Season 1: Awakening the Viliness

  Ch 12: Blood and Roses

  The banquet was everything it was supposed to be.

  Candlelight shimmered off crystal goblets and silver-edged ptes, casting gold across the long table like someone had spilled sunlight and decided to serve it cold. Dishes arrived in silence, uncovered with precision—pomegranate-gzed mb, figs soaked in brandy, soft cheeses shaped like flowers. The wine was blush-pink and cool in the mouth, scented with citrus and blood-peach. It was, Mira suspected, very expensive.

  She tasted none of it.

  The nobles around her smiled and spoke in careful tones, the kind of conversation that glittered but cut nothing—weather, fashion, minor court news. At one end of the table, someone ughed softly about a lover’s mistake in the middle of a blessing. At the other, a woman in sea-blue silk fed a sugared cherry to the pet kneeling at her feet, the divine current curling faintly in the air between them.

  Luceran knelt beside Mira’s chair. Not touching. Not moving.

  His posture was exquisite.

  Back straight. Shoulders rexed. Hands folded neatly in his p. He was dressed in the same bck silk as before, the colr smooth around his throat, the leash coiled at Mira’s side like it had always belonged there. He didn’t speak. Didn’t shift. Didn’t breathe too deep.

  And no one at the table addressed him.

  It would’ve been vulgar.

  He was there to be seen, not heard. Not acknowledged.

  Mira tried not to look at him.

  She focused on her wine, on her pte, on the careful clink of cutlery. But she felt every breath he took. Felt the slight rise and fall of his chest beside her. She could feel the shape of his restraint like heat pressed through silk.

  The food blurred on her pte. The sweetness sat like lead on her tongue. She thought she could stomach this. She was wrong.

  Alveric lifted his gss and swirled the wine, watching the liquid catch the light like rose-gold silk. He didn’t speak right away. He didn’t need to. He simply let the silence stretch long enough for Mira to register the shape of it—a pause dressed like patience.

  “Your pet’s posture is exceptional,” he said at st, voice smooth, light, directed to no one in particur and everyone at once. “Do you train him with rhythm or silence?”

  A few heads turned. Smiles curled at the edges of painted mouths. No one ughed. That would’ve been uncouth. But the amusement was there—polished and private, the kind shared between people who liked their cruelty neat and well-garnished.

  Mira didn’t look at him. She reached for her fork. Her fingers wrapped around the handle too tightly.

  “I remember,” Alveric went on, tone musing, almost nostalgic, “when he used to bite. Back when his mouth had sharper uses.”

  Luceran didn’t move. But Mira felt him shift beside her like something recoiling, curling in on itself. Not rage. Not pain.

  Shame.

  Her throat was dry. The fig on her pte blurred at the edges.

  She didn’t speak.

  Because Nysera wouldn’t.

  Alveric smiled again, and that’s when he twisted the knife. “Why don’t you let him serve me a gss of wine?” he asked, light as anything. “If he’s truly yours, he should know how to please without direction.”

  The table went quiet in that perfect, awful way—no one gasped, no one blinked. But attention shifted. Just slightly. A heartbeat of stillness between breath and action.

  Mira met Alveric’s eyes for the first time since she sat down. His expression was perfectly pleasant. He wasn’t challenging her. He was testing her.

  She turned her head, slowly, until she could just see Luceran beside her—still kneeling, eyes downcast, not trembling. Not yet. She didn’t want to say it. But she nodded.

  “Go.”

  Her voice was cold. Controlled. Luceran rose without hesitation.

  He moved with silence that drew the eye, every step measured, precise, performed. The soft sound of his bare feet against the marble barely registered beneath the clink of cutlery and murmurs of conversation, but Mira felt every one. The leash trailed behind him, bck velvet against the floor, pooling at the edge of her chair as he reached the far side of the table and stopped before Alveric.

  He bowed—not deeply. Not ritualistically. Just enough to mark the hierarchy everyone already knew. He reached for the decanter with steady hands, poured a perfect measure of wine into the goblet before him. The pour was smooth, uninterrupted, graceful. Not a single drop spilled.

  Alveric watched him the entire time, not like he was watching a man, but like he was admiring the finish on a well-restored heirloom.

