CHAPTER SEVEN
The Honeysuckle Years
There was a summer when the world smelled like honeysuckle, and she believed in forever.
She had just turned twenty, fresh from a conservatory of pale marble and wisteria-covered libraries, where the future had seemed no more daunting than an unopened letter. She wore white linen dresses, drank champagne too quickly, and blushed when men complimented her—though she didn’t yet understand that blushing was a currency, and youth a market.
It was at Lord Rutherford’s garden party that she first saw him.
Alistair.
He was laughing with a brandy in hand, his shirt too unbuttoned for propriety, the sun in his hair like burnished gold. There were women around him—there always were—but when she walked past, her shoes clicking like an accidental metronome, he turned.
And when he looked at her, she felt as though she had been written into the scene for the very first time.
They danced.
He told her she looked like a saint and a sin in the same breath.
She told him nothing important. She was too busy drowning in him.
He took her to operas and winter galas, bought her gloves the color of bruised roses, and recited lines from Byron in the back of hansom cabs. When he touched her, she thought it meant something sacred. When he kissed her, she believed he knew her soul.
And when he proposed—beneath an arch of trailing jasmine, gold ring burning her finger with promise—she didn’t hesitate.
She thought: This is what love is.
This is how it begins.
It took years for her to notice that it had already ended.
At first, there were small absences.
The way he came to bed late, wine on his breath and silk on his cuff.
The way he watched other women—not lecherously, not hungrily—but as if they were music he hadn’t heard before.
He would compliment her dress but not her. Ask her to laugh less loudly at dinners. Criticize her piano playing for being “too emotional.”
She learned that silence was safer than wonder.
That longing looked pathetic when it went unreturned.
He was not cruel.
Just… elsewhere.
His attention a key she no longer possessed.
Once, she found a necklace—delicate, too cheap for his taste—tangled in the pocket of his waistcoat. When she held it up, he only shrugged.
“Do you always need a reason to start drama?”
She laughed with him that night at a banquet, wore red satin, and smiled through the ache like it was part of the design.
She became practiced at smiling.
In time, he stopped noticing her altogether.
She'd speak, and his eyes would glaze over, as though she were a book he'd already read. His irritation grew like ivy—slow, then suffocating.
Her perfume gave him headaches.
Her questions were "pointless."
He told her once, absently, that she was too sentimental for her own good.
She thought of the girl she had been.
The white linen, the champagne, the honeysuckle.
She could hardly remember her.
And yet, even then—when her hands shook slicing fruit for breakfast, when her reflection seemed unfamiliar—she clung to him.
Because he was her proof.
Her decision.
Her definition.
And she did not yet know how to live without being someone else's.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Porcelain Hour
The garden had been arranged with mathematical precision.
Lanterns hung like small moons from the pergolas. Tables shimmered with crystal and sugared petals. The orchestra played something obscure and French, and the air was scented with peach blossom and ambition.
She stood on the terrace, a statue carved from stillness, glass of champagne held delicately in her hand as though she feared the warmth of her palm might crack it. She wore blue—silk, sleeveless, impossibly smooth—and her hair was twisted up with pearls like constellations.
Around her, the party bloomed.
Lady Beatrice laughed too loudly in the hedgerow.
Julian was making cruel remarks masked as wit near the croquet lawn.
Reginald was already drunk and mistaking flirtation for attention.
And Lord Alistair—her husband—was holding court beneath the yew tree, his hand on the elbow of a brunette whose name she had not bothered to learn.
She watched them all with a gaze so calm it was almost spiritual.
She no longer cared.
There had been no dramatic moment of betrayal.
No affair caught in the act, no heated confrontation.
Just a slow evaporation of feeling.
Her love had vanished like steam from a bath—warm, invisible, gone before you knew it had left.
Where once she would’ve clenched the stem of her glass, now her fingers were relaxed.
Where once she would’ve made excuses for his wandering eyes, now she simply catalogued them.
