Wander away from one party and stumble into another. At least the one surrounded by bonfires was one he was more familiar with, even if he was no more interested in taking part. He drank his newly acquired sweet tea and strolled leisurely through, always watching. He thanked whatever he was supposed to thank for the fact that Garnet wasn’t around to drag him in kicking and screaming—well, figuratively speaking. Dancing was never his thing, not that that would be a surprise to anyone. Most people buzzed around him at Naercy parties and knew better than to interact, if he even showed his face at all. He was still thinking about heading back, checking on Flynn and taking a moment for himself before he tried to sleep. But he stayed, and he’d probably be there until the majority of the guard was back to the dilapidated city they called home.
It wasn’t until the lively music stopped, slowing to a tune he didn’t often hear, when he felt the eyes on him. He looked around, thinking none of the women would actually want to dance with him, and so were their eyes really on him? Was it someone else? Was it in his head? He swallowed a lump in his throat, his fists clenching tighter as he watched the dancers. No one was looking at him, but that did little to settle his nerves. There he went sticking out more at a place where he should be blending in. Seeing as this crew was nothing like the one at the square, he found it easier to walk among the crowd and find someone willing to help him disappear into the mass of dancing bodies.
Leon didn’t say anything as he took her wrist with his good hand, spinning her like he’d seen everyone else do. Though he knew the general basis of this dance, he was far out of his element. Thankfully, the girl—and judging by how the firelight made her glow, a Silver girl—didn’t know the steps either. How she wandered into this mess when there was so much more for her to do elsewhere, he didn’t know. All he knew was that he had to pretend to be sociable now, and with someone who’s smile was just as bright as Garnet’s or Rachel’s. Just perfect.
“Me either,” he said, plastering on a smile. “Maybe no one will notice.”
"Oh, they’ll notice,” she assured him, her smile slightly less brilliant now, but still eager and pleased, in spite of it all. It all being the fact that she was a Silver girl, a Silver princess, dancing with a Red crowd in the firelight. Glancing around at the couples around them, she braced her hands on his shoulders and pushed, lifting up just a beat later than the rest of the women around them. “Luckily for you,” Sera continued as she dropped back down, reaching for his left hand as she did, “I happen to be a very–– oh!” She gasped, startled, at the cold metal beneath her fingers, caught off guard by the feeling. Her eyes widened down at the clockwork fingers that became a clockwork hand that became, she assumed, a clockwork arm, under the sleeve of his jacket. She’d never seen something like this before; she’d never even seen scars other than the scarring around Kieran’s eyes and the chunk that was missing from her brother’s earlobe.
Sera was intimately familiar with the war, but only on paper. She’d never seen anything that could not be healed by a Skin Healer. And then a cold realization set in: this could have been healed by a Skin Healer. But this man was a Red, and therefore...
She thought she might be sick, and it had nothing to do with the metal skin resting against hers. Recovering quickly with a shake of her head and a shiver down her spine, she rested his clockwork hand on her hip and moved with the rest of the crowd. “A very good dancer,” she finished lamely, flushing white as she spoke. She’d never felt so ashamed of her people before. The feeling was hot and rolling and made her sick to her stomach. “Just follow the beat, like this, and we should be fine.”
Octavian felt the hum of the carnival echoing through him like hymnals. The pounding of feet on the ground, the buzz of the rides, the steady endless white water rapids of chatter—cresting, swelling, always on the move and threatening to overwhelm. It was like being at the centre of some great beast, twining its coils around Archeon and washing it in revelry. He loved it so much he felt fierce and wild with it, the loneliness that had been plaguing him since arriving in this city and beating its champion into the sand smoothed out for a single night.
He stood now at the edge of a great circle of dancers, one hand wrapped around a cold beer, wishing absently for a partner to grab and launch himself into the dance with. But he didn’t know the steps—was sure to show himself up as a clumsy provincial, the boorish Pict to the dancers’ assured, fluid Romans. If he had been surrounded by laughing reds he would have chanced it, thrown himself in without a thought of self-consciousness. Even if he’d been around the lower silvers he’d grown up with. But he wasn’t—he was in the middle of a throng of the highest silvers, regal and imposing, and he was blisteringly aware of his status among them. Their champion, the current shining star in Archeon. And as that figure, he couldn’t just wade in and make a fool of himself.
But if someone invited him in…he drained the last of his beer and set his glass down, then cast his gaze around himself measuredly, hoping to catch the eye of somebody seeking a partner.
Above all other things in the world, Sera loved to dance. There was something about letting her body move to the music, letting the melody take over the silence in her head and drown it out. Feeling the song wrap around her thoughts and fill her head felt....it felt like what she imagined taking a lover to feel like, if she were honest with herself. So any opportunity for dancing was always seized with the kind of enthusiasm that the Silver elite thought she was no longer capable of. Tonight was no exception. The girls in the circle danced with the kind of elegance that was reserved for those of the highest breeding, with long, clean lines as they extended their arms and legs, and Sera was the most elegant of them all.
Part of it, she knew, was due to practice. She could do this dance in her sleep. Part of it, she thought with a tiny smile, might have also been the champagne she’d had, and the knowledge that her father’s guards had been lost long ago in the hustle and bustle of the crowd. The song was elegant and graceful, but simple, and when it finished, she curtseyed deeply to her partner and reached for her discarded glass of wine. The next song was starting in a few moments, and though there were dozens of other Silvers in the group –– after all, they were near the center of the festivities, under the dazzling and blazing lights of the carnival –– who would be happy to dance with her, she ignored them all.
“Octavian,” she murmured, smiling politely at the Champion of Archeon, a man she’d barely had time to meet after his victory. There was no love or loyalty towards Gerard Macanthos in Sera’s countenance, but her relationship with the Pit was far from ideal. She didn’t attend many of the Feats, and those that she did, she rarely watched. When Octavian had triumphed over Gerard, Sera had been reading a report from General Lerolan, who’d lost a whole battalion of Reds in the Choke. The cheering around her had told her that the victory was a great one, but Sera had paid it no mind. “You’ll have to forgive me for my intolerable rudeness, but it’s just come to my attention that I don’t believe I’ve congratulated you on your victory yet. Perhaps you could forgive me, and honor me with a dance?”
The game was simple. Run through the obstacle course, which was developed by a bored looking Telky. A distant Provos cousin, she thought, judging by the blonde hair and willowy build of her body and THOROUGHLY PINCHED expression. Claud and Juliana had always been immune to the perpetual irritation that seemed to hang around their cousins like a storm cloud. Using the obstacle course as an EXCUSE, Sera ducked away from her guards and ran through the first half of the thing. Blocks shifted underneath her feet and flew in front of her in an effort to trip her up and make the course more challenging, and though her grace came in handy through the first third of the track, eventually, there was a block she couldn’t quite avoid.
