CHAPTER TWO — EVERYONE ELSE IS REPLACEABLE (2)

He took my hand, lifted it to his mouth, and kissed my knuckles.

Soft. Slow. Deliberate. A claim so public it should have had a notary.

My heart stopped. My brain filed a formal complaint. The crowd made a sound like a wave hitting a cliff.

Then Dorian Varga turned to the room, and his voice was ice with a blade in it.

"Everyone else is replaceable," he said. "She is my only exception. Anyone who speaks of her again—anyone who touches her again—will be treated as an enemy of Varga Holdings. I have no friends. I can afford infinite enemies. Choose carefully."

He looked at Elinor, and Elinor's phone dropped from her hand like it had caught fire.

"Miss Rose," he said pleasantly. "Leon."

Leon appeared from nowhere with a tablet, radiating the smug energy of a man who had been waiting for this moment for years.

"Miss Rose," Leon said, "which would you like first: the footage of you shoving Miss Hayes at the Varga Foundation Gala, or the deepfake origin files your PR firm left on a shared drive with the password 'queenelinor1'?"

Elinor's face went the color of a bad decision.

"The Rose Corporation's accounts with Varga Holdings are frozen as of this hour," Dorian said. "The rest of you—learn from the Rose. She wanted a war with something she doesn't understand. Wars have rules, Miss Rose. Mine are simple: don't touch her."

He turned back to me, and the ice in his voice melted in a single, catastrophic second.

"Are you alright?" he asked softly. "Did she hurt you?"

The room made that wave sound again. I think someone's grandmother fainted.

"I'm fine," I said, and my voice cracked, which ruined the effect. "I was handling it."

"I know," he said. "You were magnificent. Come. I'm taking you somewhere with better air."

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DORIAN

The rooftop of the Rose's building was cold and loud with the city below, and I stood exactly one arm's length from her again, because I had learned that the distance was all that kept me from doing something I couldn't take back.

"You didn't have to come," she said.

"Yes," I said. "I did."

"Why?" She turned to face me, and the city lights caught the stubborn set of her jaw. "You don't know me, Mr. Varga. I could be anyone. I could be exactly what everyone's saying—a gold digger, a liar, a—"

"You spilled wine on me," I said. "Then you apologized to me. You were more worried about my shirt than your own life. That is not a gold digger."

"That's not an answer."

"I have been alive for nine hundred and seventy-four years," I said. "I have never once wanted to know anyone. You are the first. Don't make it a crime."

She stared at me. The wind moved her hair. I wanted to touch it. I did not. The curse was a live wire under my skin, and she was the only ground it had ever found.

"What does that even mean?" she whispered. "Nine hundred and—you're—are you joking?"

"I don't joke," I said. "Ask Leon."

"Leon said you were going to frame your shirt's ashes."

"...That was a joke," I said. "I have made one joke this century. Leon keeps it in a document."

She laughed. It was the same startled, disbelieving laugh from the terrace, and the curse sang under my skin, and I knew—with the certainty of nine hundred and seventy-four years of watching people make the same mistakes—that I was going to make the oldest mistake of all, and I was going to make it for her.

"Mr. Varga," she said, "what are you?"

The question I had asked her. Turned back on me like a blade.

"I'm someone who is going to keep you alive," I said. "Whatever is coming for you, it comes through me first. That's all you need to know tonight."

"Coming for me?" Her voice went thin. "What does that—"

"Leon," I said, without looking away from her, "is the car ready?"

"Yes, boss," Leon said from the doorway, and I heard the unspoken part: you're handling this wrong and I'm going to tell you so in the car.

"Go home, Miss Hayes," I said, and I let myself do one thing: I reached out and tucked the strand of hair behind her ear. My hand shook. She felt it. Her eyes went wide.

"Sleep," I said. "You're safe. I'll make sure of it."

I put her in the car. I watched it go. And when Leon climbed into the driver's seat, I saw his face in the rearview, and it was the face of a man who had just checked the weather and found a storm.

"Boss," he said. "The pressure on her gallery contract. It didn't come from the Rose family."

"What?"

"It came from an old-world address. A Moone."

The name hit me like a wall of ice water. Cressida Moone. The oldest of the old families. The woman who knew more about the Unbound Fate than I did—and had been waiting for the vessel for longer than my own century.

For the first time in nine hundred and seventy-four years, I felt fear.

· · ·

CRESSIDA

Across the city, in the penthouse of a tower older than Manhattan's skyline, a woman with silver hair and a smile like a glacier watched the same footage the whole internet was watching.

"Look at him," she murmured, to no one. "The frozen king, thawing."

She raised a champagne glass to the screen, where Layla Hayes stood frozen in a thousand screenshots, a girl made of fire at the edge of morning.

"The last vessel," Cressida Moone said, and drank. "Awake at last."

· · ·