Rossie's brain struggled to catch up with her eyes. The frozen, silent room was a prank. It had to be. A ridiculously elaborate, high-tech, impossible prank.
"Who are you?" she demanded, her voice shaking. "What did you do? Did you drug us?"
The man, Maher Xander, merely tilted his head, a gesture of mild, analytical curiosity. "Drugs? You believe this is pharmacology?"
"It's a trick!" she spat, desperation making her voice sharp. "My father will have you arrested. I don't know how you're doing this, but this party is over!"
She grabbed her phone again and tried to dial 112. The screen remained stubbornly locked on 12:00, the digits unmoving, the signal bars a flat, empty line.
"Your father," Maher said, his voice quiet but cutting through her panic, "will do nothing. He is, like all of this, a beneficiary of an account that is past due. An account you are here to settle."
"I don't know what you're talking about! We don't owe anyone anything!"
"You are mistaken," he said simply. "Your family owes everything."
He took a single, slow step from the balcony into the room. Rossie flinched and scrambled backward, colliding with the unmoving, statue-like form of her cousin Leo.
"This is not a negotiation, Rossie," Maher said. The use of her name, so calm and possessive, sent a viper's chill down her spine. "I am not here to discuss terms. The terms were agreed upon in 1753."
"That's... That's insane! That's impossible!"
Maher sighed. It was not a human sigh of exasperation; it was a dry, cold sound, like ancient paper unfolding. "You are so anchored in your small, bright present that you cannot see the foundations it rests upon. Your prosperity is not a right. It is a loan. And I am the creditor."
"Prove it," she whispered, her defiance crumbling into raw fear.
Maher stopped, five feet away. "Proof is a formality. But, as the signatory is no longer present, I suppose it is a courtesy I can extend to the payment itself."
He lifted a gloved hand, not toward her, but toward the massive, floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked the city. "Look."
Rossie wanted to look away, to shut her eyes, but her gaze was drawn, locked onto the glass.
"This," Maher said, "is what your 'kemakmuran' truly is."
He touched the glass. The city lights did not flicker. The glass did. It rippled, like water, and the reflection of the party room—the frozen people, the half-eaten food, the static sparklers—dissolved.
It was replaced by a vision.
She saw the penthouse, but not as it was. It was decaying. The marble was cracked. Water stains bloomed on the ceiling. The elegant furniture was covered in dust, rotting. It was a vision of ruin, of a future where the Aurora luck had run dry.
"No..."
"Your family's prosperity was the first term," Maher's voice echoed in her ear, though he had not moved. "This is what happens when that term is voided."
The image shifted. It was her mother. Not the smiling, vibrant woman frozen by the cake, but a hollow-eyed stranger in a hospital bed. The vision showed her mother's vital signs fading, a dozen doctors shrugging, baffled by a sudden, inexplicable decline.
"Your family's protection was the second term," Maher said, his voice flat. "Health, safety, an 'assurance against the plague,' as your ancestor so quaintly put it."
The vision dissolved into a new one. A dark, candle-lit study in what looked like colonial Batavia. A terrified man who looked unmistakably like her father—an Aurora—was signing a parchment with a bloody thumbprint. The man opposite him was Maher Xander, looking exactly as he did now, his expression identical, his suit the only thing that had changed with the centuries.
"The final term," Maher said, as the vision faded and the reflection of the frozen party room snapped back into place, "was the price."
Rossie's legs gave out. She slid to the floor, her silk dress pooling around her. The wrongness she had felt all her life, the itch, the void—it all clicked into place with the horrifying logic of a trap snapping shut.
"You're the devil," she breathed, the tears now hot and real.
Maher Xander looked down at her, his expression unmoved.
"I am a creditor," he corrected, "and you are the collateral." He extended a gloved hand, not to help her up, but as a command.
"I am not here to negotiate, Rossie," he said, repeating the words that sealed her fate. "I am here to take what is already mine."