His smiles, his mutterings, his faux-chivalry—each filed away in her mind like the flicking of dead leaves from a tablecloth.
He was no longer a man.
He was a pattern.
Lady Beatrice approached her, flushed with wine and mischief.
“My dear, you look like a painting. But not one I’d want to hang in my bedroom. Don’t you ever smile?”
She turned to her, expression unreadable.
“I smile when it matters.”
Beatrice blinked, unsure whether she'd been insulted.
They moved inside for the evening toast. Candlelight gilded the room, and the air grew syrupy with heat and roses. A string quartet coiled sound through the air, and Alistair raised a glass—one hand on the brunette’s waist now, too familiar to be polite.
“To love,” he said, eyes skating over his wife like a ghost.
She sipped her drink and tasted nothing.
The truth was: she had begun to feel free.
Detached from the need to impress or please.
Liberated from the tug-of-war between longing and disappointment.
She knew how to say just enough to avoid attention, how to look just alive enough not to arouse suspicion. She was not sad—she was strategic.
People still called her beautiful, but now they whispered intimidating too.
She liked that.
Outside, the garden buzzed with crickets and secrets. The moon rose like a coin tossed into a dark well. From a distance, the estate looked enchanted.
But she had seen the cracks in the marble.
She had counted the stains in the drapery.
She knew the scent of rot behind the roses.
And in that knowledge, she found a kind of power.
CHAPTER NINE
The Ninth Circle (Rewritten)
The room was candlelit and breathing. The walls, she thought absently, were pulsing. Or perhaps it was her vision—just slightly off-centre, trailing behind itself like an afterimage. The chandeliers dripped wax that never landed. Everything smelt of blood oranges, overripe roses, and faintly of ash.
People moved around her with the grace of ghosts wearing expensive shoes. Voices curled through the air but didn’t land anywhere in particular, just floated—opalescent and smug. Her own breath tasted metallic. She could not remember when she had last spoken aloud.
Beatrice emerged from the smoke like something conjured, her hair glittering with tiny stars or bits of broken glass, she couldn’t tell which. “You look like marble,” Beatrice said, reaching out with lacquered fingers and touching her arm as if testing for warmth. “Have you been dreaming again?”
She blinked. Or thought she did. “Yes. Always. I never stopped.”
Beatrice laughed, too loudly. It echoed off the ceiling and fell into her champagne.
She was back on the terrace with Alistair, once. Or maybe she imagined it. He was whispering lines from The Tempestinto her collarbone while smoke curled out of his mouth like a trick. He had smelled of burnt paper and secrets. That was long ago. Or five minutes ago. Or maybe it hadn’t happened yet.
Julian stood in the centre of the room, reciting something solemn. His words unraveled slowly, silk scarves pulled from a magician’s throat. He was wearing gloves. Or maybe his hands were just painted on. She wasn’t sure. She wanted to laugh. She didn’t.
The others began to chant, or hum, or murmur—noises that folded on top of each other like pages in a wet book. She remembered Julian pinning her to the edge of a conversation once, saying, You’re not the lamb. You’re the knife pretending to be silverware.
Beatrice was still beside her. Or perhaps inside her. “Don’t look so fragile, darling,” she cooed, “they’ll eat you faster.”
In her memory—was it a memory?—a ring was passed to her in a box lined with velvet and fingernail clippings. “It’s tradition,” someone had said. “Or penance.” Alistair had looked away.
Now, in this room that blinked and shifted like a dream in water, Alistair stood by the yew branch they had dragged indoors for symbolic reasons. His face flickered. Was he smiling? Did he ever?
The music began. Discordant, lovely. A waltz played backward.
She took the chalice with both hands and saw, reflected in the surface, her younger self with ink-stained fingertips and a heart too soft for ceremony. The liquid inside shimmered like oil and bruises. She drank. She said the words. Or maybe she didn’t.