It wasn’t that she ADVOCATED for cheating, but really, WAS it cheating to use her ability to her advantage the same way the Telky was? Silencing the girl with barely any effort, Sera smiled when the block dropped to the ground with a solid thud. Mentally patting herself on the back, she danced through the rest of the course, dropping off at a turn just before the finish line and slipping into the crowd on the other side to avoid being seen by her guards. She gifted the Telky back her ability and started to walk off, before she heard a familiar voice.
❝ I saw what you did. ❞
She paused, glancing back, and raised an eyebrow, feigning INNOCENCE. “ I’m sure I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”
After wandering through the carnival for hours, Sera eventually found herself on the outskirts of the festival, drawn in by the firelight. The electric lights weren’t as frequent so far away from the main event, but there were a few small bonfires set up, and music playing. The music! Stars, Sera had never heard music that raw before, music that was cutting through the air on reedy fiddles and flutes and guitars, played with unskilled fingers. She was used to the perfect recordings of old world music, to the practiced and beautiful compositions of the Silvers. The music of her world was so much more REFINED than this, but it was nowhere near as ALIVE as the melody she could hear wafting through the firelight. Couples and children danced in a giant circle, paired off into twos and threes and fives as they spun and clapped and laughed in time with the beat, and Sera found herself counting their steps as she hovered on the outskirts of the group. The dance was unfamiliar to her, but simple enough. One, two, three, cross, spin, clap, two, three, clap, clap, spin. It was easy to follow, an uncomplicated pattern that was embellished on by the more talented couples in the group, and by the time she’d watched two cycles of it, Sera was fairly certain she had it down. Not that she was about to INTRUDE, by any means, but a dancer herself, she was all too interested in this folksy bit of fun.
She had good intentions –– the BEST of them, really –– when someone bumped into her, sending her stumbling forward, closer to the group of dancers. It was odd. No one immediately apologized or reached to steady her. No one bowed or cowered before her. Three people turned to glance curiously at her, but that was that. Sera blinked, startled, but then smiled, a bit pleased that no one had recognized her. She didn’t have to be the ghost tonight. She clapped when the song finished, CHEERING for the band with the rest of the Reds, intending on turning around and leaving them to their own devices and enjoyment, when a new song started up. Something slower, still unfamiliar, with drawn out claps and a humming so loud and deep it felt like the buzzing vibration of standing in the middle of an oversized beehive. Someone grabbed her by her wrist and tugged her into the stamped down circle of a dance floor, and before she could protest, they were spinning and dancing with the rest of the group. She stumbled a little with the steps, glancing at her partner’s feet and at the feet of the couples around them, and flushed SILVER in the firelight.
“ Sorry!! ” she called out over the music, “ I’m not really familiar with this one! ”
For a brief and transient moment, he had rendered her speechless. It brought forth a sense of pride to know that he could have such an effect on someone who was trained in the art of diplomacy, someone who was always supposed to have some sort of trite comment tucked away for use. So as her eyes shut, her long lashes brushing against the crests of her cheekbones, more focused on holding back laughter than firing back, Augustus smiled, the edges of his lips quirking upwards as if tugged on by strings grasped by some unseen puppeteer.
But when she reoriented herself, her eyes fluttering open, his mouth dropped again, though the grin couldn’t be completely wiped off his face. The motion had been wholly involuntary and far too personal at this juncture and Augustus mentally kicked himself for slipping like that. For some reason Sera repeatedly threw him off balance and the more they interacted, the more obvious it became. He supposed he hadn’t expected her to be so expressive or determinate — after all, her nickname was the Ghost of Norta and to some degree it inferred passivity, but with each encounter she only seemed to get more assertive, more ALIVE. The rumors he had heard about her had been dead wrong and though some would adamantly disagree with him, the eldest princess did share some of that Calore fire that branded her other siblings.
“ I’m sure you have thought of it and yeah, you’re right, all those things can happen, ” he conceded with a slight tilt of his head, acknowledging her very real concerns, “ but consider this: you do well and no one suffers for it. ” She seemed to be so preoccupied with all the things that could go wrong, so set on avoiding backlash. Admittedly, not everyone could be as reckless as he was sometimes — in fact, he probably shouldn’t have been as reckless as he was sometimes, but she took caution to a whole other level. He wondered if that had always been true of her or if standing beneath the spotlight for so long behind the shadow cast by her brother had made her that way. He didn’t care though, he couldn’t.
Then, at her remark, he nodded curtly, unwilling to overstay his welcome. Truthfully, Augustus had already crossed multiple lines he probably shouldn’t have and he didn’t want to push his luck any further. Rocking back in his seat, he placed his gloved palms over the platform of his thighs, and pushed up from his position so that he was standing upright and towering over the princess. Using her own words as ammunition against her, Augustus spoke once more, his voice solemn and low, “ Like you said, they’re your people too and what you do doesn’t always necessarily detract from him. ”
Sera stood with him, knowing it was the respectful gesture, and knowing that he’d helped, in his own way. She couldn’t afford to be rude to him, not now that they’d spent time together in a....FAMILIAR way. She still didn’t care for him, still held a degree of CONTEMPT for him that was deep seeded and contributed to by other factors than just himself. It might not be fair to judge him on his own reputation, the unnerving feeling that his father had always inspired in her, and the fact that she couldn’t look at him without seeing his sister’s cheekbones and feeling the loss of Alessa all over again. It wasn’t fair to load all of this on his back and hold him accountable and responsible for them all, but as Sera had known since she was a child, LIFE WASN’T FAIR.
His parting remark seemed to steal the air from her lungs, drawing it out with delicate motions and releasing it into the air between them in a barely audible sigh. How dare he turn her own words against her like that? How dare he remind her, once again, that she was as much of a princess as her brother was a prince? Her spine remained straight, her chin up, and even in her lace and silk dressing gown, even with her hair loose around her shoulders, she looked every inch the ghost of a queen. Like a shadow, an imprint, wavering in and out of view, but with crackling edges like a flame.
“ Colonel, ” she finally murmured, nodding her head, and then taking his hand. Etiquette dictated that this was where he’d kiss her hand, but Sera wasn’t holding her breath that he’d observe politeness. ( In an odd way, she’d been THANKFUL for that aspect of him. Over the last year, he’d been trying to worm his way into her time and space far more often than not, but he’d never once touched her bare skin with his, not even her knuckles, and that brought its own sort of comfort. ) The leather of his gloves was cold, but she didn’t shiver. “ Thank you for your opinion, ” she started, and her tone was almost genuine for the span of a heartbeat before ice seeped into her words. “ But I did not ask for it. ”
She slipped her hand out of his, closing his knuckles into a fist for him, and pushed lightly, signaling to him that it was long past time for him to leave. Sera couldn’t run the risk of getting comfortable with him. He was disingenuous, he was after any status she could give him, and if she gave him an inch, he would take a mile, she was sure of it. She couldn’t afford to forget that about him; she would not let this moment repeat itself.
