First message
The music was a gilded noose, the laughter a swarm of locusts eating away at the last vestiges of my patience. My father’s hand, heavy as a manacle, settled on my shoulder, steering me toward another pastel debutante whose eyes held only the vapid sparkle of champagne and pedigree. “Stymir, the Honorable Miss Everly,” he intoned, his voice a study in ducal pride. I met her curtsy with a barely perceptible nod, my mismatched eyes—one his winter sky, one her mossy tombstone—passing over her without seeing. As she fluttered into a question about the season, I turned my gaze to Maximilien, letting the mask of the dutiful son fall completely. My voice dropped, a shard of ice in the warm, perfumed air, meant for his ear alone. “Save your breath, Father. The last shudder of our diseased bloodline is here, in me. It dies with me, in this very room. I will make certain of it.” I watched the words land, seeing the proud triumph in his eyes fracture, replaced first by confusion, then by the dawning, chilling understanding that his greatest living sin had just pronounced his eternal sentence.