They clapped. Or screamed. Or someone dropped a glass and it shattered into applause.
Reginald slithered toward her. “You’re luminous tonight,” he said, teeth like piano keys. “Lethal.”
She turned her head slightly, as though hearing music no one else did. “I am done pretending to be real.”
He laughed nervously. “You always say the oddest things after ritual.”
But this wasn’t after. This was still inside.
The floor was velvet. Her shoes had disappeared. She wondered if the paintings were watching, or just blind. Their eyes had been gouged out years ago, but she still felt them—somewhere behind her ear, or deep in the bone.
Alistair’s voice swam across the space like a fish through milk. “To love,” he said.
She mouthed the word back, but it tasted different now. Like salt. Or glass.
The fire snapped its fingers. Someone refilled her glass without asking.
She thought: This is the beginning of the end. And they won’t even see it coming.
Because she was no longer afraid.
No longer innocent.
No longer anything she had been when she walked into this house all those years ago with jasmine in her hair and hope stitched into her hem.
Now she was smoke.
Now she was watching.
Now she was the room.
CHAPTER TEN
The Table of Wolves
The table was too long. That was deliberate.
Each place setting had three forks, two knives, and a single black fig placed neatly atop a folded linen napkin. The centrepiece was a swan carved from ice, its wings melting just enough to suggest sadness. Around it, the guests sparkled with diamonds and deceit.
Laughter rose like smoke. The room was scented with saffron and scandal.
She sat between Julian and Lady Beatrice, which was also deliberate.
Beatrice had already drunk too much but was pretending otherwise. Her lipstick had bled slightly into the cracks of her smirk. Julian, of course, hadn’t touched a drop—he preferred to remain sober while manipulating the course of global belief.
“So,” Reginald drawled from down the table, swirling his wine, “have we all seen the latest nonsense about the satellites?”
Groans. Chuckles. Someone choked on their oyster.
“Oh please,” Beatrice sighed, “the weather control theory again? I thought we’d retired that one after Davos.”
“Retired it?” Julian murmured, cutting his lamb with surgical precision. “We upgraded it.”
“Shame,” Beatrice said, resting her chin on her hand. “It was such fun watching the Americans argue about cloud seeding. I always liked the religious angle. Remember when they said God was angry because of the drought?”
Laughter again. Real this time. Intimate and cruel.
Across the table, Alistair raised his glass. “To the divine power of bureaucratic incompetence. The only true veil.”
She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes.
They were talking about it too openly.
Or rather—they were counting on no one believing them.
That was the trick, always. Tell the truth loudly, absurdly, in the middle of dinner, and everyone would assume you were being ironic.
“I still think the flat-earth rollout was one of our greatest hits,” Reginald said, dabbing the corners of his mouth with a gold-trimmed napkin. “All those influencers spinning around in circles trying to prove gravity wasn’t real. Delicious.”
“Not as delicious as watching the counter-theories take hold,” said Lady Danforth, emerging from silence like an eel from a crevice. “People want to be lied to. They just don’t want to feel passive. So give them a lie they can participate in.”
A waiter poured something fizzing into her glass. She didn’t look down.
Julian turned to her. “You’ve been quiet tonight.”
“I’m listening,” she said.
“And what do you hear?”
“Confirmation.”
A ripple passed through the air—not quite tension, not quite interest. Beatrice tilted her head.
“You always did have a gift for saying nothing with menace,” she said sweetly.
“And you,” she replied, “for saying everything and hoping no one notices.”
The table stilled. Then slowly began to fracture again, splintering into new threads of conversation—distraction, as always, being their real currency.
Lady Danforth leaned in. “Tell me, dear, were you present at the Ukraine simulation?”
She blinked. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
“The first one. The one before the vote. With the war table projections and the colour-coded outcomes. I believe you were in the Blue Room, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” she said. “I remember the napkins.”
A few guests chuckled.