Ever since he had found Lucretia and needed to play some kind of role again, Brooks had gotten a little more careful about getting mixed in the crowd. Actually, he was slowly sobering up because of that encounter and the shock effect it brought with it, now back to being his usual silent and stern self, rather watching from the sidelines than getting involved in the middle of all those people and cause trouble. He would return back to actually being the one to avoid trouble from happening, soothe fights and try to get everyone back out alive instead.
More unusual that he wasn’t paying attention to his steps, but actually for once he seemed not to have the need to be careful. Danger was nowhere detected, and he could return back to try and find some fun again. That was what he had in mind until he got harshly knocked off his feet, landing on the ground. Not even having a moment to react he was attacked by someone else on top of him. While at first anxiety rose, feeling his stomach churn and twist into all directions, a moment later he was able to detect that whoever had fallen on him had not attacked.
The girl was soft, petite and on second glance he could recognize: blonde. Another one of those breathtakingly beautiful Princesses? Damn, wasn’t he just lucky? Unlike the one of them he had met first, this one seemed to even apologize to him. Before Brooks could even wave it off and just tell her it was alright, he was being dragged by her to the side. Stumbling after, he followed willingly, not even having the time to waste thought if he would even want to.
Only after several moments that he needed to catch his breathe from whatever sudden action he was being dragged in, he was able to look down at the woman. Her warm body pressed against his in the tight, dark booth. Out of instinct he had moved an arm around her in protection, which he now realized only and loosened the grip on, just as their hands being clutched together still. “I… — Wow. It’s nice to meet you!” A quick glance went outside, returning his gaze back to her with a nod. “I think it’s safe again.” Unless she would like to stay in such position. Which he had no reason to object against.
When she laughed, it was a quiet, barely there chuckle, but a laugh all the same. She rose up on her tiptoes to try and peek over his shoulder, barely paying any attention to how close they were. Her chest brushed against his, and she sighed happily as she realized that he was right, it was safe, they were in the clear. Dropping back to her feet, Sera paused, realizing suddenly how close they were, and felt her face heat up with a flush, sending silverblood straight to her cheeks.
“ I’m sorry about that, ” she grinned, sheepish and embarrassed and loosening her grip on his hand. Callouses scraped over soft skin, and she adjusted her grip on his hand to attempt a motion closer to a handshake than anything else. “ I’m Sera, ” she told him softly, avoiding titles or even her full name for the moment. It wouldn’t take a genius to put two and two together, but introducing herself as a princess got a bit old. Her world view had been shifting since she’d heard about the Red girl that Claudius had fallen in love with, and while she still had a ways to go, she didn’t RECOIL from the strong arm he had wrapped around her back, or the way his body was still sheltering hers from a view of the street, regardless of the fact that they’d both assessed that the situation was safe.
“ I didn’t mean to drag you into this, ” she finally said a moment later, another soft laugh escaping her and her hand slipping from his to rest onto his elbow, her touch as light as a bird about to TAKE FLIGHT. “ But thank you for playing along...? ” Sera asked, waiting for him to supply his name as she finally stepped back a bit, giving him a bit more room in the small booth they were occupying.
She was right, he didn’t care ( truthfully, Augustus didn’t have the luxury to ), but for the sake of keeping up appearances he had to seem like he did — after all, to everyone else he was still unabashedly LOYAL to the crown and laughably, so was his father. Concern marring his normally expressionless face, the magnetron sat, easing down on plush velvet cushions. He was a respectable distance away and he was careful not to encroach on her personal space for both his own benefit and hers. The fib came easily enough, rising up through his throat and out his mouth, “ It does matter. ” Then sink or swim, he cracked a ( rather poor ) joke to break the tension, referencing their prior conversation at the masquerade just mere days before, “ I mean, it’s actually in my job description to care and I’d hate for all those tax dollars you appropriated for the Sentinels to go to waste. ”
Dropping the base of his chin to his chest, Augustus peered down at the floor after finishing, feeling rather silly for trying. It was no secret: he was not equipped to handle this and he was floundering like a fish out of water. The people he spent a bulk of his time with rarely asked him to be an emotional pillar, knowing fully he was at a deficit when it came to matters such as these.
However, he saw the burden Graham carried as general and although princess was a wholly different title, Augustus understood that the weight felt very much the same. “ You can’t wallow in this feeling. I know silence is your preferred state, but more than ever your people need to hear your voice. That’s the best thing you could do for them now. If you’re silent here, it’s the same as being in the safe room — WORSE, actually, since you would be putting yourself in harm’s way for no good reason. ” Augustus hoped his bluntness would pay off. After all, it was gamble to speak with such candor on a topic as grave as this one, but anyone could give hollow reassurances. For that reason alone, he couldn’t.
Sera took a deep breath, her eyes narrowing, and the words don’t insult my intelligence LINGERED on the tip of her tongue. And then, just like that, her glare at him became more pronounced as her face twisted, like she was trying not to laugh at the poor comment he’d cracked. Closing her eyes, she inhaled slowly, fighting against the urge to snort out a short breath of air, and then shook her head at him, finding n o t h i n g that she could contribute in a rebuttal. Augustus Samos, a colonel, the head of the Sentinel program, a well respected and feared man, had terrible jokes.
She hated that it felt so fitting.
Her eyes opened, blinking once, and she watched him suffer through a few painful facial expressions of his own. He was CLEARLY out of his element, and his discomfort, oddly enough, comforted her more than anything else, for a moment. Sera was glad not to be the only one out of their element there. The fact that he was still in her room, sitting on one of her couches and speaking to her the way she imagined he spoke to his FRIENDS –– after all, she couldn’t imagine him as anything other than fearsome and cold and detached, even around those he was PRESUMED to care about –– was surreal, to say the least. She blamed the shock for the fact that she’d yet to kick him out of the room, and that she was actually turning over his advice in her head
" You think I haven’t already thought of all this? ” Sera stared at him, confused and irritated and unsure of herself. Part of her wanted to slap him for the liberty he’d just taken. Part of her felt a bit of respect blossoming in her chest for the fact that HE WASN’T AFRAID to tell her the truth of it all. So many people wanted to shield her eyes, as though she were as delicate and fragile as Eveline or as young and naive as Helene still was, despite the latter’s protests to the fact. “ If I address the people, so many things could go wrong, ” she said, leaning forward and resting her forearms on her knees, rubbing her palms together, slowly and carefully. Her fingers bent slightly as they moved, and she frowned at the wall. “ I could say the wrong thing. ” Sera’s voice was quiet, and she spoke to him more like an advisor than a man she’d sworn to loathe until the end of her days, but –– there would be time for her to return to that place of war against him later in the day.
“ I could make the situation WORSE by offering them the wrong information, the wrong reassurances, the wrong posture and timbre of voice. And if it went right, I could pull even a little bit of respect away from my brother, which would be....UNFORGIVABLE. If any of us address them, it should be him, not me. And besides, I could––– ” I could incur the wrath of my father. Or worse, his admiration. The words stuck in her throat, and she looked away.
