Bound in Blood

Chapter 2 — Almost

Seraphine

She found Elowen near the florist’s station at the edge of the east hall, clipboard in hand, directing a pair of staff members on the placement of ivory centerpieces with the calm authority of someone who had been doing this since before she could reach the table.

Sera walked straight to her and said nothing. She simply stood there.

Elowen looked up. Took one look at her and said, “What happened to your hair?”

Sera reached up. It was loose and falling forward, the careful pinning from the changing room entirely undone — whether from the walk or the panic or the general disaster of the last twenty minutes, she couldn’t say. It was, by any measure, a mess.

“I got lost,” Sera said. “The palace is a maze. I’ve always said that.”

“You’ve always said that,” Elowen agreed, setting her clipboard down and stepping closer with the resigned efficiency of someone who had been tidying up after younger siblings her entire life. “Come here.”

She began working through Sera’s hair with her fingers, smoothing and gathering, pulling the loose strands back from her face. Sera stood still and let her, eyes forward, expression carefully neutral.

After a moment, Elowen reached into her own pocket and produced a spare clip, pressing it into place at the front. “There,” she said, stepping back to assess. “Better. You were starting to look feral.”

“Thank you. Very sisterly of you.”

Sera glanced down at her ankle out of habit — the place where the ceramic shard had caught her. The skin was clean and unbroken, the sting already gone. Shallow wounds closed quickly for their kind. By the time she had rounded the corridor it had likely already sealed itself. She smoothed her trouser leg down and said nothing about it.

Their mother arrived from the direction of the catering station like a force of weather — elegant, purposeful, moving at the specific velocity that meant fourteen things were happening simultaneously and she was across all of them.

“Elowen. The floral arrangement on the east end needs to come forward by half a metre — the lighting isn’t catching it.” Lysenthe Greymane turned to Sera without slowing. “Seraphine. Good, you’re here. Cross-check the placement cards on the left wing against the seating chart — two names are transposed and it needs to be corrected before guests arrive.” She pressed a printed sheet into Sera’s hands, already turning away. “The room on the third floor is prepared for you both to dress. Be in it by six-thirty. Ready by seven. Not seven-fifteen. Seven.”

“Yes, Mum,” they said, in unison, to her retreating back.

Sera looked down at the seating chart. Then at Elowen.

Elowen picked up her clipboard. “You heard her.”

Theron

He had gotten dressed, sat through his mother’s inspection, exchanged the necessary words with Magister Corvus, confirmed the evening’s schedule with the household steward, and accepted his father’s handshake and the quiet, weighted things his father said about what it meant to turn eighteen in their bloodline.

He had done all of this with a hair clip in his jacket pocket and a scent that had not left him since the corridor.

The banquet did not begin for another two hours. The palace was alive with the particular industry that preceded large formal events — staff moving in coordinated patterns, event coordinators with earpieces and clipboards, florists and caterers occupying every secondary hallway. Theron moved through it without drawing much attention. He had always been better at that than people expected.

He was looking for her.

The difficulty was immediate and compounding. Every person working Lysenthe Greymane’s event that afternoon wore the same thing — black tailored trousers, black fitted top, the coordinated professional attire of a well-run operation. The palace household staff wore their formal livery, which at least distinguished them. But the event company staff — dozens of them moving through every preparation corridor — were indistinguishable from each other at a distance.

And she had been dressed exactly the same way.

He had not gotten a clear look at her face. She had been moving away from him the entire time, and what he had registered was fragmentary — dark hair, a slight frame, the particular way she carried herself. All of it buried now in a sea of identical black attire moving through the preparation areas with coordinated purpose.

He had already stopped twice — once for a catering supervisor, once for someone from the florist’s team — and been wrong both times. Same dark hair. Same slight build. Same black attire. Wrong person both times, confirmed the moment he got close enough to know.

He turned toward the east wing, where the guest changing rooms and preparation areas sat adjacent to one of the main corridor arteries. The scent of fresh flowers was dense here, which complicated things further. He moved through it carefully, using what he could.

Then he saw her.

About ten steps ahead, moving in the same direction. Dark hair pinned back, slight frame, all black attire — identical to every other member of the event staff in this corridor. The particular way she carried herself — purposeful, head slightly forward, the pace of someone with a list of things to do and a reasonable concern about how much time remained. The back of her. The line of her shoulders.

It matched.

He closed the distance quickly and caught her elbow, turning her toward him.

The girl startled so completely that the sound she made was not a gasp but a short, sharp shout — genuine, involuntary, the kind that comes from having your attention entirely elsewhere — and then she turned fully and they were face to face.

He knew immediately. Not intellectually, but in the way that mattered — the way his senses knew things before his mind caught up. The scent was absent. Not unpleasant, not unfamiliar, but carrying none of what had stopped him cold in the corridor. No pull. No recognition of that particular, unmistakable kind. The girl in front of him was not his mate.

Then he actually looked at her face, and something else happened entirely.

He knew her. Seraphine Greymane — the twins’ younger sister, Aldric and Lysenthe’s youngest. She was in her first year of the college division now, he recalled — she must have just started this term. The last time he had seen her properly she had looked considerably younger than she did right now.

The structure of her face had sharpened into something more defined, the softness of childhood replaced by something cleaner and more considered. She looked like herself, only older, and the older version had a face that was — he stopped that line of thought with some deliberateness, because it was beside the point entirely.

In the all-black event attire, hair pinned back, moving through the preparation corridors with purpose — she had looked, from behind, exactly like the girl he was searching for.

“Sera?” he said.

It came out as a question — but more than a question. The tone of someone who had been holding an old picture in their mind and had just been shown it was no longer accurate.

She had recovered herself fully by then. She looked at him with an expression that was composed and gave nothing away, and drew her elbow back with the quiet precision of someone who had decided to treat the last thirty seconds as entirely unremarkable.

“Theron,” she said. “You grabbed my arm.”

“I thought you were someone else,” he said. “I apologize.”

A brief pause. Something moved behind her eyes — a flicker, quick and unreadable.

“It’s fine,” she said. “Are you looking for someone?”

“A guest,” he said. It was the most honest version of the answer he could offer without explaining anything. “It’s nothing urgent.”

She nodded — the polite, measured nod of someone accepting an answer they are not fully convinced by — then adjusted the papers in her hands, offered him a small, even smile, and said, “Enjoy your evening, Your Highness.”

She walked past him toward the corridor that led to the upper preparation rooms.

He turned briefly to watch her go — just long enough to confirm what he already knew. The scent that lingered in her wake was warm and familiar in a distant, ambient way, like someone encountered often enough to register but never closely enough to know. There was nothing in it that resembled the corridor. Nothing that resembled the pull.

Same build. Same dark hair. Same all-black event attire — he understood now, belatedly, why he had made the mistake. In those clothes, from behind, moving through a preparation corridor at that pace, she was indistinguishable from the girl he was looking for.

Wrong girl.

He faced forward. Somewhere in the palace, behind the movement of two hundred staff and early-arriving guests, there was a girl whose ankle had healed and whose hair clip was in his pocket.

He had time before the banquet began.

He kept walking.