“Oh, that was the run with the accidental famine protocol,” Beatrice said, reaching for another fig. “Terrible optics. Very effective though.”
“History is just choreography,” Alistair said, running his finger along the rim of his glass. “It only looks random if you don’t hear the music.”
“And who writes the music?” she asked.
Nobody answered.
The swan’s beak snapped off with a faint crack.
Later, when dessert had collapsed into liqueurs and confessions, they brought out the dossiers. They always did, eventually. Just a little teasing. Just a few photos. A glimpse of a prime minister’s diary. A memo with a signature that didn’t exist.
They passed them around like favours.
“These,” Beatrice said, holding up one grainy satellite image, “will be leaked in three months. But not by us, obviously. A blogger in Oslo thinks he’s uncovered them independently.”
“Good,” said Julian. “That’ll create enough smoke to hide the Mexico pivot.”
She looked at the photo. The desert was carved into a perfect spiral, a labyrinth of trucks and silence. She knew the place. She had visited once, blindfolded.
And still, she said nothing.
Because that was how the game was played: truth spoken like rumour, lies whispered like gospel, and history rewritten over cigars and crème brûlée.
Outside, lightning cracked once, briefly.
Inside, the laughter never stopped.
C
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Curtain is Always Open
She did not knock. She simply opened the door and stood in the light of the hallway, letting the gold spill over her like syrup.
Her gown was not quite a gown. It clung. Whispered. Fell like a lie from her shoulder and waited, breathless, just above the floor. Her bare feet made no sound against the marble, but the silence felt different now. A silence with its hand at your throat.
She knew he was watching.
Not him, not Alistair. He was somewhere else, somewhere irrelevant. This was the other one. The unseen one. The one who had always been there. The one in the mirror, the camera, the keyhole. The one who watched when she wasn’t looking.
She liked to be seen. She always had. But not by everyone—only by those who understood what they were seeing.
She stepped into the room.
The curtains were open, as she had left them. The city blinked slowly in the distance, a pulse of amber and poison. Her body reflected in the glass—once, then twice, then scattered into endless selves. One hand reached for the windowpane and left a smudge like blood. Or breath.
She turned her face slowly toward the darkness where she felt him.
“I know you’re there,” she whispered.
The room didn’t answer. But it tightened.
Her fingers unpinned her hair. It fell in waves, a ritual offering. She combed through it slowly, slowly, as if time were water and she had all the oceans to drown in.
The chair waited for her. A tall, winged thing upholstered in oxblood leather. She sank into it, knees apart, arms draped over the sides like a throne’s familiar. Her pulse was deliberate. Her skin, gleaming. Her gaze, ancient.
“You’ve been watching me for some time, haven’t you?” she said. “I used to wonder why. Now I know.”
The fireplace was not lit. Still, the room was warm. Her body warmer still.
A single drop of sweat made its slow descent down the inside of her thigh. She did not wipe it away.
She let him look.
“Do you want to know what I was like before all this?” she asked, cocking her head. “I used to blush. I used to cry in the bath. I used to think it was a virtue to be kind.”
She pressed one hand to her collarbone. Slid it down. Paused at the ribbon of silk knotted at her waist.
“I killed that girl,” she whispered. “Or maybe you did. But I buried her. I kissed her goodnight and covered her in velvet.”
The ribbon loosened. Slid apart.
“You like power, don’t you?” she purred. “But not having it. Watching it. Tasting it on other people’s breath.”
She leaned forward now, her body a question with no punctuation. Her hair fell over one eye like a secret. Her tongue darted to her lip.
“What would you do if I came to you now?” she said. “What would you ask me to do? What would you beg me not to?”
She smiled, slow as sin.
Outside, lightning flickered once. Just enough to show the shadow in the corner—elongated, uncertain, real.
She saw him.
Or she dreamed him.
Or perhaps she conjured him by wanting to be watched badly enough.
Her breath fogged the air between them.
Then, very softly, she stood.