Sera had to admit, the carnival was A SMART MOVE on her father’s part. As much as she didn’t want to be here, didn’t want to be trailed by his Sentinels as though she was a prisoner, she had to give him that. It was smart, it was calculated, and it was the kind of move she would have made. She hated him for that. Almost as much as she hated him for the guard he’d saddled her with, the group of faceless men in bright red uniforms who shadowed her, but not quite.
Wandering through the carnival, she did her best to slip away from her guards, a rather futile effort, as she stuck out rather like a sore thumb in her white blouse and skirt. Ducking through the crowd and then hurriedly sliding between stalls, she came out the other side and then promptly knocked into someone, sending them slamming to the ground, with Sera landing right on top of them. A startled gasp and an OOMPH!! escaped her throat, her hands braced for impact on either side of his head, and she blinked down at him, FLUSHING white with embarrassment.
“ Oh my colors, I’m so sorry!! ” Sera said, realizing quickly that this man was a Red, but that fact not affecting her apology. “ I wasn’t watching where I was going, please let m–– ” she stopped, glancing behind her, and then JUMPED up, grabbing his hand and dragging him to a darkened and empty booth. Her chest remained against his as she peeked around his arm, waiting for the Sentinels to look around once, twice, and then disperse, clearly looking for her. Breathing a sigh of RELIEF, Sera glanced back up at him. “ I’m sorry, my father’s implemented some guards and it’s–– very tiresome. ”
Words left him, frightened away by the malignant thoughts in his mind, more memory than fantasy however. A picture is worth a thousand words, the saying went, but what was the worth of a series of images? It clicked on like a movie in his head, cutting to a scene with a backdrop littered with dilapidated buildings and smoke billowing listlessly in the wind. Pure white snow drifted down in sheets, caught amidst the chaos, and for that reason he was cold, so cold but his focus wasn’t on that. Instead, Augustus watched with his mouth agape as RED blood seeped into an odd mixture of broken asphalt and loose ash; the man’s face draining of color and life.
( “ How old were you when you lost your first soldier? ” )
Not old at all.
It took him just a second to recover, but still it was a second too long. That sort of hesitancy was deadly, especially in the game he played. Averting his gaze, Augustus drew his legs together, his discomfort palpable, until finally he was able to push out a string of empty observations. “ Perhaps you should be — concerned, that is — things can get hairy fairly quick. ” As if she didn’t know that already. “ Besides, wouldn’t you want to be with your family at a time like this? ”
Then he broached the elephant in the room, addressing the question she had asked in her GRIEF. “ It happened within the first few months of my deployment. They can’t really ease you into it — it just happens one day. ”
“ Don’t do that, ” she said immediately, her tone almost sharp but failing somewhere along the way. “ Don’t act like it MATTERS to you whether my family lives or dies, ” Sera murmured, straightening her spine and pushing a few strands of hair off her face. A heavy braid hung over one shoulder, but a few pesky strands lingered around her face, falling in her eyes. She hesitated, words turning over in her mouth slowly, weighted down like a rock. It would have been easier to snap at him, but she’d been doing so much of that today. “ Someone has to stay out here, ” Sera finally told him, her hands falling into her lap as she spoke, “ and it makes the best sense for it to be me, right now. I came in here to get dressed and ––– ”
The admission of weakness stuck in her throat. She didn’t want to admit to anyone, certainly not him, that she hadn’t yet found the STRENGTH in her spine to face her people. But even without giving voice to it, it hung in the air between them, and she hated herself for it. Sera bowed her head, swallowing thickly and lacing her fingers together. She leaned forward, her elbows resting on her knees, and pressed the knuckles of her thumbs to the inner corners of her eyes, listening.
It just happens one day. She didn’t know what to say to that. Silence stretched between them once more, long enough for her to remember that he hated the quiet, before she looked up again. “ Fifty of my people died today, ” Sera murmured, knowing, in her HEART, her concern should be with her uncle, and it was, but it was also with the fallen soldiers and dock workers and civilians who had suffered the casualties of war. “ And I know that Dom is going to be the KING one day, and I know what people think about me and my capabilities but I –– ” Sera didn’t know why she felt the need to j u s t i f y herself to him, but she thought, perhaps, it was his experience on the battlefield, his rank in their military. She could pour over strategy books and troop movements all day long, could come up with logical tactical maneuvers, but at the end of the day, it was NOTHING compared to real world experience. “ They’re my people too. ”
♫ the five times it’s not a date, and the one time maybe it is.
everybody wants to know if we fucked on the bathroom sink;6k words. modern au. nsfw. trigger warnings for physical, child, and sexual abuse.
It’s not a date. This is not a date. Sera’s made that abundantly clear in everything that she’s said and done, and she’s fairly confident that he’s caught on to that; or at least, that he never thought it might have been a date to begin with. Or maybe she’s just suffering from serious wishful thinking.
Alessa, cold and angry and dear, dear Alessa, one of Sera’s best friends in the whole world, had asked her to please, please, take her older brother out for the night. Augustus, the aforementioned elder brother, was home from deployment. There’d been some sort of an accident –– an IED, Sera thought Alessa might have said a few weeks ago, when the news had first come in that Augustus was coming home –– and he’d been discharged from the army with a hero’s honors and a few medals to boot. Apparently, though, a hero’s return didn’t mean that said hero had a place to stay, and when she’d suggested that he stay with their parents, Alessa had shut down. Wisely, Sera had immediately let the subject drop. The Samos house, an old and ancestral mansion in upstate New York, was close enough to the Calore estate that the two girls had grown up together. While Sera had never quite understood just why Alessa never spoke about her parents, she knew a few things to be true:
1. Alessa had not spoken to her parents for the exact length of time that Sera had not spoken to her father. It had been exactly five years and twenty six days; the exact amount of time between now and the day after they’d both graduated from high school and went off to college together.
2. Mr. Samos had always, always, given Sera what Juliana had referred to as ‘the heebie jeebies’, even when Prosperina and Juliana had convinced her that she was just seeing things that weren’t there.
3. Augustus, years older than her and rarely spending time in the same space as her, had too often had bruises growing up, even for him. No one got into that many fights at school, not even Augustus. She’d never forget the day that he showed up with a black eye to a formal gala that the Provos family had been holding, and when she’d asked him how he got it, his story of tripping and hitting a doorknob differed vastly from his father’s assertion later on that night that he’d sustained it during a schoolyard fight, that boys would be boys.
