The Gala & The Monster
If fear had a scent, tonight it wore designer perfume.
The Vale Corp Charity Gala was the kind of event the city bled money for—an ocean of champagne, silk gowns, and smiles sharpened like knives. Cameras flashed outside the Crystal Meridian Hotel as if light itself was trying to prove it could touch the powerful.
And me? I was walking into it holding the arm of the most feared man in the room—Damian Vale.
To everyone else, I was just his employee. The girl who fetched files, the one no one remembered at lunch. But underneath the silver gown he'd sent me, hidden by the diamond cuff that disguised my ring, I was his wife. His secret. His mistake.
The elevator doors slid open with a soft chime, revealing the ballroom below—a chandeliered galaxy of gold light and expensive laughter. My heart hammered. I wanted to disappear. But Damian's hand was already on my back, his palm steady, warm, commanding.
"Head up," he murmured. "They can smell fear."
"I'm not afraid."
"Liar."
I turned just enough to glare at him. He smiled, the faintest edge of amusement curling his mouth—the kind of smile that had ruined empires. "Good," he said. "Stay angry. It's easier to control."
Control. That word again. It chased me like a ghost.
We stepped out, and the crowd's reaction was immediate—a subtle shift in temperature, a collective hush before the whispers began. Damian Vale never brought a date. Never smiled. Never touched anyone unless it was to destroy them in a deal.
And yet here I was.
I felt the stares slide over me like cold oil—jealousy, curiosity, suspicion. Someone muttered "new assistant"; another voice whispered "poor girl doesn't know what she's in for."
If only they knew.
Damian guided me through the crowd with the quiet dominance of a man who owned the floor he walked on. His presence swallowed conversation wherever he went. When he stopped to greet investors, I stood slightly behind him, smiling when required, invisible when not. My pulse was a drumbeat against my throat.
Then, as if the night hadn't already been surreal enough, I saw her—Kendra.
She was standing near the champagne tower, dressed in liquid black, her lips red enough to warn. When our eyes met, she smiled like a cat finding the mouse it had lost track of.
"Aria," she purred as we passed. "Didn't know you were invited. New promotion?"
"Temporary," I said.
Damian didn't slow. "Kendra." His tone was a blade sheathed in ice. "If you're done gossiping, perhaps focus on the donors. Or are you trying to scare them off?"
The color drained from her face. "Of course, Mr. Vale."
We moved on. My lips twitched. "You didn't have to—"
"Yes, I did," he said. "She's been watching you."
"Everyone's watching me."
"No," he corrected softly. "They're watching us."
The word vibrated through me like a spark. For a moment, I almost forgot the contract, the warnings, the blood that still haunted my hands. Almost.
A waiter offered us champagne. Damian took two glasses, handed me one, his eyes flicking to the ring under my cuff. "Keep your hand covered," he murmured. "If anyone sees the mark—"
"They'll know?"
"They'll want you," he said. "And I won't be able to hide it."
"Hide what?"
He looked at me then, really looked, and the noise of the gala fell away. "The fact that you're not one of them," he said quietly. "You never were."
Before I could ask, the lights dimmed slightly—the stage brightened. The master of ceremonies began his practiced monologue, thanking the board, the donors, the elite. I tuned him out. My eyes drifted toward the tall glass walls at the edge of the ballroom.
The city glittered beyond them, a sprawl of neon and night. But for a split second—so fast I might have imagined it—I saw something move outside. A shape. A flicker.
I blinked. Gone.
Damian noticed my distraction. "What did you see?"
"Nothing," I said. "I thought—"
"Don't think," he said under his breath. "Observe."
He shifted closer, his breath warm against my ear. "If you sense cold air, don't turn toward it. If you smell iron, step away. If you hear your name whispered and I'm not speaking—run."
The way he said it made my skin tighten. "Are you expecting something to happen tonight?"
"Expecting?" He smiled without humor. "Always."
Before I could press, the emcee announced him—Mr. Damian Vale, Chairman of Vale Corp.
The crowd erupted in polite applause. Damian set his glass down, adjusted his cufflinks, and stepped onto the stage. The light found him like it always did—hungry, flattering. He looked carved from command itself.
I watched him speak—measured, magnetic, his voice smooth enough to sell salvation. But I couldn't focus on the words. My mark was burning again, faint but steady, like an invisible pulse synced to the rhythm of his speech.
Then—something cold brushed the back of my neck.
The champagne glass slipped slightly in my hand. I turned instinctively, scanning the crowd. The ballroom seemed normal—waiters moving, cameras flashing—but the air… it had changed. Thickened.
