Sera's POV
Her father's fingernails dug into her arm hard enough to leave marks.
"Smile," he whispered, his breath reeking of wine and desperation. "You're worth less when you look angry."
Sera smiled. She had learned years ago that her face was a weapon she could control even when nothing else obeyed her. The smile showed teeth but no warmth, the kind men mistook for invitation. Around them, the Imperial Gala churned with hundreds of bodies dripping jewels and silk. Chandeliers threw light across the marble floor. Servants moved like ghosts between conversations. The air tasted like champagne and profit.
She counted exits anyway. Three from the main hall. Two through the kitchens. One behind the orchestra platform if she could slip past the guard. Six total if the servants' corridors weren't blocked.
Her father squeezed her arm again, painful this time.
"Lord Castor is waiting," he said, and she felt the tremor in his voice. Fear. He was afraid of a man who wasn't even in the room yet. That told her everything. The debt wasn't small. Castor Drein didn't appear in person for small debts.
Viscount Aldwyn had once been powerful. She could see it in the bones of his face, in the way older noblemen still nodded at him with a ghost of deference. But power borrowed eventually comes due, and he had been borrowing for years. Cards. Wine. Women who weren't her mother. Sera had spent a decade watching him trade away everything their family had. The estates had shrunk. The staff had dwindled. The creditors had multiplied like rats in grain stores.
This was the final transaction.
She was the final transaction.
"Don't embarrass me tonight," her father said. It wasn't a threat. It was a prayer, and that was worse. She would have preferred rage. Rage she could understand. Rage she could fight.
Castor emerged from the crowd like something conjured.
He was smaller than she expected, with the kind of face that seemed harmless until you noticed his eyes. They were the eyes of a man who had never lost anything he wanted to keep. She had seen eyes like that in ledgers and property deeds. They belonged to men who calculated the cost of everything in blood before they calculated it in money.
He smiled at her father. "Viscount," he said, and the word was a knife wrapped in courtesy. "The contract is drawn. I trust the terms are acceptable."
Her father nodded. Nodded. As if he had any choice. As if the debt hadn't already signed her name.
Castor's eyes shifted to Sera and held. She felt her stomach drop the way it did when she was reading the estate accounts and discovered the real number beneath the small number she'd been told. The feeling of ground disappearing.
"Lovely girl," he said. "Educated, I hear. Languages. Mathematics. Access to her father's correspondence." He paused. "Useful."
Not pretty. Not charming. Useful.
He wasn't buying her as a wife or a companion. He was buying her as a tool. Something he could use.
The clarity of it hit her like cold water. Her father didn't understand. He thought Castor was a suitor, a way out, a solution. He didn't understand that some cages have prettier bars than others, and that was the most dangerous kind of cage.
She had maybe ten minutes before Castor had the contract signed. Before her father sealed whatever transaction was about to be sealed. Before "ward" became something with actual chains instead of just invisible ones.
Sera turned to her father and let her smile falter. Just slightly. Enough for tears to look credible. "I need to use the retiring room," she said softly. "I'm not feeling well."
He hesitated. Looked at Castor. Castor waved a hand with lordly permission, amused, certain she would be waiting when he returned. Of course she would be waiting. Where else would a girl like her go?
Sera excused herself from their presence with the kind of graceful nothing that was expected of her. She moved through the crowd with practiced steps, nodding at faces she didn't know, avoiding people who might stop her with conversation. The retiring room was on the eastern side of the hall, past the orchestra.
She didn't go there.
Instead, she found the servants' door behind the refreshment table. The one she had noticed on the way in. The one that was supposed to stay closed. She waited until a waiter pushed through with empty glasses, and she slipped through behind him.
The corridor was dimmer than the hall, cooler, quieter. Her heels echoed on stone. The palace was a maze of passages that connected the glittering surfaces to the hidden places where servants actually worked. She had never been inside the palace before, but she had studied maps in her mother's library. Maps her mother had drawn herself, before the fever came. Maps of old places, forgotten routes.
The corridors twisted in directions that didn't match the main hall's architecture. She passed a kitchens passage. Turned left where she should have turned right. The servants were gone at this hour, all of them still in the hall, cleaning spilled champagne and gathering fallen napkins.
Her footsteps quickened. Behind her, she could almost hear Castor's voice. Almost feel the moment he realized she wasn't coming back.
She turned a corner too fast and stopped dead.
A man stood in the corridor ahead of her, reading a document by candlelight. He wasn't a servant. His clothes were plain, dark, expensive in the way that meant he didn't need them to be expensive. And something about the way he held himself suggested he was used to taking up space in rooms.
He looked up at the sound of her heels.
His eyes were gray in the candlelight. Very steady. Very still. Very focused on her in a way that made her breath catch. The kind of eyes that saw things other people missed. The kind that looked at her like she was interesting, not like she was a problem or a product.
For a moment, Sera forgot she was running.
His gaze moved from her face to the desperate way she was holding her skirts, to the frantic rise and fall of her chest. He set his document down slowly, like he was giving her his complete attention, and when he straightened, she realized he was tall. Broad. The kind of man who probably didn't have to run from anything.
Behind Sera, deeper in the palace, she heard the first shout. Castor's voice, maybe, or her father's. The hunt was beginning. Reality crashed back.
"Please," she gasped as she reached him. "I need help. Someone is chasing me. I need another way out of this corridor."
The man didn't move. Didn't flinch. His eyes traced her face like he was reading text, searching for something true beneath the panic that might or might not be real. His presence was so still, so controlled, that she felt her own heartbeat slow in response to it.
"Why are you running?" he asked, and his voice was quiet. Curious. Like he genuinely wanted to understand her.
Behind them, the footsteps were getting closer.
She could lie. She could say a suitor was bothering her, something harmless and believable. Something that would make sense.
Instead, she told him the truth.
"I'm being sold," she said, breathing hard. "My father sold me to settle a debt, and I'm being auctioned to a man who wants to use me as a weapon. I'm not going to let that happen. So I need you to help me disappear, or I need you to move out of my way."
The man didn't answer. He just watched her for another beat while footsteps echoed closer through the stone. His eyes didn't judge her. They held her like she mattered.
Then he stepped aside.
She ran past him, deeper into the palace corridors, her heart hammering against her ribs. She didn't know where she was going. She only knew that she had just told the truth to a complete stranger in a palace she'd never been inside before, and that stranger had let her run instead of stopping her.
The corridor ended at a heavy wooden door. She pulled it open without thinking, and suddenly the noise hit her like a physical thing. Voices. Guards. Movement.
She was in another hallway, one connected to the main chambers, and directly across from her stood a man she didn't recognize. Tall. Broad-shouldered. Dressed in the kind of dark clothes that suggested authority without announcing it.
He was reading a military document, and when he looked up at the sound of her frantic entrance, the document nearly slipped from his fingers.
Because something about the way he was standing, the way the guards in that hallway immediately went very still when they noticed her, told her exactly who he was.
And in that second, Sera understood that she had just made a terrible mistake.
She had run from one trap straight into the only trap in this palace that couldn't be escaped.
But as his gray eyes found hers across the distance, she realized something else.
Part of her didn't want to escape.