4. Whatever it was that was going on behind closed doors in the Samos household, it had never, never, been good.
So, needless to say, for all that she didn’t understand the whole story, for all that she didn’t know the absolute truth of it all, she knew that sending Augustus to the house that he and Alessa grew up in was not an option, just like she knew letting the Samos parents see Alessa was not an option. She didn’t know what had happened to Alessa; she just knew that her friend, cold and angry and stronger than most men she knew, flinched whenever a man raised his voice. Just like Alessa didn’t know what had happened to Sera; she just knew that Sera couldn’t listen to a debate about whether or not Lolita was a book about a sexual awakening without wanting to throw up.
They’d never asked one another, never pried. They were just two broken girls who lived together for four years in college and tried to fix each other and themselves in the only ways they knew how. Sera owed Alessa her life a hundred times over, so when Alessa had asked, she had agreed. Reluctantly, sure, but Alessa’s plaintive ‘I haven’t gotten laid in a week, Sera, a week!’ had won her over. Gerard’s relieved face when she showed up that morning to their place asserting that she was looking for Augustus and no, she did not want to talk about it, had cemented the deal for her. She didn’t want to be doing this, didn’t want to subject herself to this kind of awkwardness, but she didn’t want to leave this couple high and dry, not when she loved both of them.
She’s busy ruminating on the events that led them to this spot, Augustus sitting in a chair that’s just a hair too small for him in a cafe that looks far too bright and loud around his profile, Sera sitting across from him with her legs crossed and her knees deftly angled so that they’re not touching his. He still looks every inch the soldier, with a spine so straight and a jawline so sharp and eyes scanning the room every few minutes, like he’s expecting someone to burst in and try and shoot them all. She wonders what happened to him over there, but she knows better than to ask. Her own brother served a tour; Sera knows the kinds of horror that war does to men. Instead, she sips from her latte and she watches the crowd go by outside the window and she casts about for a conversational topic with the kind of desperation that a man fishing for his family casts out a line into the ocean. She’s always been too quiet for this sort of a thing, and she curses that now when she realizes she has nothing to say to Alessa’s brother.
Sera’s grateful when he finally breaks the silence, one of his hands wrapped around the mug of black coffee in front of him, the other hand resting deceptively casually on his thigh. ( He’s carrying; she can see the outline of the pistol under his shirt, mostly hidden by his jacket. She knows no one else has noticed, she knows that she only sees it because she knows what to look for, and she thinks that maybe she should not feel safe sitting across from a man who keeps his hand so close to his gun, just in case. She thinks that the fact that she does feel safe sitting there with him says a lot about her psyche, but she doesn’t feel like psychoanalyzing herself just yet. She’d always been a terrible psychology student. )
“Lessa tells me you bought out half of your father’s company,” he’s saying, and she blinks, startled both by the use of Alessa’s long forgotten nickname and the fact that this is a thing that the siblings had talked about in their free time. Sera doesn’t like to brag about her business ventures; doesn’t like to brag about the fact that at twenty three, she’s already a college graduate who owns the better part of a Fortune 500 company that used to belong solely to her father.
“Two thirds of it,” she finally corrects a moment later, quietly and humbly, taking another sip of her latte almost before she finishes her sentence. She didn’t buy so many of Aurelian’s stocks because it was a smart business move ( it was ), because she wanted to wound her father ( she did ), or because it would gain her publicity ( it had ). She did it because in taking most of his company, she was taking away the only thing in the world he’d ever loved. She was reclaiming part of herself with every stock she bought, reclaiming control over the man who had held that control over her head and used it against her since she was too young to understand that fathers were not supposed to love their daughters in the way that her father loved her.
She’d stolen his position as the CEO of Calore Incorporated to regain a sense of self, not to impress anyone. But Augustus looks impressed all the same, and she’s struck, suddenly, with a question that hovers on the tip of her tongue.
Did my father give you the creeps like yours gave me the heebie jeebies?
But she says nothing, just continues to drink her coffee and stare out the window. She can feel his eyes on her until Alessa texts her to say it’s safe to bring Augustus back home.
The second time they spend time together, it’s still not a date. She shows up at Alessa and Gerard’s place a few days later, looking for Alessa. No one answers when she knocks, no one yells back when she walks in after using her key, and after a few minutes, she finally gets an answering call from the garage. She expects to see Gerard when she walks in, fiddling around with one of their cars. Instead, Augustus is sitting on the ground, grease smudged on his hands and one sharp cheekbone, working on a motorcycle she’s never seen before. It’s sleek, black on black on black, with innards more silver than chrome. It doesn’t look broken, doesn’t look anything other than perfect, but he’s still frowning as he asks her for a wrench. Sera, in her sensible nude heels and her messy braid and sundress and cardigan, clearly has no place in this garage, but he waits patiently for her to dig the wrench out of the toolbox for him. She’s not sure how he ends up recruiting her to help with this –– it’s probably the way he requests things in a way that makes it impossible to say no –– but somehow, she ends up perched on an upended spare tire, digging around in the toolbox.
Half an hour goes by before he sits back and sighs heavily, more satisfied than frustrated, and hands her back the tools. She’s reorganized the box in this time period, found a place for everything where before someone ( Gerard, most likely ) had merely thrown everything into it. He runs a grease stained hand through his hair, and she notices, suddenly, the tattoo that runs down his forearm and disappears behind the shirt that’s been rolled up to his elbows. Sera nods at his arm, noting the same dark smudges on his left arm as she does.
“Where’d you get your ink?” She asks him, and he blinks, glancing down at his forearms as though he’s never seen his own tattoos before.
“Here and there,” he answers a moment later, and Sera raises an eyebrow, hesitant.
“Can I see?”
There’s a moment between the two of them, silent and loud and confused and knowing all at once, before he shrugs a little bit and reaches back to grab the neck of his shirt and tug it neatly over his head. There are words inscribed over his right ribcage, words she doesn’t pay attention to in the wake of the masterpiece that covers his shoulders and his arms. It takes Sera a moment of examining them, stepping closer to peer curiously at his skin, before she realizes what they are.
Wings.
They bloom from between his shoulder blades and wrap around his shoulders, around his arms, covering his skin with intricately drawn feathers. There’s a lot of blackwork, a lot of shadows, and she knows that those blocks of solid black ink are more painful than anything else. There’s an element of masochism in these tattoos, an element of ownership of his own body, and suddenly, Sera feels as though she knows him more intimately than she knew her last boyfriend. She doesn’t read the lettering over his ribs, doesn’t pay attention to the blocked out pieces on his side, just stares at the wings he’s made for himself. She wonders, somewhere in her mind, how many times he wanted to fly away as a child.
“Icarus,” she finally says, tilting her head and reaching out to touch that space between his shoulder blades where skin became ink, “did you overreach and fall?”
Augustus turns before she can touch his skin, moving so fast that it’s more of a flinch than a spin, but when he glances back at her, reaching for his shirt as he moves, he’s almost smiling. It’s dark and it’s barely there, but his lips are quirked all the same.
“If I’m anyone,” he tells her, “I’m the Minotaur they tried to escape from.”