A whisper slid through the noise.
> "Aria…"
I froze.
The voice was female, soft, almost kind—and it came from nowhere. I turned sharply, heart hammering. No one was there. Just guests chatting, laughing.
I forced a smile, pretending nothing happened, but my hands were trembling. I backed away from the crowd, moving toward the far side of the ballroom near the balcony doors. The night air beyond the glass looked cooler, safer.
Then I saw her.
A woman standing outside on the balcony. Pale dress, dark hair, her back to me. She wasn't a guest—I knew it before I knew why. The way she stood was wrong. Still. Too still.
My breath caught.
Because even through the glass, even across the crowd, I recognized her silhouette.
My mother.
My breath went thin and sharp like someone had slit the room open. For a second I forgot how to be a person at a party. I only knew the shape at the window and the ache of a name that had been folded into my life like a secret.
"Mom?" The sound slipped out of me before I could catch it. Heads turned. Someone laughed at the stage joke; a camera flashed like a heartbeat.
Damian was at my side in two strides. Heat hit my cheek where his arm brushed mine. He looked at the balcony, then at me, and I watched the logic cross his face—recognition, calculation, denial, and then something else: the same cold that had sat on his features the night I first met him in the alley.
"That's impossible," he said under his breath. He didn't ask me to explain. He didn't need to. He had seen the way the world bent around me since the contract had settled into my skin. He took my hand—gentle, not the possessive grasp he used when he gave orders—and guided me away from the crowd toward the balcony doors like we both knew the exit we needed was there.
"Stay close," he murmured. There was urgency folded into the softness of it. It made my chest ache in an entirely new way.
We passed under the crystal glow, through the press of bodies and perfume. People smiled at the Chairman, at the spectacle of him with some unknown companion—rumors would have headlines by morning. I kept my face neutral, but every step felt like I was pulling along a thread that led straight to whatever had been outside.
Outside was colder, a bright wash of night and city lights and the thin bite of winter wind. The balcony looked out over the river; the skyline was a knife of light. My mother's silhouette stood near the railing, head slightly bowed, hair down in a way I'd never seen in her photographs. For a breath I allowed myself the foolish hope that maybe—just maybe—she'd come back to fix the loose ends she'd left behind.
I moved forward. Up close, the woman's posture was wrong. Too composed. Too staged. The way she held herself had the refusal of breath in it, like a mannequin arranged by someone who wanted to provoke me.
"I thought she was dead," I said softly, the words nearly lost in the wind.
"That is the version you were given," Damian said. His voice had an edge now; he'd shifted from protector to predator with a purpose I didn't like. He watched the woman, fingers flexing at his side. "Don't approach," he warned.
But the pull toward that figure was a physical thing. Memory is a rope tied to a heart, and I had spent the last twenty-two years holding on to the knot. I wanted to reach out, to touch the sleeve, to prove the shape was not a trick.
She turned then.
The face that met me was not my mother's.
It was someone else's entirely—familiar only in the sense that it belonged to the city's older ghosts: high cheekbones, eyes like cold coins, a smile practiced enough to unnerve. Her skin was too pale against the night; her gaze cut across me as if cataloguing a rare specimen.
"You shouldn't be here," she said, and the voice slid through the air with a softness that carried a threat.
"Who are you?" I demanded. I forgot to keep my grip on Damian's hand. He tightened his fingers around mine, anchoring me.
She laughed—not loud, but with a quality that made the hairs on my arms stand up. "Names matter little when games are being set, Aria Blake. We prefer roles. You are the prize. He is the guard." She bowed slightly, mocking a courtesy.
"How do you—" My question died. She didn't belong to our world of steel and charity; she belonged to some underlayer of it, the part that thrummed with teeth.
"You saw her because we wanted you to see her," the woman said. "Because seeing is believing and believing breaks things."
Damian's jaw tightened. "Step away from her," he ordered. His voice had teeth now. I'd heard it before; it was the voice that made deals end in ruins. Men listened. Women wept. Buildings shifted.
"I think not." The woman stepped backward from the railing and folded her arms, as if their conversation were theatre. "We have courted you for weeks. You lure, you bait, you sign the line with blood, and then you hide the blessing in shadow. It makes for better sport."
My chest thudded. The ring under my cuff felt like it was about to combust. "What do you mean—'we'?" I demanded. "What do you want?"
She tilted her head as if considering whether to hand me an explanation. "What we want is the thing you are. What you want is to know why your mother died." She let the sentence hang and the night seemed suddenly full of small knives.
Damian stepped between us. His hand was at the small of my back, pulling me behind him. "You leave now," he said. "Before this becomes messy."
