Chapter 78: Seris’s Story [3]
Seris shook her head slowly.
"Even I don’t know," she admitted. "We all just call him the Planner. I’ve never learned his real name. I’ve never seen his face clearly — he always wears a heavy scarf that covers most of it. He’s been behind everything from the beginning, but he stays in shadow."
Alden said nothing.
The name sat wrong in his head. The Planner. Someone had apparently existed inside this world the whole time, designing the very pieces that moved around Seris’s life, yet he had never created this person. Not in any draft, and not in any set of notes.
’How much of this world has actually changed from what I wrote.’
He didn’t let the thought show on his face. Seris was still talking.
"After I came here, things got worse." Her voice had gone quieter. "I thought coming to the academy might give me some freedom. That being away from my family, I could at least live like a normal person for a while." A bitter smile. "But then I became engaged to Augustus."
She looked toward the dark sky above the garden.
"The Augustus everyone sees here isn’t the real one. It’s like he wears two completely different faces." Her fingers pressed together in her lap. "There’s the one everyone knows — the talented prince, the Council President, the confident heir who seems unbothered by everything. The one who smiles and makes people feel like they’d want to follow him."
She paused.
"And then there’s the Augustus I know."
Her voice went colder.
"He doesn’t smile at me. He doesn’t treat me like someone he cares about. He doesn’t treat me like a person at all." She exhaled slowly. "To him, I’m just something that belongs to him. That he owns."
Alden’s jaw tightened.
"When he’s angry, he takes it out on me." Each word came out careful and measured, the way someone speaks about something they’ve rehearsed not showing. "Sometimes he hits me. Sometimes he insults me until there’s nowhere left to go. Sometimes he just finds a reason to remind me where I stand. And when I push back, he reminds me that I’m his fiancée — that I agreed to this, that I owe him this."
Alden said nothing. He was afraid that if he opened his mouth, what came out wouldn’t be useful.
Seris closed her eyes briefly. "He’s told me more than once that I should be grateful. That someone like him is willing to be engaged with me." A quiet, hollow laugh. "And there are other women. Women he brings around when he wants them. Women he’s spent nights with." She looked at the fountain. "He doesn’t even bother hiding it from me. He knows I know. He simply doesn’t care."
For a moment Alden couldn’t find a single word.
His hand came up and pressed hard against his forehead.
’What the fuck?’
This wasn’t Augustus. In his manuscript, Augustus Solaris was arrogant and competitive and a little careless about people’s feelings, but he was a genuine a brilliant and a capable rival character, ultimately someone who respected the people around him even if he didn’t always show it well. He was supposed to be the kind of antagonist you ended up respecting.
He was never supposed to be this.
’I didn’t write this. I never wrote Augustus like this.’
And then the question underneath that one arrived: how much of this world had already become something he didn’t recognize? The Planner. Seris’s mother dying in childbirth. Augustus using his power over her as something personal and cruel. All of it connected into a shape he hadn’t built.
He lowered his hand.
Seris was sitting beside him staring at the ground, the playful ease she usually carried entirely absent. There was just exhaustion underneath the composure now, visible only because she’d stopped managing it for once.
Alden had always thought of Seris as the dangerous one. The villain he’d eventually have to figure out how to navigate. But the person beside him right now wasn’t a villain. She was someone who had been hated by her family from birth, used by her father the first time he’d ever needed her for anything, manipulated by a person whose face she’d never clearly seen, and trapped inside an engagement with a man who treated cruelty as a default.
And through all of it she had kept smiling.
For the first time since arriving in this world, Alden wasn’t calculating the plot. He wasn’t thinking about the next arc or her role in it or what she was likely to do next. He was just looking at the person sitting next to him.
The fountain ran quietly between them.
"For so many years I had no one," Seris said softly. "Not someone I could actually talk to. Not someone I could spend time with without calculating what they wanted from me. Not even a friend." She looked at the water. "I was becoming empty. I’d wake up, follow instructions, gather information, repeat it. Like a machine running without anything real inside it."
She took a light breath.
"Until I met you, Alden."
He didn’t speak.
"At first I thought you were useful." A small, slightly embarrassed smile crossed her face, different from her usual ones.
"You were strange and you knew things you shouldn’t know and you understood things faster than you had any reason to. I thought if I got close enough to gain your trust, I could eventually turn you toward our side. I even thought my father might finally acknowledge me for something."
She paused.
"But there was always one problem. You knew I was your enemy. But despite knowing that you still talked to me." Her eyes moved to his face. "Not once or twice. More times than I stopped to count. You knew what I was hiding and you helped me anyway."
Alden looked away from her and at the water instead.
"At some point I stopped thinking of you as a tool," she said, her voice dropping lower. "You became someone I actually wanted to talk to. Spend time with. Even when you were being dramatic—"
Alden’s eyebrow moved.
"—even when you were being incredibly annoying—"
"Hey—"
"—and even when you acted like you were always right about everything."
"I am usually right," he said, quieter than usual.
Seris gave a real, small smile. "See? Still annoying."
The weight in the air lifted for just a second. Then her smile faded again, slowly, like something running out of fuel.
"Somewhere along the way you became more than that." Her voice had found a quality he hadn’t heard in it before — careful in a way someone sounds when they’re choosing to say something that costs them. "You became the only person I genuinely wanted to be around. The only one I could talk to without performing something. The only person who made me feel—"
She stopped. Took a slow breath.
"Warm," she finished quietly.
Alden looked at her.
She was looking at her hands. A faint color had appeared in her face that wasn’t anything like her usual composure, and she seemed very aware of it.
"I tried telling myself it was nothing. That I only trusted you because you were useful to me. That it was practical." She gave a quiet, almost self-deprecating laugh. "But I couldn’t keep lying to myself about it."
She raised her eyes to his.
The composure she usually kept perfectly in place was still mostly there. But underneath it, in the direct way she was looking at him, was something she had clearly decided to stop hiding.
"I fell for you, Alden." Her voice was steady even as she said it. "You were the first person who made me feel like I wasn’t alone. Like I wasn’t just a tool or a burden or a piece of something larger." She held his gaze. "I like you."
The night was completely quiet.
Alden blinked once. Then again.
His mind had gone entirely still in the way it goes still when something arrives that it wasn’t prepared for and can’t immediately process.
"...What?"