Veloura's fashion show hall shimmered with an almost celestial glow. The ceilings arched like the heavens themselves, their gilded chandeliers dripping light like molten stars. Black chairs gleamed in two perfect rows, framing the white platform that stretched like a sacred road to glory. At its end, two towering velvet curtains of midnight blue guarded the models, their folds heavy with mystery.
It was the first launch of the year for Felicity Lourdes. And though titans of fashion—Louis Vuitton, Versace—had graced this city before, even they had never summoned such a sea of faces. The crowd here was swollen, restless, drawn not only by the promise of couture but by the lure of a single name.
The Yamamotos sat with stiff elegance, their reputation in the automobile empire shadowing them like armor. Rudolph Sinclair, Secretary General, lounged like a man weighing alliances. DA Marcus Lee brushed shoulders with Murphy Donovan, each handshake practiced, each smile sharpened like a blade. The air was heavy with perfume, pride, and speculation.
Then came Tracy. Draped in brilliance, she swept in with William Conrad on her arm—Harvard pedigree, son of the Vice President, the sort of man who carried the illusion of power as naturally as he breathed. The crowd whispered like wind stirring dry leaves. They looked like the couple of the night. Cameras flashed like lightning around them. Marcus Lee, nearly stumbling in his eagerness, clasped William's hand with sycophantic fervor.
"Mr. Conrad, you should have let me know you were attending," he fawned. His eyes strayed, greedy, toward Tracy.
"Then the world would've been alerted too," William said smoothly. He squeezed Tracy's hand, drawing her further in, his presence spelled in capital letters—AUTHORITY.
But it was the midnight blue Rolls-Royce that silenced the hall. Vincent had arrived. His stride was a study in controlled power: long legs cutting across the carpet, a predator draped in civility. At his side, Vivian Holman moved with feline grace, her hips swaying as though to remind the world she was still part of his orbit. Together they walked in, an old legend revived.
Vincent was a blade drawn from the fire—red, glowing, dangerous, but cool to the touch. When the Attorney General clasped his arm and whispered, "Sebastián is with us tonight," Vincent's mouth curved into something uncharacteristic. A smile.
"He did like models," he teased lightly, and for the first time in months he looked—relaxed. Almost human. He sat opposite Tracy and William, deliberately refusing to let his eyes touch theirs. Tonight, he was here for one soul alone.
When Felicity appeared, she carried the room like a queen in her own court. The applause rose before she even spoke. "Thank you," she sang, nodding. Then with a sweetness sharp enough to charm and disarm alike:
"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I am honored to see such numbers tonight." Her pause was deliberate, her smile dangerous. "It makes me wonder… are you here for Veloura's unveiling, or for the star we're about to set free?"
Laughter rippled. From the front row, Abigail Francis clapped with frail but determined hands. She was still a shadow of her former strength, but nothing would have kept her away from this night. Cookie sat beside her, gripping her arm protectively. His eyes shone with that rare light—part mentor, part guardian, part brother to every girl who had once walked under his watchful eye.
The lights dimmed. The platform blazed. The curtains sighed open.
The first models drifted forward like choreography set to heartbeats. Their gowns glimmered. The crowd gasped. Applause crackled like thunder. Cookie's lips pressed into a proud, trembling smile. He had trained countless women, corrected their posture, angled their chin, taught them to walk as if they owned the earth. Tonight he saw his craft reflected in every precise step.
But when the next curtain opened, everything changed.
Jennifer's silhouette emerged like a shadow carved from grief itself. The hall fell into silence so heavy it seemed the walls leaned closer to hear. Everyone knew her face—broadcasts, newspapers, scandal—and yet here she stood, unrecognizable, transformed.
She was a lone rose in a winter garden. Her gaze carried sorrow, her cheekbones sharp with unspoken battles, her painted lips darkened deliberately to cast a mourning glow. And her dress—Cassandra's "Widow's Wail"—clung to her with a whisper of tragedy. One shoulder bare, the fabric swooping across her body in an elegant S, the hem spilling like liquid night.
Cookie inhaled sharply. His breath broke. Abigail turned to him and was startled—she had never seen him this way. His eyes glistened, his lips parted as if he were staring at something holy. To him, modeling was never vanity; it was sacred, the theater of humanity's grace. Tonight, Jennifer embodied it fully.
