The night after the masquerade left the Hearth heavy with silence. Ash hung in the air, faint but unmistakable—an olfactory ghost of the blaze Arabella had conjured, both literal and political. I stood in the drawing room, watching the flames in the hearth. Real ones this time. Contained. Flickering against the mirror.
Wren entered first, barefoot and tousled. She held a stack of correspondence but dropped it on the table without ceremony. “Three barons wrote this morning. Two sided with Arabella. One abstained. But the margins are thinner than I expected.”
Marcelline appeared behind her, still in half-costume from the ball, her face scrubbed clean but her eyes sharp. “The Montclair matriarch sent roses. Not black. White. Three stems.”
“Subtlety,” I muttered. “We taught them too well.”