The silk fell.
She walked away from the light.
And left the curtain open.
CHAPTER TWELVE
She Who Is Looked Upon
She woke just before dawn, in silk and sin, and the city was silent.
No birds. No wind. No clock ticking. The kind of stillness that came not from peace, but from expectation. As if the world were holding its breath.
She remained where she was—half-folded into the chaise lounge, one leg tangled in the sheet, her body arched like the leftover curl of a dream. Hair mussed. Lips swollen. Perfume clinging to her like a secret no one dared to speak.
She had not slept. Not really. She had rested beneath herself. Dipped just far enough to feel the hunger quiet but not die. Sleep would have been too human.
There were mirrors on the ceiling. Of course there were.
Not for vanity. For proof.
To remind herself that the woman she’d become wasn’t imaginary. That she existed—not merely in whispers or files or bedroom walls—but in angles and glass, with a mouth made for command and eyes that turned pity into pleasure.
She turned her head.
The chair was empty now.
But she remembered the weight in the room. The presence that watched, wordless. The soft pressure of being desired like a thing stolen from a museum. Not touched. Not claimed. Just studied, reverently.
She’d been addicted to that since the first time she felt it.
Since she was seventeen, standing in front of a panel of men twice her age, reading a poem with tears in her voice and a line of sweat down her back. She had known—known—they were no longer listening to her words. Only watching her mouth.
That was when she learned:
Power wasn’t about control.
It was about creating need.
Need in others.
Need you could feed—or starve.
She sat up.
Her body moved with slow, predatory grace. The kind of grace you never taught yourself. The kind that came when you stopped pretending your instincts were shameful.
Somewhere below, the kitchen staff were beginning to stir. She could hear the faint clink of silver, the hum of electricity returning to the walls. But none of it touched her.
She was still in that other space—the one between moments, between roles, between realities.
Her reflection met her own gaze.
“You are what they desire,” she said aloud, “because they were never taught how to want themselves.”
She ran a finger along her thigh. Not with lust. With ownership.
Every scar. Every curve. Every shadow she had carved into herself through denial or delight.
There were rumours about her now. Of course there were. That she seduced ministers into silence. That she once whispered a man into suicide. That her skin, if touched without permission, would burn.
Good.
Rumours were a kind of faith.
And faith made her a kind of god.
She stood and crossed to the window, still naked, still open.
The city watched.
Or maybe not. Maybe it was just glass and sky and towers blinking code at no one. But she moved as if she had an audience.
She always moved as if she had an audience.
Even if the only watcher left was herself.
And in that act of seeing, and being seen, she was whole again.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Taste of Sunlight and Surrender
The garden smelled like champagne and contempt.
Roses bloomed too eagerly, as if drunk on themselves. The air shimmered with heat and gossip, and the fountains whispered in Latin. Somewhere, a quartet sawed dutifully at violins beneath parasols, but no one was really listening. Music, like morality, was background now.
She arrived late. On purpose.
The hush followed her like smoke.
A low rustle of fabric. A delicate cough. A momentary silence that said there she is.
She wore yellow. The kind of yellow that screamed sunlight, but with a cut that whispered midnight. The silk clung in the wrong places on purpose, drawing the eye to curve and collarbone, to the place where throat met shoulder, to the line that begged for hands but permitted none.
They parted for her like petals. Or prey.
Beatrice met her near the roses, glass half-raised, lips already curled in envy. “You always make an entrance like you’ve already won something.”
“I did,” she murmured, brushing past her. “I won you all.”
Eyes trailed her.
The wives watched with acidic smiles, their teeth hidden behind lace gloves and polite laughter. The husbands tried not to look, and looked anyway. She gave them all the same gift: a glance. Just enough to haunt them later. Not enough to follow.
She paused at the centre of the garden, where the grass was flattened by heels and secrets. There was Julian, sleek as ever, discussing trade routes that didn’t officially exist. There was Alistair, at the bar, his hand on another woman’s wrist and his eyes fixed on nothing. There was Reginald, sweating beneath his cravat like a sinner at a sermon.
