Bound in Blood

Seraphine The drive back from Nexus Academy had taken just over three hours, and Seraphine Greymane arrived at the palace gates still wearing her college uniform. She hadn’t had time to change before the car came. Her mother’s message had been characteristically brief — Come early. I need you. — and Sera had learned long ago that when Lysenthe Greymane said early, she meant an hour before that. She’d barely had time to throw her overnight bag together before the driver was already waiting at the dormitory entrance. The exemption letter from the Academy had arrived that morning: Students attending the Royal Birthday Banquet in honor of Crown Prince Theron Nighthollow are granted leave from Friday through Sunday. Sera had read it twice, folded it neatly, and tucked it into the front pocket of her bag. She had never left campus mid-week before — it still felt strange, like stepping through a door that was usually locked. She had only been in the college division for a few weeks, and everything about it still had the particular newness of something she was still getting used to. The palace was always a little overwhelming, even when you’d grown up visiting it. It wasn’t the size — though it was enormous — or the Gothic architecture that climbed in dark spires and arched windows toward the sky. It was the weight of it. Centuries pressed into every stone. Sera had always felt it the moment she stepped through the entrance, a kind of atmospheric pressure that had nothing to do with weather. She greeted the staff at the door, signed in with the household coordinator, and made her way to the east wing where the family changing rooms were kept for guests who came and went throughout the day. The changing room was quiet and smelled faintly of cedar. Sera changed quickly — black tailored trousers, a fitted black long-sleeve top, flat shoes she could actually move in. The same attire as everyone working her mother’s event today, which was the point. If she was going to spend the afternoon helping coordinate a royal birthday banquet, she was going to look like she belonged in the operation rather than a guest who had wandered into the wrong corridor. She caught a glimpse of herself in the tall mirror and paused just long enough to pull her bangs back and clip them away from her face with her favourite clip, the small pale gold one with the crescent moon etched into it. There. Functional. She could actually see. She picked up her bag, squared her shoulders, and went to find her mother. This was where things went wrong. The palace, Sera had always maintained, was deliberately designed to disorient people. Her brothers disagreed. Callum thought it was charming. Cassian had once memorized an entire wing’s layout for a dare and was insufferably proud of it to this day. Elowen navigated the corridors like she had been born here, which, as far as Sera was concerned, was the most unfair thing about her eldest sister. Sera had taken what she was certain was the correct turn toward the banquet hall’s service entrance. Then she had taken a second turn that had felt right. Then a third that had seemed reasonable at the time. She was now in a corridor she did not recognize. It was quieter here. Deeper in the palace, away from the main artery of activity. The hallway was wide and grand in the way that all palace hallways were, lined with framed paintings of ancestors she didn’t know and tall decorative vases spaced at careful intervals along the walls. Sera paused, pulling out her phone to text her mother, and that was when she heard it. She stopped walking. A sound from behind the nearest guest room door. Low. Rhythmic. And then a voice — deep and rough, the kind that carried through walls and did things to the air it moved through — saying something she could not make out but did not need to. Her brain delivered its verdict before she could stop it. No. Her face went from warm to burning in approximately half a second. She knew exactly what that was. She was not twelve years old. She understood, with complete and unwanted clarity, what was happening behind that door, and the specific sounds coming through it were not leaving any room for misinterpretation. A soft sound followed — feminine, breathless — and then his voice again, lower this time, the kind of low that suggested he was close to something, unhurried and entirely in control of the situation, the kind of voice that belonged to someone who knew exactly what they were doing and had no intention of stopping. Sera pressed her lips together so hard they went white. Then the voice said something — one word, quiet and rough — and she recognised it. Not because she knew him personally. Because you did not grow up in Arcadia without knowing the voice of the Crown Prince. She had heard him speak at formal functions. At galas her mother had organised. At the Academy’s welcome ceremony just a few weeks ago. Of course. Of course it was him. Of course the Crown Prince was spending the afternoon of his own birthday