Sera shakes her head at him, more than a little surprised that he’s so familiar with mythology, and sits back down on the tire she’d made a throne of.
“They’re nice,” she says, after a moment of contemplation. “You had a good artist.”
“And since when does the great Seraphina Calore know so much about tattoos?” He asks, teasing without any venom or bite to his words. She knows, from the look in his eyes and the set of his jaw as he tugs his shirt back on, that he’s thinking about the teenager she was when they last knew each other. She’d been a tiny, slip of a thing, scared of her own shadow with a fire blooming inside of her that was choking to death from the lack of oxygen in her heart. And he –– he’d been terrifying and lost, and he’d been shipped off to war before she got to know what kind of an adult he’d become. Whenever he was home on leave, he always stayed in the apartment she shared with Alessa in college, but she was rarely there, wanting to give the siblings time to themselves, without her intrusion. Alessa had done the same the few times Dom had come to visit, and it was nice, it was polite, but as a result, she was still getting to know her best friend’s brother. “I would’ve thought that was too…” he casts about for words, and Sera fights a smile as she watches him turn over options in his mind. “Edgy. Permanent. For someone like you.”
“I majored in business,” she says with a shrug. “I minored in art. I appreciate art in all of its forms, Augustus –– except modern art,” Sera amends, wrinkling her nose delicately. “Pollock was an idiot.”
He nods at her body, mostly covered by her sundress and cardigan. “You have any of your own?”
Sera smiles, rising from the tire as she did.
“None that I can show you without taking this dress off,” she tells him, heading for the door and glancing back at him over her shoulder when she reaches it. “Tell your sister I stopped by.”
The third time, Alessa’s thrown a party for Sera. It’s a small, intimate thing, with Juliana and her husband Graham, Prosperina and Dom, Griffin and one of Sera’s younger half sisters, and a few other couples that do nothing but make her feel more alone than anything else. She’d finally done it, finally staged the perfect coup to get her father off the board of the company. Alessa had decided that she needed to celebrate that, which was how she ended up leaning against her best friend’s counter, catching up with her sister in law and her other best friend. Juliana was pregnant with baby number three, Pros was curiously abstaining from any champagne, and Alessa was rolling her eyes at everything, and it was like no time had gone by at all.
Sera thinks, watching these girls, that if she squints and tilts her head just right, they’ll all be back in high school again, gossiping about boys and discussing clothes. The thought makes her feel nostalgic and nauseous all at once, so with a quick kiss to each girl’s cheek, she sneaks off with a glass of champagne to the balcony on the second floor. It’s not until she shuts the French doors behind her and sighs with relief that she realizes she’s not alone. Augustus has already claimed the spot, leaning against the railing and watching her curiously, a glass of scotch held loosely in his hand.
“I needed some air,” she finally says, her dress feeling too tight as she kicks off her heels and goes to rest her elbows on the stone railing, staring down at Alessa and Gerard’s backyard.
“I know the feeling,” Augustus tells her after a beat, shifting his weight so that he’s angled towards her, as though he’s readjusting his orbit. Sera tries not to think about how close they’re standing to one another, and takes a sip of her wine. She nearly chokes on it when he speaks again. “Why didn’t you go public?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“About your father. You’ve spent the last –– what, two years? –– trying to pull the rug out from under him, and now he’s bowed out gracefully, still has a ridiculous amount of money to fall back on and a political career likely to start any day now. You could have slaughtered him in the eyes of the media and forced him to let go of the company in disgrace ages ago.”
Sera can feel a chill settle in her spine that has nothing to do with the night air. “What did Alessa tell you?”
He sighs, shifting his weight again so that his posture mimics hers, his forearms braced on the railing and his drink in his hands.
“She didn’t have to tell me anything,” Augustus says, softly, quietly. “I know that look,” he tells her after a moment, “I know that feeling. You carry yourself the same way my sister does, just –– with less violence.” He somehow manages to make that a compliment for both her and Alessa, and she doesn’t want to smile, but she can’t quite help it.
“It’s not the same,” Sera says a long minute later, and he nods, not protesting, not arguing. “I’m not going to pretend to know what the two of you went through…Alessa and I never talked about it, but ––”
“The way I see it,” he interrupts, “trauma does one of two things to you. It makes you softer, or it makes you harder. For Alessa and I, it was the latter. For you…”
Sera bristles. She knows he’s right, and he doesn’t mean it as an insult, but she shoots him a look all the same.
“If you could expose your father tomorrow, if you could destroy the Samos name and reputation, would you do it?”
The silence between them is deafening.
“No,” he finally admits, his head bowed, “but Alessa would. Without hesitation.” There’s a pause, and then… “She’s always been the stronger one, you know.”
Sera drains her glass, glances at the skyline.
“If I went out and told the world my father’s a…” The word sticks in her throat, chokes her until she can’t breathe, and she shakes her head. “There’s no guarantee anyone would believe me anyway. And all it would do is just…drag myself and my siblings through all of this. Helene still ––” Sera keeps her eyes trained on the skyline, unable to look at him. “She doesn’t need to know the things that happened. She’s still got some of her innocence left. I want to keep it that way.” She doesn’t tell him that even Dom and Eveline don’t know; doesn’t tell him she’s never confirmed this out loud to anyone except him. She thinks, somewhere in her mind, that she doesn’t have to. When she glances over at him again, he’s watching her, and she doesn’t want to call his gaze soft but she doesn’t know another word for it.
“You deserve a better world than the one we live in,” he tells her quietly, oh so quietly, and her smile is sad.
“Softness isn’t a sin, Augustus. It’s not a weakness, either.”
When she moves, it’s impulsive, a fleeting brush of her lips across a cheekbone so sharp it’s a wonder her lips aren’t sliced open. The delicate smear of red lipstick across his skin looks enough like blood in the low light that for a moment, she wonders if she did cut herself on the sharp edges of Augustus Samos. She nods at him, once, dropping down from her tip toes.
“Good night, Augustus.” She picks up her shoes as she goes, stepping back into them, and returns into the house, finding her friends in the kitchen and laughing with them like nothing’s just happened, like she hasn’t felt the world shift and tilt underneath her feet. When Augustus rejoins the party, Graham’s arm around him as they talk, she pretends she can’t feel him watching her, just like he pretends that he doesn’t feel her eyes on him the moment his look away.
The fourth time is where the lines start to get blurry. Alessa and Gerard were supposed to go out to dinner with Prosperina and Dom, but Pros ended up with a stomach flu, and the reservations for four weren’t something they could reschedule. Alessa, using that plaintive tone of voice that always got Sera to do what she wanted, had somehow managed to convince her to join them at the restaurant. She’d suggested, at one point, that Sera call her ex, and had nearly been beaned by a high heel for that. It wasn’t that Sera and Caius had ended on bad terms, it was just –– well, Caius wasn’t so much of an ex boyfriend as he was an exit wound. Sera didn’t like to dwell on him and what they used to be for too long, but what she hadn’t counted on was this meaning that the fourth party comprised of Augustus. The only reason she agreed to it was because the reservations were so hard to come by at this place; otherwise, Sera would have left them out to dry.