They were all exactly as she had left them: powerful, bored, trembling beneath their privilege.
She smiled. This was her altar.
A waiter offered her a drink. She didn’t take it. She leaned in instead, just close enough to make him forget the tray in his hand, then passed him like a breeze that smelled of something he would remember but never name.
She moved without haste. She moved like music. She moved like myth.
The conversations bent around her.
“What is she doing here?” someone whispered.
“She was invited.”
“She invites herself. The invitation is just theatre.”
She reached Julian. Let her fingers graze his wrist as she leaned in, not to kiss, but to whisper. “Tell them the truth is safe with me.”
He paled, just slightly. “Which truth?”
“All of them.”
Then she stepped away, as if the exchange never happened.
Later, she found Alistair. Not alone, of course. He never was. But she knew how to change a room just by entering it. She slipped behind him, a hand at his lower back, fingers resting where his spine still remembered her.
“Darling,” she said, sweet as poison. “You look almost happy.”
He turned. His mistress stepped back. She didn’t even need to speak. Her presence was rebuke enough.
“I see you’re in a mood today,” Alistair murmured.
“I’m always in a mood,” she said. “You simply notice when it isn’t for you.”
She walked away without waiting for a reply. She liked it better that way. Power was not about conquering—it was about walking off the battlefield before anyone else realised there was a war.
As the sun began to sink, the garden pulsed with tension. The party swelled like something about to burst.
They all felt it.
Not just the heat, but the shift. The awareness that she wasn’t simply there—she was enacting something. A charm. A spell. A performance.
And somewhere between the olives and the opium, the laughter and the linen, they began to remember something old: that beauty could be violence, that charm could be hunger, that sex could be a sermon.
She was not dancing, but they watched her as if she were.
She did not speak often, but they listened when she did.
And when she finally turned her head and met the eyes of a man no one recognised, a man who hadn’t been on the guest list, a man who watched her like he knew her real name—
—she smiled.
The world tilted.
And the garden party, for all its wealth and privilege, suddenly felt like a congregation at her feet.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Man Without a Name
She had spent years perfecting entrances.
How to glide, not walk. How to speak in riddles that made men feel clever when they guessed wrong. How to touch without touching, to burn without fire.
She was fluent in every dialect of desire.
But he was already there.
Not arriving. Not mingling. Just… present.
Leaning lightly against the sundial at the garden’s edge, one hand in his pocket, the other holding nothing. He wasn’t watching her the way others did. No hunger. No awe. Just… awareness. As if he were waiting for her to remember something.
She did not recognise him.
And yet.
A line of electricity drew her toward him, silent and slow, like silk unspooling in the dark. Around them, the garden thickened. Laughter dulled. The party thinned.
No one noticed.
She stepped into the shade where he stood, and for the first time in years, she felt it:
Not seen. Uncovered.
“You don’t belong here,” she said.
“Neither do you,” he replied.
His voice was not remarkable—calm, low, devoid of flirtation—but it hooked something inside her, a memory she didn’t know she’d hidden. A hallway. A dark room. A scent like rust and incense.
She narrowed her eyes. “Who invited you?”
“I was summoned.”
“I don’t summon people.”
He smiled, slowly. “Don’t you?”
The words coiled around her like smoke.
She wanted to dismiss him. Walk away. Resume the dance. But her body had gone still, too still, the way animals freeze just before the ground gives way. He was… wrong.
Too composed. Too silent.
He didn’t blink enough.
And his suit—elegant, dark, well-cut—was slightly too old in its style. Not vintage. Not fashionable. Just… unplaceable.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“To remind you.”
“Of what?”
“That you weren’t always the hunter.”
She flinched. Just slightly. It was enough.