banquet doing that, in a guest room, with enough enthusiasm that a person could hear it clearly from the corridor without trying even slightly. Another sound came through the door — his, unmistakably — and Sera’s entire face felt like it was on fire. She was forming absolutely no opinions about this. She was simply going to leave, quietly and immediately, and pretend this corridor did not exist, and if she was very lucky she would never have to think about what she had just heard for the rest of her natural life. She did the only logical thing available to her. She closed her eyes. She pressed both hands firmly over her ears. And she walked. She walked with the urgent, purposeful pace of someone who had somewhere to be and had absolutely not just heard what she had heard, and she was doing very well at this strategy until her shoulder clipped the edge of something tall and ceramic, and then several things happened at once. The vase tipped. She spun. She grabbed for it and missed entirely, and it struck the stone floor with a crash that rang down the corridor like a small catastrophe. Sera froze, hands still half-outstretched toward where the vase had been. The silence afterward felt enormous. The sounds behind the door had stopped. She looked down. Several shards had scattered across the floor, and one, she realized a moment later, had found the soft skin near her ankle above her flat shoe. A thin line of pain registered. She didn’t have time to think about it — she gathered what remained of her dignity, stepped carefully around the broken pieces, and walked away from the scene with considerably more speed than before. She was never going to speak of this. Not to Callum. Not to Cassian. Especially not to Elowen, who would find it hilarious for the rest of their natural lives. This was going to the grave. She did not look back. - Theron He heard it from inside the guest room. The crash was sharp and clean — something ceramic, something large — from the corridor just outside. Theron stilled. It had come from just beyond the door. He crossed the room in a few strides and pulled it open, the girl behind him already forgotten. The hallway was empty. Or nearly. There was a girl at the far end of the corridor, moving quickly away from him — dark hair, all black professional attire identical to half the event staff in the palace that afternoon, walking with the rigid, determined posture of someone who had decided, firmly, that whatever had just happened was not her problem and never had been. He could see the vase. Or what remained of it: shards spread across the stone floor in a wide scatter, the pieces still settling. Theron opened his mouth to say something. He wasn’t sure what. Then it hit him. It wasn’t a sound. It wasn’t a sight. It was something else entirely — a pull, low and sudden, like the drop of a floor beneath him, except nothing had moved. The air had changed. Or he had. He wasn’t sure which. He stood in the doorway and felt something he had no immediate language for, something that bypassed thought entirely and landed in his chest like a key turning in a lock he hadn’t known was there. And underneath all of it — a scent. He’d been told about this. His father had described it once, quietly, on an evening that Theron had been young enough to find the conversation embarrassing and old enough to file it away. You’ll know it, his father had said. There’s nothing else like it. The moment it reaches you, everything else goes quiet. He’d been skeptical at the time. He wasn’t skeptical now. He moved. He was already through the door and into the corridor, crossing toward her, before he’d made the conscious decision to do so — but she was faster than she looked, or the corridor was longer than he’d gauged, or both. By the time he reached the vase she was already gone, disappeared around the far turn without once looking back. Theron stood still. He looked down at the scattered shards. There, on the floor near the largest piece, a small dark stain caught the light. He crouched slowly. Blood. Recent. The scent clung to it with the particular clarity that only comes from a fresh wound — and it was the same scent. Unmistakably, completely the same. He reached out and picked up the other thing he’d noticed: a small pale gold hair clip with a tiny crescent moon etched into its face, resting where it had fallen near the base of the wall. He straightened. Turned the clip over once in his fingers. Behind him, a voice drifted from the guest room doorway — soft, questioning, carrying the particular edge of someone whose afternoon had been interrupted. He didn’t turn around. He was looking at the empty corridor. At the turn she had disappeared around. The stone floor held her scent as cleanly as a signature, and the clip was warm in his closed hand, and it was his eighteenth birthday, and somewhere in this palace was a girl who did not know she had just changed everything. He looked down at the clip one last time. Then he went to get dressed. He had a banquet to attend.