Abigail's heart quaked. She whispered, barely audible, "She's… breathtaking." And the thought crept upon her like a prayer—what they said about her cannot be true.
Tracy's reaction was poison. Her whole body shuddered. William's whisper slithered into her ear, reverent and worshipful:
"My God. She's the real deal."
His hand slipped from hers. He didn't notice. He couldn't. His eyes were bound to Jennifer, drinking her in with every heartbeat. Around Tracy, men were leaning forward, enthralled. Even Marcus Lee nodded slowly to himself, as though in agreement with fate.
Tracy's breath caught in her throat, her jaw tightened, and her vision burned red. She forced her gaze sideways—Vincent. And there it was. A smile. His eyes were fixed upon Jennifer, lit not with curiosity, but with something deeper. Something dangerous. Tracy's blood boiled.
Then the music shifted. The bass silenced. A violin sang, soft and mournful, its voice curling around the hall like smoke.
Jennifer closed her eyes. Felicity's voice echoed in her mind: The outfit can shine, but the real glow comes from your self-belief. Embody confidence.
The curtains parted fully. And in that moment, the hall, the crowd, the whispers, all vanished. There was only her and the long white road before her.
She stepped forward. One foot glided in front of the other with the precision of rehearsal—but her presence was no longer rehearsal. Each step was a confession. Each sway of the dress was a lament. The Widow's Wail was no longer fabric—it was her heart stitched in silk, her grief walking upright.
The violin soared, and Jennifer became the note itself.
Jennifer moved as though she were not stepping onto polished wood, but treading upon memory itself. Each stride was deliberate, sculpted, yet soft, like the unspooling of a sorrowful dream. The hem of The Widow's Wail rippled behind her like a mourning veil. The light caught the silk in ghostly waves, as though the fabric carried whispers of the women who had ever lost, ever wept, ever risen.
The violin's lament deepened. Her heel struck the platform. Step. A sharp intake of breath rippled through the hall.
Step. Men leaned forward, women pressed fingers to lips.
Step. Jennifer's eyes lifted, and the mask of tragedy became her crown.
Cookie clutched Abigail's arm so tightly she flinched. His lips moved, though no sound left them. He looked like a priest mid-prayer, gazing upon a miracle. Abigail, watching him, realized she was witnessing something greater than a model's debut. She whispered to herself, She's not walking a runway. She's walking through fire. And the fire did not consume her—it bowed.
Jennifer reached the center of the platform. She paused. Her chin lifted just slightly, but the gesture was monumental. The light pooled around her face, sharpening the sorrow etched in her features. Her eyes looked out—not at anyone, not at the crowd, not even at the cameras—but beyond them all, into some abyss only she could see. It was grief incarnate, but it was also defiance.
The crowd gasped as if they shared one set of lungs. Silence pressed upon them, sacred, unbearable.
From the far side of the hall, Vincent's mask cracked. His fingers drummed once against his thigh, sharp and uneven. His chest rose with a breath he had not given permission to take. His smile had slipped into something else now—something raw. Jennifer was no longer a girl at a fashion show. She was a storm. And he, a man who had commanded empires, felt small before it.
Tracy saw it. She saw the hunger in William's eyes, the awe on Marcus Lee's face, the fevered devotion rising in Cookie. But it was Vincent's breaking composure that stabbed her heart. He was watching Jennifer like a man recognizing his destiny. Tracy's blood boiled. She wanted to scream, to claw the air, to make the music stop. Instead she gripped the side of her chair until her nails bit the wood.
Jennifer turned. Slowly. Elegantly. The dress shifted with her like a living thing, one shoulder bare like a wound, the opposite side draped like a mourner's shroud. As she pivoted, she caught the audience in that silence again—trapping them, binding them. She did not rush her return down the runway. She glided, and the violin swelled higher, like heaven itself could not contain the ache of her walk.
Abigail pressed her palm to her chest, breath trembling. "She's… untouchable," she whispered. "No one will ever see her the same way again." Cookie could not answer. His eyes were wet. For him, Jennifer was no longer just a model—she was the manifestation of everything he had ever believed about beauty as art, as resistance, as salvation.
The final steps came. Jennifer reached the curtains but did not disappear. She stopped. Turned her head, just slightly, and let her eyes sweep across the hall. In that single look she gave the audience both her agony and her challenge: See me. Not the girl you read about, not the shadow the world made of me. See me.
And then she vanished behind the velvet blue.
