Seraphina Vale stared at the rejected invitation on her vanity, her reflection a mask of cold fury. The plan had been elegantly simple. The plan involved a heartbroken, unstable girl, a public poisoning, and a tidy execution. Rosalind's role had been to be a willing, lovestruck puppet.
Now the puppet had cut its strings. Publicly. Politely. By doing so, she had become something unpredictable. Something dangerous.
Worse, she was spending time with that Northern brute's sister. Elara Frost was a variable Seraphina hadn't accounted for—a genuine person in a court of masks, which made her unnerving. And the Duke himself had summoned Rosalind. Why?
The original timeline was fraying. She could feel it, a subtle wrongness in the flow of events, like a single dissonant note in a familiar symphony. The entity nestled within her soul, the fragment of something ancient and patient, stirred with mild interest.
The anomaly grows, it whispered, a sound like dry leaves in her mind. The system notes variance. Adjust the calibration.
Seraphina didn't fully understand the "system" her patron referenced, but she understood power. And Rosalind Thorne was slipping from her grasp. The tea party was in two days. The poison—an elegant, untraceable blend of moonbell and shadowcap—was already here, hidden in a sealed vial within a hollow hairpin. The target was still Cassian. The patsy was still meant to be Rosalind.
But the patsy had refused to take the stage.
Fine. If the trap wouldn't spring one way, it would spring another. She needed to force Rosalind's hand or find a new way to drape the crime around her shoulders.
She dipped her quill in ink, her hand steady. The note was to the compromised apothecary, but the wording was careful and innocent to any outside eye.
'The special order for the upcoming event is confirmed. Please deliver the usual quantity to the usual drop, prepared as discussed. The recipient's taste remains delicate.'
She sanded the note, her lips a thin line. The "usual drop" was a hollow statue in the academy's least-frequented garden. The "recipient" was herself. But if this note were intercepted… the meaning could be twisted. Especially if it were found in someone else's possession.
She would need to ensure that the note was not intercepted.
Across the academy, in the lavish suite reserved for the Crown Prince, Cassian Aurelius gazed at a transparent, blue-tinged screen only he could see.
[System Alert: Timeline Variance: 5.1%]
[Anomaly Tracking: Subject 'Rosalind Thorne' – Divergence Rate Increasing]
[Recommendation: Close Observation/Neutralization Protocol Available]
A slow smile spread across his perfect features. So, the strange little shift in the story had a name. Rosalind Thorne. The girl who had gone from a background piece of adoring scenery to a glaring, off-script character. Her refusal had been a surprise. Her sudden friendship with the Frost girl was an intrigue. And his brother Lucian's faint, approving nod to her in the courtyard had been a revelation.
Multiple pieces were moving toward her. The Duke. The Second Prince. Even his tool, Seraphina, was fixated on her.
Cassian dismissed the system screen. He didn't need its protocols. He was a master of the narrative. An anomaly could be studied, then corrected. Or exploited.
Perhaps Rosalind Thorne's newfound clarity and defiance could serve a purpose. A public, dramatic fall of a newly risen star was even more compelling than the fall of a known fool. The scandal would be greater, the lesson to the court more potent.
He would watch. He would let Seraphina play her little game. And when the moment was right, he would step in as the heroic prince, either saving the day or delivering justice, whichever narrative proved more powerful.
The system was a tool, but the story was his to write.
I felt the net closing. The red thread of my death hadn't vanished; it had multiplied, weaving a denser, stickier web around me. The silver-blue thread to Kaelen was a lifeline, but it hummed with a tense, warning energy.
I was in the servants' passage again, the only place I felt semi-invisible, when I saw it. A junior maid, her face pale, furtively tucking a small, sealed note into the loose mortar behind a laundry lintel—a known drop-point for anonymous gossip or illicit letters.
My new senses, the "fate-sight," flared. A vicious, sticky crimson tendril emanated from that note, and it led directly back to Seraphina's chambers.
This wasn't gossip. This was evidence being planted.
I waited until the maid scurried away, then pried the note loose. The seal was plain wax, no insignia. Breaking it, I read Seraphina's flowing script. The words were innocent, but to me, they screamed of the poisoning plot. 'The special order… the usual drop… the recipient's taste remains delicate.'
This was the kill shot. If this were "discovered" by the guards after the poisoning, perhaps in my possession or linked to me, it would be the final, damning piece. It described the poison delivery for the "event"—the tea party. And it would be considered my order.
My blood ran cold. She wasn't just proceeding without me. She was setting a secondary trap, framing me for ordering the poison even if I wasn't there to administer it. She was covering every angle.
I had to steal this. But if I did, she'd know I was onto her, and she'd devise something else. I needed to change it.
Crouching in the dim passage, I acted. I copied her handwriting—years of forging the saint's signature on tedious blessings had given me a skill for replication. On a fresh scrap of parchment, I wrote a new note.
'The order is cancelled. The situation has changed. Dispose of the materials discreetly. Await new instructions.'
I sealed it with a blob of wax smoothed from the original, using the plain base of a candlestick to make a generic impression. I placed the forgery back in the hiding spot and pocketed the original.
It was a gamble. Would the apothecary obey a cancellation order? Would Seraphina check the drop and realize the note had been swapped?
It didn't matter. I had the original now—a piece of tangible evidence directly from her hand. But it wasn't enough. It proved she was ordering something, not necessarily poison. I needed the vial itself.
And I needed to understand what Cassian was doing. Since my refusal, his occasional glances were no longer just curious. They were calculative. He was running his own system, and I had become a variable in his equation.
That night, as I lay in bed, the threads of fate, a tangled skein above me, the truth crystallized with chilling clarity.
I wasn't being hunted by one enemy.
I was caught between two.
Seraphina, with her petty, mortal malice and her poisoned trinkets, wanted me dead to clear her path to a throne.
But Cassian, with his calm smiles and his unseen system, was a different kind of hunter. He didn't want me dead yet. He wanted to understand the anomaly. To measure its use. He would either force me to submit to his will or completely remove me from his narrative.
The execution date still pulsed red on the horizon. However, the number of paths leading to that date had increased. And in the shadows, a third player, a man who dreamed of my death, was now watching me with the haunted eyes of a man protecting a ghost he'd just found alive.
The web was tightening. And I was at the very center.