POV: Seraphine Vale
His grip is iron.
Seraphine's wrist is trapped in King Darian's hand, and every nerve in her body is screaming at her to pull away. But pulling away from a king is a death wish. She knows this. Everyone in this ballroom knows this. So she stands perfectly still instead, heart hammering, while his dark eyes move over her face like he is trying to read something written on her skin.
The silence in the ballroom is suffocating.
"Your Majesty," she says carefully. Her voice does not shake. She will not let it shake. "I apologize for my clumsiness. I was simply—"
"Going somewhere?" he finishes. His voice is soft. Too soft. The kind of soft that makes your blood run cold because it means he is thinking carefully about what he will do to you next.
Her father is staring from across the room. The foreign buyers are watching. Every lord and lady in the empire is holding their breath. Seraphine can feel the weight of a thousand eyes, and she understands with absolute clarity that this is the moment that decides everything.
This is the moment she either breaks or becomes dangerous.
She stops apologizing. She stops explaining. Instead, she does something incredibly stupid.
She twists.
It is a small movement — just her wrist rotating sharply inside his grip — and it is taught to her by years of surviving her father's house. The pressure point. The angle that catches people off guard. His hand does not open, but for just a second, his attention flickers to the pain, to the surprise of it, and that second is enough.
Seraphine yanks herself backward and runs.
She does not think. She does not calculate. She simply moves toward the nearest opening in the crowd, pushing through clusters of shocked guests. Behind her, she hears the king's voice bark something to guards, but she is already turning a corner, already moving deeper into the ballroom instead of toward the exit, already using the chaos of the gathering to lose herself in the crowd.
Her chest is burning. Her breath is coming in short, desperate pulls. She does not know if he is following her. She does not know if he has ordered her arrested. All she knows is that she has maybe thirty seconds before the entire palace guard blocks every door, and she needs to be moving.
Ten more steps and she will make it to the service corridor. The servants use it to move between the ballroom and the kitchens. If she can get through there, she can reach the gardens. And if she can reach the gardens, she might actually—
A footman steps directly into her path, and he is carrying a full tray of champagne glasses.
Time does something strange. It stretches. It slows. Seraphine sees the moment coming toward her like something in a dream — the way the footman's eyes widen with surprise, the way his hands try to adjust the tray, the way gravity begins its work.
She reaches for the glasses, trying to catch them, trying to stop what is about to happen. Her fingers brush one glass, just barely, but it is not enough. The glass tilts. The tray tilts. And then everything is in the air.
The champagne cascades like liquid gold, spinning, falling, glittering in the chandelier light. It happens in slow motion and too fast all at once. The music is still playing. The crowd is still talking. But the glass keeps falling.
It arcs over the heads of a dozen guests, each person below it looking up with confused expressions that turn to shock.
Then it lands.
Directly on the back of a man in a black uniform with silver insignia standing near the center of the room.
King Darian Ashvael.
The crash is impossibly loud. The champagne soaks into the fabric of his jacket. It drips down the back of his neck. And in the same moment the glass hits him, every single person in the ballroom understands what just happened.
The music dies mid-note.
The conversations stop like someone cut them off with a blade.
A thousand people holding their breath at exactly the same moment. A thousand people waiting to see what a king does when he is humiliated in front of his entire court.
And Seraphine — standing near the footman, her hands still raised as if she is reaching for something that no longer exists — understands that she has just made a catastrophic mistake.
The king turns around slowly.
There is champagne dripping from his dark hair. Wet fabric clings to his shoulders. And when his eyes find hers across the crowded ballroom, there is no anger in his face. No rage. No visible reaction at all.
He is simply watching her.
The way a predator watches something it did not expect to find interesting.
His lips move slightly, like he is about to smile, and that small movement sends ice through Seraphine's entire body. Because she has heard what they say about the Crimson King's smile. They say it is the last thing his enemies see before everything goes dark.
She turns and runs.
There is no plan now. No strategy. Just pure survival instinct screaming at her to move, to get away, to vanish before whatever is about to happen catches up with her. She bolts toward the nearest exit, pushing through guests, ignoring her father's shout, ignoring the guards who are starting to move in her direction.
The ballroom is chaos now. People are pointing. Whispering. The foreign buyers are backing away from her like she has become contagious. Her father's face has gone the color of ash. And somewhere behind her, she can hear the smooth, measured voice of the king giving quiet orders that make every guard in the room snap to attention.
She is almost to the door when a hand closes around her arm.
Not gentle. Not like before.
This time, Captain Renn Solace — a tall man with a soldier's bearing and eyes that miss nothing — steps directly in front of her, and his grip says one thing very clearly:
You are not leaving this room.