"Messy is more fun." Her smile was a blade. "And Messy doesn't like to be hurried."
There was a beat—one, slow; the kind of beat before thunder. People on the floor below laughed at an awkward joke. Someone clinked a glass. A violinist hit a wrong note and the noise seemed obscene.
Something moved in the shadows of the balcony—too quick to be a gust, too precise to be wind. A presence folded itself like a shadow cat along the rail. I should have been terrified. Instead, my body hummed with adrenaline and something like rage. It wasn't purely fear; it was the animal inside me answering to a scent it had once known.
"Get behind me," Damian barked. His voice was an order, and for the first time since we'd been married by law and cursed by ink, I obeyed without thinking. I stepped behind his back; he turned, hands up, ready.
There was a sound then, something like paper tearing, only it was the air itself. The woman laughed and clapped slowly, elegantly, as if applauding a performance.
"Ladies and gentlemen!" she called, her voice carrying perfectly even to the ballroom below. "A little demonstration. If you will indulge us." Her tone was theatrical, cruel, designed to prick attentions.
It was like someone had thrown a switch. The crowd's music swelled to fill the void between calm and chaos. My mind raced; the ring burned. I reached, unseen, for the little card Damian had given me—the one with the crescent moon and the crown that opened a way to the top floor. My fingers found it but my hand didn't move.
The woman raised a hand, and the night bowed.
From the other side of the balcony, something moved. Not a person—something bigger, older. It widened the space like a living shadow and poured itself toward the guests below. For a moment I thought it was smoke, then I saw the edges of it—teeth, not quite forming, limbs that folded in angles that a human spine couldn't hold. It spilled over the balcony railing like a dark tide.
People screamed—a small sound, oddly distant. The woman on the balcony's lips curved into a smile that made the hair on my arms stand up.
Damian shoved me back, though I would have jumped anyway. He reached for my hand and pulled me away from the railing, his body a shield. There was a scrap of screaming below, a splinter of panic. People stumbled, a chandelier shuddered, someone dropped a tray and plates shattered into starlight.
"No," the woman said softly. "Not yet. Let them watch."
The shadow pooled on the marble like oil. It moved with hungry intent. Cameras flashed blindly, catching images that would make conspiracists' nights for years. Someone had the presence to shout about security but their voice was lost in the sudden roar.
Damian's face was a hard plane of concentration. He extended his hand—not touching me—and raw power threaded from him, a low chord that thrummed against my bones. He did things with that chord, pushing at the shadow with a force that bent it back like wind trying to resist water.
"Run," he told me, voice flat. "Down the stairs. Now. The service staircase." His hand closed around my wrist. His fingers were iron and warm. He didn't let go.
"Yes," I breathed. My legs moved. I turned to peel away, but a part of me was fixed there, watching. The woman on the balcony lifted both hands, and the shadow lunged.
The first thing the shadow took was a waiter. He vanished into the darkness in a sound like fabric tearing, and for a horrible second I could see something inside it—something that was eating memory as much as flesh. The waiter's scream became smaller and then nothing at all.
I started to run—the ballroom a smear of bodies and glitter—toward the stairs Damian had named. Security pulled at me; someone hit me with a shoulder. The smell of fear was thick, metallic, and hot.
Behind me, a sound I'd only ever heard in films—an animal roar made of broken glass and giant wings—ripped through the ballroom. The shadow was not just outside now. It had come inside. It moved with a will that didn't care about social graces or gala menus.
And then everything—every scripted smile, every curated photograph—broke.
I ran. I kept running. I could taste the ring inside my skin, like a second mouth. I could hear Damian's voice—faint through the roar—shouting my name. I could hear the woman's laughter, bright and terrible.
A hand—cold and feather-soft—touched my shoulder from behind. I spun.
There, inches from my face, a figure loomed. Not human. Not exactly. A face like a half-remembered photograph, eyes like pits. It leaned in close enough that I could see its breath—smoke and riverbed.
It whispered, and the word it breathed into my ear was the same one my mother had written on that letter:
"You were awakened."
Then everything went white.
Drop Your Vote and Comment here......
Beneath chandeliers and champagne, something ancient woke up.
Aria Blake walked into a ballroom as a secret wife —
and walked out as something the dark had been waiting for.
Her mother's ghost warned her.
Damian tried to cage her.
But the shadow came anyway.
✨ If every truth about your life was hidden inside a curse,
and the only way to survive was to become the thing that hunts you,
would you fight the monster — or let it wear your skin?
Tell me:
👁️ Do you think Aria was awakened… or claimed?