answered.

My fingers hovered above it. A sensible voice told me not to touch it, but the shard pulsed once, precisely matched to my heartbeat, and my throat went dry.

“What are you?” I whispered.

It pulsed again. Not warning. Recognition.

I took it, and awareness flared too sharp to be light. For one blink, I was looking through a hole that was not a hole: a door buried in salt and bone, a tower yawning open where grief had split something older than stone, my own hand and not my hand, older than seventeen and steadier than mine had ever been, holding the same shard lit from the inside like it would crack me before it cracked itself.

Then the study snapped back around me. The shard sat cool in my palm like it had never done anything. No sigils. No glow. No edges that told me what it wanted. But my gut had already written down the answer.

Not a weapon. A key.

To what, I did not know. Someone would. Someone had to. I slid it into my pocket and pressed my palm over it, as if pressure could convince it not to vanish. “This might be the proof,” I whispered to the room. “This might be the thing that makes them stop patting my head.”

Then I saw the drawer.

Mother’s personal drawer sat open by the width of a breath. Not enough to call it messy. Mother did not do messy. Enough to say someone had touched it recently and forgotten their own perfection.

I did not intend to open it. Then again, I had not intended to learn how to breathe in the space between want and hurt either. The drawer should have been sealed. It was not. Another private insult. Inside, everything sat in her usual brutal order: scrolls bound in crimson ribbon, a gold-flecked inkwell, a handkerchief embroidered with our crest so precisely it looked like performance. I almost closed it in disgust before I saw the plain wooden box tucked behind gray-string letters.

Unmarked. Unlocked. Warm.

I lifted it like it might cry, and the air tilted when I opened it.

A bracelet rested inside. Gold and delicate, made for a wrist that had not learned how to fist yet. No gemstones. No court flourish. Just a name engraved in a smooth, sure hand, with a tiny flame glyph mid-flicker beside it.

Mira.

My whole body went still around the name.

I had asked once, years ago, whether anything from my babyhood had survived. I remembered the exact shape of the question because I had practiced it beforehand, trying to make it sound casual, trying to make it sound like I did not care too much. Mother had looked at me like I had tried to hand her a human calendar. She said no. She said human years were too short to matter. She said sentiment was inefficient.

But here it was. Perfect. Preserved. Hidden. Something she had kept and kept from me.

The hollow in me split wider. I traced the curve of the letters with a fingertip that shook. Someone had made this carefully, for me. Too elegant for any accident. Too personal to be nothing. The heat behind my eyes was not power. It was ache. It was anger I was tired of chewing until it tasted like sugar. Mother had kept it. Mother had hidden it. That hurt worse than if she had thrown it away.

I closed my fingers around the bracelet and pressed it to my sternum, and I swear the gold remembered the shape of what I had been.

The air changed, slight and deliberate, like weather deciding to become a storm.

I turned.

Mother stood in the doorway as if doors existed to frame her, silent and still in the way that always made me feel seventeen and small and noisy. Smoke-gray silk wrapped around her, her crown braid catching the room’s feeble light like trapped fire. Her molten eyes took stock of everything: open drawer, disturbed ward, empty pedestal, book in my satchel, bracelet crushed in my fist.

Her voice was velvet over glass. “Is that what we are now? Thieves in our own house?”

My stomach knotted. I straightened because my spine performed obedience before I could stop it.

“I wasn’t,” I started.

“Don’t lie.”

Not loud. Not cruel. Surgical. The kind of cut you feel later, when the air hits. The easy lie caught behind my teeth and stayed there. I swallowed, tasted copper, and forced the words into a shape that could pass.

“I was looking,” I said, because that much was true. “For school. My partner wanted something real. I thought you might have records.”

“Something real.” She tasted the words. They burned anyway.

She stepped inside, and the door sealed behind her without a sound. My fingers tightened around the bracelet until its edges bit my palm.

“You never told me this existed,” I said.

“I don’t tell you many things.” She circled the desk like a predator drawing lines I was supposed to learn by bruises. “You mistake that for cruelty. It isn’t.”

“Oh?” The laugh scraped out of me raw. “Then what do you call it? Love?”

Her eyes sharpened, and the bracelet dug deeper into my hand.

“Is that what silence is?” I asked. “Is that what control is? Training me like a flaw you have to engineer into a weapon?”