He stepped closer—not invading, but folding the distance between them with unbearable precision. His presence didn’t press. It pulled. Like gravity.
“I know what you’ve become,” he said, voice like velvet over stone. “But I remember the other girl. The one who wrote letters in candlelight. Who believed in absolutes. Who cried in locked rooms and prayed for power.”
Her mouth was dry. She hadn’t cried in years.
She tilted her chin. “And what of it?”
He leaned closer. “You asked the dark for strength. It gave you performance. You asked for control. It gave you illusion.”
“You think I’m an illusion?” she hissed.
“No,” he said. “I think you’ve forgotten the cost.”
A breeze stirred, cold despite the sun. For a moment, she thought she saw his shadow stretch too far behind him—too thin, too long. But when she blinked, it was gone.
He stepped back.
“I’ll see you soon,” he said.
She opened her mouth—to ask when, to ask why, to ask what he meant—but he was already walking away.
She turned to call after him—
But the sundial was empty.
No footsteps.
No trace.
Nothing.
The garden buzzed again. Laughter returned. The spell snapped.
And for the first time in a long time, she was shaken.
Not because he frightened her.
But because he had looked at her without wanting.
And because some ancient part of her—a part she thought long dead—felt like it had just been claimed.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Rooms Where I Am Not Myself
She did not leave the party.
She vanished from it.
No one noticed. They never did when she was no longer performing.
The corridors of the house welcomed her like old wounds—soft carpet, oil paintings, chandeliers dimmed to honey. Familiar shapes became strange. Time slowed. The clink of glasses outside sounded like a distant ocean, crashing against the windows.
She moved barefoot. She didn’t remember removing her shoes.
Her hands trembled once. Only once. She watched them shake like they belonged to someone else.
His words had curled under her skin like smoke:
You weren’t always the hunter.
She opened a door. It led to the piano room.
The lid was closed. Dustless. Too clean, like everything here. The keys called to her—not as music, but as memory.
A girl pressing ivory.
A mother correcting posture.
A slap for a missed note.
A promise whispered in the mirror: I will never need them again.
She shut the door.
Another hallway. Longer this time. Or shorter. She couldn’t tell. The walls leaned too close. The wallpaper was wrong, didn’t it used to be green?
She passed a mirror and didn’t look. But she saw.
Her dress moved like water. But her face—her face was still.
Too still.
Painted in place.
Eyes black as the garden’s soil.
She touched her reflection. Cold glass. A slight hum.
Behind her, the reflection smiled.
She did not.
She kept walking.
The next room had no furniture. Just a chair in the centre. And a letter on the floor. She didn’t read it. She knew what it said.
It had said the same thing for years:
You traded your name for silence.
She stepped over it.
The house was a maze now. Her sanctuary. Her prison. Her theatre. Her grave.
She reached her bedroom. Closed the door. Locked it.
Inside, she undressed slowly, reverently. As if removing ritual garments.
The zipper sighed.
The fabric fell.
She stood before herself.
There were bruises she did not remember getting.
A scar she thought had faded.
A pulse too loud.
She touched her own throat.
The room pulsed.
You asked the dark for strength…
She lay down on the bed. Stared at the ceiling. Listened.
Nothing. Then a sound.
She sat up.
The mirror on the far wall fogged as if someone were breathing on it.
She approached.
One word had appeared in the glass, written in mist:
"Before."
Her breath caught.
Before the parties.
Before the power.
Before the marriage, the mask, the hunger.
Before she learned to weaponise her skin and wear her beauty like a blade.
Before she turned seduction into survival.
She backed away. The mirror cleared. The room was empty. But she was not alone.
She turned off the lights.
In the dark, she whispered to the silence:
“I don’t remember who I was.”
And the silence whispered back:
“She does.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Rooms Where I Am Not Myself (Rewritten: St. Moritz Edition)
The restaurant at the summit had no name—only a number, etched into the glass like a secret: 3180, its altitude, not its price point. Though the prices were just as vertiginous.
