Chapter 807: Another Male Lead
The ballroom pulsed with music again, the kind of music designed to erase—soft strings and elegant flourishes meant to smooth over the cracks in everyone’s memory. A subtle performance of forgetting. The nobles returned to their masquerade, their laughter deliberate, the tinkling of glasses a little too crisp, too frequent. Everywhere Priscilla looked, she saw masks being reapplied—stitched on with silk and obligation. And yet none of them came near.
She stood alone.
Not ostracized.
Not quite.
Just... noticed. Marked. A line drawn around her that no one dared step over. Even the women she had once dined with weekly were suddenly caught in deep, spontaneous conversations across the room. No curious glances. No whispered invitations. Just space.
’So this is the price.’
It shouldn’t have surprised her. She had felt the fracture the moment her voice broke the air between Rowen and Lucavion. The moment she sided not with the Empire, nor with silence, but with something dangerously close to truth. The air was thinner here—colder. The kind of cold that didn’t touch skin, only status.
And still, beneath the weight pressing along her ribs, beneath the nerves whispering of Lucien’s wrath to come, she felt it again—that quiet thrum in her blood. Thrill.
She hadn’t bowed. Not to her brother. Not to Rowen. Not even to fear. And there was a part of her, sharp-edged and secret, that had been waiting for this.
Daring for it. Wanting to know if she could be more than the Crown’s ornament.
’What is this...’
Her gaze slid over the ballroom, taking in the subtle shifts—the way conversation flowed around Reynard and his ilk now like water avoiding rot, the way Lucien hadn’t moved in several minutes, frozen in a coil of political paralysis.