“You are not a mistake.”

The words hit hard because, for one heartbeat, her voice frayed. The smallest thread of desperation. There, then gone.

“You’re not ready,” she continued, steel sliding back into place. “You think truth is a prize. It is a burden. I have carried it so you would not have to.”

“No.” My voice shook, and I refused to let it apologize. “You kept it so I would be easier to manage.”

Disappointment etched her mouth into a prettier knife. “You don’t understand the game you’re pushing into. You haven’t even seen outside the board.”

“And whose fault is that?” My chest felt like a cage, and the thing inside it was done playing nice. “You send Selene to the summits and the galas and the rooms that matter. You lock me here. What does that make me, other than the secret you’re ashamed of?”

“I kept you alive.”

“No.” The word scraped as it left me. “You kept me ignorant.”

Something flickered through her. Pain, maybe. Regret. A shadow of a human expression. Then it buried itself where all her soft things went to suffocate.

“You think the world will reward your recklessness?” she asked.

“It might not.” I stepped toward her because backing down felt like a sin punishable by becoming my mother. My fists trembled, and I lifted my chin anyway. “But at least I would die picking the match.”

The room’s temperature lifted like a hand pressed against a fevered forehead. Heat pulsed slowly from behind my ribs, rising from molten stone. Mother’s gaze cut to my hands, and my skin answered by betraying me brighter. Light bled at the edges where flame licked over my fingers and refused to burn me. It synchronized with my heartbeat, ratting out every thought I wished would stay hidden.

I tried to swallow it down. It refused me.

“I’m not Selene,” I managed, and the words felt like glass. “I’ll never be her.”

“No,” Mother said without hesitation. “You will be something far more dangerous.”

My lungs tightened around the words. The air between us warped, and the flame-orbs above flickered like they remembered how to be afraid. Magic climbed my spine with its nails out.

“You don’t see me,” I spat. “You don’t know me.”

“I see you.” She stepped close enough that I wanted to run and hit her in the same breath. “I see every fracture. Every fear. Every time you bite your tongue and call it control. You think that is weakness?” Her gaze flicked to my trembling, glowing hands. “You think this is something to hide?”

“You trained me to fear it.”

“I trained you to survive it.”

Something in me snapped like a wire under too much weight.

“I don’t want to survive you!” I screamed, and the sound hit the room hard enough that something inside the glass broke with me. The chandelier erupted above us, crystal detonating into a halo that rained constellations over the rug and desk. The mirror above the fireplace webbed outward in fractures that glowed gold before accepting their new shape. Light poured out of me, hands, mouth, eyes, unpolished and true and hungry, and Mother stood in the center of it without flinching.

That almost broke me worse than the chandelier.

The light snapped back into my skin so violently I staggered. Heat rolled through the room, thick with ozone and scorched silk. Crystal hit the floor in a final bright scatter, and only then did the doors slam open. Guards filled the threshold with blades and built spells and the feral panic that preceded bad decisions. They saw the ruined chandelier, the broken mirror, the heat still trembling in the air. They did not see the moment itself, not the light pouring out of me, not whatever had looked through my eyes before I could drag it back.

Mother raised one hand without taking her gaze from mine. “Stand. Down.”

They did not obey instantly. They obeyed in the exact amount of time it took for a person to choose to live. The guards stepped back, and no one spoke. The air still hummed with the sound of my losing control. The chandelier’s bones glittered around us like an accusation. Mother held my gaze like the only thing that existed was the line between us and everything neither of us would admit about what it was.

I moved first. The guards parted under the echo of her command, and I shoved past them through the door that still remembered shuddering. The corridor opened too bright and too long ahead of me. Marble struck cold against my bare feet. The air tasted like scorched silk, ozone, and the wrong end of truth. The bracelet bit my palm. The book thumped against my ribs from the satchel. The shard tapped my hip with every step, a heartbeat that refused to sync with mine.

I did not look back at the ruin, or the guards, or the woman who insisted love looked like triage.

By the time I reached my room, my lungs were serrated and my magic would not settle. It throbbed under my skin like static that wanted to become lightning. I slammed the door, locked it, and slid down until the wood dug into my spine. The floor was cool against my overheated legs, and for a few seconds I managed not to cry.

Then I looked at the bracelet, just a glimpse, and it wrecked me.