The silence that followed was unbearable—until it cracked into thunder. Applause roared like a storm breaking against glass. People rose to their feet, clapping, shouting, a standing ovation that shook the hall.
But in the middle of that chaos, certain hearts beat differently. Cookie's with reverence. Abigail's with hope. Vincent's with something sweet, refreshing, and unspoken. And Tracy's—with a rage so sharp she thought her ribs might shatter around it.
***
The ovation did not fade quickly. It grew, thundered, until the entire hall seemed to pulse with it. But behind the velvet curtains, the sound came to Jennifer as though she were underwater. She staggered once, catching the edge of the frame. Her chest heaved—not from nerves, but from the torrent that had poured through her veins when she stepped onto that runway.
Felicity was there instantly, radiant with pride. "Jennifer," she whispered, breathless, as though she herself had run the stage. "Do you understand what you just did? You silenced a hall of wolves and made them bow." Her hand trembled as it cupped Jennifer's cheek. "You've marked yourself tonight."
Cookie shoved through the other models, his face flushed, his eyes wet. He didn't speak at first, only grasped Jennifer's hands as though anchoring himself to reality. Finally, words stumbled out of him, broken, reverent. "Ma sœur… I taught, I prayed, but this—this was not me. This was God. Dieu himself lent you that walk."
Jennifer managed a small, weary smile. "No, Cookie. It was grief." Her voice was steady, but her eyes glistened. "And grief knows how to walk better than any lesson."
Abigail had been wheeled close by, her hands trembling as she reached out. "Jennifer," she said, her voice hoarse, "when you stepped out there, I thought I was watching my mother again, the way she carried her dignity through every storm. You don't know what you've given us." Her lip quivered. "You don't know what you've given me."
Jennifer's chest tightened, tears threatening to undo her composure. But she forced herself to steady, to breathe. She leaned down and kissed Abigail's forehead, whispering, "Then it was worth it."
Behind them, Felicity clapped her hands softly, like a benediction. "Back to the floor, all of you. The night is far from over. But remember—history was made in this hall tonight."
---
Meanwhile, in the audience, the applause was still thunderous, but beneath it ran currents sharper than blades.
Vincent sat with his hands clasped, knuckles bone-white, though his face betrayed nothing but quiet composure. Yet inside, his thoughts were molten. He had come here for a glimpse, to measure the distance between Jennifer and the world's cruelty. Instead, he had witnessed her wield pain as a weapon. She does not need saving, he thought, astonished. She is saving herself. And that terrified him—because it made him want her more.
Tracy's rage burned like acid in her throat. She clapped once, twice—mockingly—and then stopped, arms folded across her chest. Her smile was wide but venomous. She saw the way William could not take his eyes off Jennifer, how the DA leaned forward as though bewitched, how every man around her seemed spellbound. And worst of all, she saw Vincent. Saw the rare fissure in his mask, the way his focus had sharpened on Jennifer alone.
You'll regret this, Tracy vowed silently, her eyes narrowing into daggers. Both of you.
***
Jennifer was still seated, her hands tracing the folds of Cassandra's gown, when the curtain of solitude was pulled back. Cookie slipped in, his breath unsteady—not from joy this time, but from unease.
"Ma sœur…" he said softly, almost hesitant, his accent thick with worry.
She looked up, expecting more praise, another kind word. But the look on his face froze her breath. Cookie's usual sparkle was gone, his eyes darting like a man carrying dangerous news.
"What is it?" Jennifer asked, rising to her feet.
Cookie swallowed hard, his throat bobbing. Then he leaned closer, his voice dropping to a whisper.
"Zere is… someone asking for you."
Jennifer's blood turned cold. The applause from the hall still roared faintly through the walls, but in her ears, it was replaced by the thundering of her own heartbeat.
"Who?" she demanded, though her voice was barely above a whisper.
Cookie's eyes flickered with fear. He shook his head slowly. "He would not give a name. But he waits… in the shadows."
The lights from the stage cast long, fractured silhouettes across the backstage walls, and for the first time that night, the brilliance of her triumph felt like a snare closing shut.
Jennifer's fingers trembled as she clutched the edge of her gown. Voss. The name hissed in her mind like smoke.
The applause outside reached its crescendo—cheers for her, the star of the night. But inside, her chest tightened with the weight of a single truth: victory had drawn out the wolves.
And one of them was already here.