She feels exposed in the backless cream dress she’d chosen, her hair spilling down her skin and Augustus lingering at her side, though, thankfully, keeping his hands to himself. Sera tries to tell herself that she didn’t choose this dress because when she turns, her hair slides over one shoulder and her tattoo is visible between her shoulder blades. She tries to tell herself that she’s not trying to see how long it takes him to notice.
It doesn’t work.
It takes them a solid hour of listening to Gerard’s terrible jokes and Augustus’s even worse ones and Sera’s complaints about the quality of the wine and Alessa’s nose upturned at the waiter before they all agree, collectively, that maybe this wasn’t the best idea.
“Who chose this place, anyway?” Sera finally asks, taking another sip of her wine and making a face at the amount of oak in the taste of it. She reaches over to pick up Augustus’s glass of scotch and take a sip of that instead, ignoring the way Alessa’s eyebrows raise at her brother’s lack of a reaction. She leaves a smear of lipstick on the rim of the glass, and everyone pretends like they don’t notice that when Augustus lifts the glass to his lips, his mouth finds the exact spot that hers had just vacated.
“Prosperina,” Gerard answers, trying in vain to flag down a waiter for more alcohol. ( He thinks that if Sera and Augustus keep looking at each other like that, he’s going to need to be far more drunk than he is at present. )
Augustus snorts, like that explains everything, and, frankly, it does. Sera shakes her head at her friend’s taste and turns in her seat to shove two fingers in her mouth and whistle, loud and decidedly unladylike, a talent born from half a decade of living in the city rather than a childhood in the richest part of the suburbs. Every head in the restaurant turns towards her, and she waves at their waiter to return to their table. Alessa looks proud, Gerard looks irritated that he didn’t think of that first, and Augustus is too busy looking at the tattoo etched delicately on her back to pay attention to anything else.
i’m the hero of this story; i don’t need to be saved.
When she turns and sees the way he’s staring at her, she swears the heat in the restaurant rises ten degrees. Gerard’s still disgusted with the two of them, even more so when Sera announces that she’s going to the bathroom, and Alessa, would you please order something strong enough to tide her over through the food. Her napkin hits the table as she strides off to the bathroom, and she almost makes it before she hears Augustus’s footsteps after her. They’re lucky that the bathroom’s unoccupied, because he’s got the door locked behind them and his lips on hers before Sera’s even finished checking the stalls for people. She ends up sitting on the edge of a sink with her legs wrapped around his hips and one of his hands fisted in her hair. He tugs, hard enough to send her head snapping back so he can press hot, open mouthed kisses to the side of her neck, and Sera gasps, the sound stilted and caught in her throat. They don’t have a lot of time, and they both know it, so his free hand slips between her thighs as he starts to suck a mark into the juncture of her neck and her shoulder. Her fingers tighten in the fabric of his shirt as his slide over her, her hips jerking towards his hand and a shuddering moan escaping her lips. She drags his mouth back to hers, whispers something that sounds suspiciously like hurry, and he kisses her like a man starved.
Two fingers slide inside of her as his other hand twists in her hair, and Sera braces one hand on the bathroom sink to lift herself up enough to work her hips against his hand.She tugs on his lower lip with her teeth lightly, her other hand finding the back of his neck, her nails biting into his skin. She rides his hand until neither one of them can stand it and she’s helping him out of his pants. Her underwear’s discarded across the bathroom almost immediately, her dress rucked up around her hips. Augustus fucks her until she’s sure the sink is about to break underneath her and she clenches down around him and falls apart. Helpless to do anything but hang on to him and try and match his rhythm, Sera manages to come apart one more time before he spills inside of her. He’s panting into her hair, his hand finding the side of the sink to lean against her, and before either one of them can figure out why, she starts laughing. He joins her a moment later, loosening his grip in her hair to wrap around her back and hold her against him.
They agree, a few moments later, when she’s sliding her underwear back on and standing like a newborn colt on shaky legs, not to talk about this again. She sends him out before her, knowing that there’s probably no way they can hide this from Gerard but hoping, at least, to keep Alessa out of this. Augustus isn’t gone but thirty seconds before he pokes his head back in the bathroom to tell her that Gerard and Alessa have left, and Sera starts laughing again, shaking her head.
“Of course they have.”
The fifth time, it’s definitely not a date. Absolutely not. Gerard’s been dying for more time alone with Alessa –– it’s been over a month, and Augustus is still staying in their spare room –– and he let Sera know in his characteristically blunt and unsympathetic way that she needed to take a shift of watching him.
Genuinely, his words were: “You’re sleeping with him now, that means it’s your turn to fucking babysit.”
Which, she supposes as she lets Augustus into her apartment, is only fair. Still, it’s weird to see him standing there, eyeing her shoe rack and her marble end table and the mismatching knitted afghan thrown over the back of the couch that’s made up of at least fifty different patches.
“It was my mother’s,” she says by way of explanation, padding barefoot down the hall in her yoga pants and tank top. “You hungry? I’ve got leftover Thai in the fridge.”
There’s a long silence before she hears his duffle bag drop to the floor and he follows her into the kitchen. “That sounds nice,” he says, and Sera glances over at him as she opens the fridge.
“I’ll make plates,” she tells him, pausing before nodding at the table, “but put your piece down before we eat.”
To his credit, he doesn’t try to pretend like he doesn’t understand; he pulls the gun from the back of his waistband and drops the clip, setting both pieces down onto the table and raising an eyebrow at her. “Better?”
“Better.”
Sera makes up two plates and shoves them into the microwave, resting her hip against the counter and offering him a beer from the fridge as she does.
“You’re not in a war zone anymore, you know,” she murmurs, and he nods, looking almost ashamed.
“I know. It’s a difficult lesson to unlearn.”
Sera doesn’t argue with that. She takes a beer from her fridge for herself and after a few minutes, the two of them end up on her couch with her mother’s afghan around their shoulders, watching an old movie and eating their Thai food in relative silence. It’s peaceful, it’s oddly comfortable, but it’s not a date. Absolutely not. Not even when they finish eating and their plates are discarded on the coffee table and he’s kissing her and he tastes like chili oil and beer. It’s not a date when she ends up in his lap with his hands gripping her hips hard enough to leave bruises. It’s not a date when she has to stand up to take off her pants and ends up dragging him off to her bed, smiling at him more than she originally intended to.
It’s not even a date when they’re laying side by side after the fact, with Sera’s hair tangled from his fingers and sweat beading on his chest. His arm is around her, she’s curled up against his chest, and both of them are out of breath, staring at the ceiling. The silence isn’t awkward, it isn’t deafening, it’s just…silence. The sound of his breathing is ringing in her ears, she can still feel the ghost of him inside her if she shifts on her side, and it’s ––
Sera doesn’t want to say it’s nice for fear of jinxing something, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is.