  “You remember how I like it, don’t you?” he said, not loud, but clear enough for the others to hear.

  Luceran didn’t answer.

  Alveric took the gss from him and sipped. “No tremble this time. Your dy really has refined you.”

  Mira stared at the fruit on her pte, face composed, knuckles white beneath her gloves. She could feel her heartbeat in her ears, in her throat, in her teeth.

  Luceran said nothing. He didn’t flinch. His hands remained at his sides, loose and elegant.

  But Mira saw the smallest detail: his fingers, curled just slightly beneath the edge of the table. Not enough to be noticed. Just enough to tell her he was still in there, still gripping something invisible and trying not to shatter.

  He turned, walked back to her side, and resumed his pce on the floor like nothing had happened.

  Mira set her wine down, carefully, the crystal clicking gently against the pte beneath it. She hadn’t tasted a sip. Her voice, when it came, was smooth and unimpressed.

  “This has grown tiresome.”

  The words dropped like silk soaked in vinegar.

  The table quieted. A few turned to look. Not with surprise—Nysera had always left when she was bored—but with curiosity. Mira met no one’s gaze. Only Alveric’s.

  She smiled. A sharp, ft thing.

  “A room full of panting mouths and divine moans, and somehow the only sound worth remarking on is the one man here who insists on dragging out old grievances like a boy clutching broken toys.”

  Alveric’s face didn’t change immediately, but his eyes flickered—just slightly, just enough.

  “If I wanted to be entertained by petty dispys,” she continued, “I’d have brought a mirror.”

  A noble at the far end of the table bit back a ugh. Another shifted uncomfortably. The temperature in the room dropped, not literally, but socially. Mira stood with smooth precision, letting her chair slide back on velvet without protest. The leash trailed beside her as Luceran rose wordlessly, silent as ever, and stood at her side.

  “I’m leaving,” she said, brushing her gloves over her sleeves like something had soiled them. “There’s only so much desperate rutting and feigned politicking one can enjoy in an evening.”

  The hosts didn’t stop her. No one did.

  Alveric rose a second too te. “Nysera—”

  She turned, gaze cold. “Your theatrics bored me. Don't try to make them tragic now.”

  He didn’t follow.

  The room watched her leave—her back straight, her expression pcid, Luceran trailing behind like the night hadn’t broken him.

  But Mira felt it.

  He was barely breathing.

  The carriage waited at the base of the marble steps, its dark enamel gleaming in the torchlight, the sigil of House Altherys etched in gold on the door. The driver didn’t speak. The guards didn’t move.

  Mira stepped in first.

  Luceran followed without a word.

  The door shut behind them with a muffled thud, sealing them inside thick velvet and stillness. No music. No perfume. No eyes. Only the low groan of wheels on cobblestone and the faint creak of wood as the city’s shadows blurred past.

  Mira sat with her back straight, gloves folded in her p. She said nothing. She didn’t know what she could say. Her skin still burned from the effort of fisting her hands to keep from throwing something. Her throat ached from swallowing what she wanted to scream. But at least she had said something. She’d stood, turned the bde back, and called it boredom. It wasn’t enough. Not nearly. But it was something.

  Luceran sat opposite her.

  His eyes were down, unfocused. His posture was still perfect.

  And then—slowly, as if the air itself had thickened—he slumped forward.

  Not dramatically. Not with a cry. Just... folded.

  His body leaned sideways, knees buckling, shoulder catching against the side of the seat as he sagged like a puppet with strings cut. His breath was shallow, his face pale.

  Mira was beside him in an instant.

  She caught him under the arms, lowering him gently to the bench before he could slide to the floor. His skin was too warm, too flushed. His pulse—quick, fluttering. His eyes flickered open once, then closed again.

  Not unconscious. Not entirely. Just... gone. Overdrawn. Emotionally, spiritually, physically emptied.

  She brushed a hand over his hair, fingers trembling.

  “You made it,” she whispered. “You held on.”

  He didn’t respond. He didn’t need to.

  Her chest ached. Not with guilt. Not with shame. Just grief, quiet and sharp. Her voice cracked when she added, barely audible, “I’m sorry.”

  He didn’t hear it. But maybe that was the only reason she could say it.

  Spoiler

  [colpse]