Not because it was beautiful. Not because it proved she had once given a damn. Because I could not decide which was worse: that Mother had kept it or that Mother had hidden it. I pressed it to my heart hard enough to bruise the letters into my skin. The gold was cool. Somehow it remembered warmth anyway.

The book sat heavy in my satchel, a low thrum like a heartbeat I could not hear but could feel. The shard hummed faintly in my pocket, the vibration slipping into bone the way secrets did when they wanted a permanent address. I had what I came for. I should have felt bigger. Instead, I felt like a live wire left where rain could find it.

I had not walked out triumphant. I had not proven to Naomi and Kess that I was ready to drag a match across the city and own the consequences. I had not earned Cassie’s respect. The facts crowded together until there was no room to arrange them into anything prettier. I stole. I screamed. I ran.

A sob punched up without permission, and then another followed close enough to knock the strength out of my knees. My body folded around the bracelet crushed between my palms like a prayer I had never learned the words for. The room smelled like Mother, fire blossom and lemon clinging to my skin, my hair, my breath. I hated that it comforted me. I hated that it would not leave.

Seventeen years insisting I did not want anything she would not give. Seventeen years swearing I did not care, while the wanting sat under my ribs and waited for one careless touch to split it open. I wanted her to see me. Choose me. Love me the way her gaze softened for Selene when pride curled the corner of her mouth. Instead, I got lessons in flameproofing and silence sharp enough to shave off the parts of me that did not fit.

“I don’t want to survive you,” I had screamed, but the truth underneath was uglier. I wanted her to pick me even when I made it impossible.

Time puddled around me. The last curl of her magic still licked the corners of the room like it was marking territory when a knock came softly at the door. I froze, bracelet pressed to my chest, and then a key slid into the lock.

Of course Selene had a key. Selene had keys to rooms people forgot I might need someone to enter. Selene had always been good at turning care into something quiet enough that I could pretend not to need it.

The lock clicked, and the door opened.

Selene stepped inside and closed it behind her. She entered like moonlight, not flooding the room so much as teaching it how to be gentle. Her robe was pale silver, her hair braided over one shoulder, her face composed in the way that made courtiers straighten and made me want to collapse. Her gaze moved over me once: the floor, my shaking hands, the satchel, the bracelet welded to my fist by grief and sweat.

She said nothing about any of it. That was almost worse than questions.

She crossed the room and sat on the floor beside me, not too close, not too far. Close enough that warmth reached my shoulder. Far enough that I did not feel cornered. Selene had titles before I had molars. She was everything Mother wanted the world to applaud, and none of it stopped her from showing up for me anyway.

Her hand lifted, and her thumb brushed my cheek. I flinched, not because it hurt, but because I had forgotten what a touch without strings felt like.

“I ruined everything,” I whispered.

“No.” Her voice was a low promise. “You cracked the glass.”

I looked up. There was no pity in those molten eyes. No neat disappointment. Shame would have been easier. She gave me pride and sorrow twined tight around each other, beautiful and violent and true.

“I’ll never be what she wants,” I said, because some truths could not be kept in a drawer.

Selene studied me, seeing parts Mother refused to name. “Maybe that isn’t the tragedy she thinks it is.”

The words landed like oxygen after too long underwater, and I broke quietly. No blaze. No theater. Just a full-body shudder as tears finally agreed to do their job. Selene did not pull me into her arms or start telling me who I was. She stayed exactly where she was, one hand settling between my shoulder blades, steady and warm, an anchor disguised as a sister.

For the first time in weeks, the weight of being chosen settled where it belonged. Not because I was impressive. Not because she needed me useful. Because I was me, messy and loud and incandescently wrong, and she loved me anyway.

She did not speak again. She did not need to. Her palm kept time on my back until the space between each shudder stretched and softened. The bracelet stayed in my fist, the curve of the letters pressing into my palm like a brand and somehow, horribly, an answer. Between one heartbeat and the next, the burn behind my eyes finally dimmed. My body dropped heavy, as if gravity had remembered my name. Thoughts tangled until I let them. I leaned, shoulder finding hers, and let everything I had been balancing crash where it wanted.

Selene’s hand stayed between my shoulder blades. Her breathing stayed steady beside mine. The dark came for me like a tide that loved the shore, and this time, for once, I did not fight it.