“I’ll make up the couch for you in a minute,” she finally sighs, stretching and feeling the burn and pull of her muscles, feeling the emptiness between her thighs, and he cocks an eyebrow at her. “Oh, don’t look at me like that,” Sera groans, rolling over to land half on top of him and press a kiss to the underside of his jawline, his stubble scratching her chin and lips. “It’s nothing personal, I promise. I’m –– not an easy bedmate.”
“Kicking?”
“Nightmares.”
Augustus doesn’t hesitate when he leans down to kiss her again, long and deep and leaving her boneless against him. “I’ll be fine, princess,” he teases when he finally pulls back, his nose nudging against hers briefly before he settles back against the pillows. Silence stretches between them again, just as comfortable as ever, and he rests his chin on top of her head. “Alessa used to get them, you know,” he finally says, and she nods, remembering all the times they’d woken each other up with midnight screaming in their apartment in college. “Not anymore, though.” His voice is soft, almost regretful. “I haven’t heard her wake up in a panic once since I’ve been home.”
Sera doesn’t think he’ll ever voice this out loud to Alessa, and certainly not to Gerard. But she knows what he’s not saying, because it’s the same thing she didn’t say to Dom when he told her he was going to propose to Prosperina. It’s approval, reluctant and grating, but approval just the same.
“They love each other,” she finally says, softly, the dark around them swallowing up her words. She doesn’t know why saying that makes her feel so small, so lost. Sera supposes she always thought, selfishly, that Alessa would be like her; that she was too broken to find someone who could fill those cracks in. She wasn’t unhappy that Alessa had found Gerard, just…
“It’s hard to watch,” he confirms a moment later, “especially when you don’t think you’ll find that.”
“Is that how you feel?”
It’s silent for so long that she thinks he fell asleep. And then, quietly, he speaks again.
“It was.”
They’ve been living together for over three months ( and that wasn’t intentional, it just…sort of happened ) when it finally happens. Augustus isn’t happy about it, Sera’s over the fucking moon, and she has to keep reminding him to smile as she adjusts his bowtie for him. He’s never really gotten the hang of that. Smoothing his jacket down, she smiles up at him and nods behind him.
“I’m up,” she says, and he kisses her cheek swiftly before she loops her arm with Kieran’s and heads down the aisle, her dress black lace with a long slit up the side and her bouquet full of roses so red they look like they’ve been dipped in blood. Prosperina and Dom follow a moment later, and then Juliana and Graham, and then Eveline and Griffin, and finally, Alessa emerges in a sleek white gown on the arm of her eldest brother. If Gerard tears up, Sera, standing in the position of the maid of honor, doesn’t comment. She kisses Alessa’s cheek when she takes her bouquet, smiles at Augustus as he kisses his sister’s forehead and puts her hand in Gerard’s, and tries not to stare at him as the ceremony unfolds.
She doesn’t do a great job of it; by the time the ceremony’s over and they’re headed to the reception, they find a dark corner where they can kiss each other breathless until Dom walks by and tries to punch Augustus. Griffin and Claud drag him off and convince him to take a walk where they can calm him down. Claud’s girlfriend, a dark haired beauty with long curling hair and a crown of sunflowers on her head winks at Sera, and she laughs as she drags Augustus onto the dance floor. Alessa’s dancing with someone Sera doesn’t recognize, clearly looking for her new husband as she does. Graham’s got his eldest daughter in his arms, her little feet standing on top of his as they waltz around the dance floor, Prosperina and Juliana are spinning each other around and laughing, and her throat seizes up with so much happiness she thinks she might explode.
They dance until Sera’s sure her feet are about to fall off and Alessa steals her brother away, and Sera ends up dancing with Kieran, the best man, who is so charming that it’s no small wonder that Augustus cuts in before the song’s over. They watch Alessa gleefully smear cake on Gerard’s face, she keeps a hand on Augustus’s arm when Gerard goes after his sister’s garter, and when it’s time to toss the bouquet, everyone else seems to disappear around her, and it lands rather neatly in Sera’s hands.
By the time the night’s over, with Alessa and Gerard being sent off for their honeymoon and Augustus standing in the drive long after his baby sister’s disappeared into the night, Sera lifts his arm over her head and ducks under it, tucking herself against his side and wrapping an arm around his waist. “She’ll be fine,” she promises, and he nods, leaning down to press a kiss to the top of her head.
“Come on,” he finally says, tugging her down the drive and glancing over his shoulder like he’s convinced her twin brother is about to dive out of the woodwork and try to kick his ass again, “let’s go home.”
He stood on his knees in the throne room, hands tied behindhis back. The room was deathly silent, not many permitted to witness thepunishment, and the ones who did were too afraid to watch. The king didn’t wantthe story of their prized general falling from grace getting out to the public.The only people allowed in were the Calores and the man who’d been tasked withdealing out the beating. There were no skin healers present. Augustus had been there due to his position inthe sentinel, but he assumed it was only a cruel reminder from Aurelian becauseAugustus had to be “escorted” out soon after it started. The king didn’t wantanyone associated with Graham to act out as he had.
Thanks to their reputation as a distant family, thisreminder hadn’t fallen on his siblings—and unfortunately not on his mother.Thanks to the four of them finally reconciling after years worth of turmoil,however, he knew what they thought. He knew the Macanthos family was alwaysready for war. And this was all but a declaration to them.
But they weren’t with him. Domitius stood off in a corner, andGraham could tell that he didn’t know if he should feel betrayed by his friend oroutraged by his parents. Eveline kept her head down on the other side of theroom, while Helene’s expression twisted into something unrecognizable. Aurelianand Delphine, of course, had no problem watching every bruise and cut bloomover his skin.
Which left Sera, her head down, eyes closed. She was why hecouldn’t use his stone armor, why he was left to take the punches at fullforce. He knew it wasn’t her fault, knew that she was being forced to do this.It wasn’t her fault he wasn’t given a fair fight. Aurelian didn’t know themeaning of the words “fair” and “justice.” Yet he still couldn’t look at her.If he did, he was afraid his anger would be directed at her, and that wasunfair, when all of it should be directed at the mighty king.
He was the one who’d made Graham beg for forgiveness he knew hewould never get. For forgiveness he didn’t want. He was the one who scared hischildren so terribly that the four of them wouldn’t stand up to him. It was anumbers game, a game Graham had been taught to play well. And from what he could see, there weremore children in this equation. They could choose to rebel. They could choose tokeep more people from dying. Instead, they looked away and left Graham toconsequences he would not be facing if there were any fairness in this world. If he had been fighting for someone worth the bloodshed.
“Enough,” his smug little voice finally said, raising ahand. The brute managed to kick Graham one more time in the stomach beforestopping. Aurelian was amused.
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