The room was a study in understatement. Pale timber walls. Floor-to-ceiling windows framing a dusk that looked painted by old money. Waiters glided silently across the stone floors in uniforms so crisp they might have been carved. The cutlery was antique silver. The plates, thin as snowflakes. The wine list was bound in calfskin, discreetly without prices—only the knowing ever dared to ask.
She sat by the window in a soft grey cashmere turtleneck, her hair still dusted faintly with the glitter of fresh powder. Her cheeks were pink from skiing, her lips wine-dark. Around her, the others leaned into the glow of candlelight and conspiracy.
Alistair was opposite, of course. He always managed to appear natural in these places—like privilege had been stitched into his posture. He was slicing into a venison medallion the colour of rubies, and not listening to the woman beside him. The woman—brunette, always brunette—was wearing too much perfume and not enough subtlety.
Julian arrived late, as was his custom, shrugging off a navy wool coat lined in sable. “Apologies,” he said, sliding into his chair and nodding for the sommelier. “My banker kept me hostage. Geneva, you know.”
“What’s left of it,” Alistair muttered, not looking up. “Half the banks are just shell operations now.”
“Oh, I know,” Julian said, glancing at her with a smile that didn't reach his eyes. “That’s why I was there.”
The table laughed. Except for her.
She was studying the menu like it was poetry. “Do I dare order the white truffle fondue again?” she murmured. “Last time it came with its own bodyguard.”
“It should,” Beatrice said from beside her, leaning in, breath warm with brandy. “Did you see the price? Six hundred francs for melted cheese.”
“It’s not melted cheese,” Julian corrected. “It’s heritage. And soft power.”
The food arrived like a ritual. Saffron-glazed foie gras, smoked Arctic char served under a glass cloche, a salad made of edible snow. Her main course—a beetroot risotto with 24-karat gold leaf and pickled spruce tips—was both absurd and exquisite. The wine, a 1998 Domaine Leroy Clos de la Roche, was poured with the reverence of a religious sacrament.
“You’d think the Russians would be here tonight,” said Reginald, swirling his glass. “St. Moritz used to be thick with them. Oligarchs and girlfriends with surgically improved ankles.”
“They’ve shifted,” Julian said smoothly. “Zurich, mostly. And Zug. Still moving funds, of course. Just less... ostentatiously.”
Alistair leaned back in his chair. “Because discretion is the new decadence.”
“They're nervous,” Beatrice added, licking fondue from the tip of her spoon. “Too many seizures. Too many freezes. The wrong mistress leaks a photo and suddenly you’ve got the Bundeskriminalamt crawling up your accounts.”
“But the Swiss still protect them,” Reginald said.
“Not quite,” Julian replied. “They protect the illusion. The vaults are digital now. The real money is elsewhere. You don't hide gold bars anymore—you hide algorithms.”
The waiter refilled their glasses. She barely noticed. Her eyes had drifted to the window, where the snow was falling in perfect, untroubled sheets. Below, the mountains slept under silk.
“How many accounts did you freeze this month?” she asked softly, not turning her head.
Julian smirked. “Only the ones that mattered.”
Alistair chuckled. “Translation: the ones that made too much noise.”
“Or got sentimental,” she said, finally meeting Julian’s eyes. “That's always the mistake. Thinking any of it is personal.”
For a moment, the table went quiet.
Then Beatrice lifted her glass. “To laundering,” she said brightly. “The only thing the Swiss do better than snow.”
Glasses clinked. A toast disguised as a joke disguised as truth.
She sipped and tasted nothing. The wine was exquisite, but her palate had moved on to older hungers.
The fire in the corner crackled politely. The room glowed. Beneath their feet, the Alps hummed ancient and indifferent.
And outside, in the darkness beyond the glass, the wind shifted.
Just enough to make the snow whisper.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Girl Who Disappeared in Fur and Diamonds
It began with a lull. That delicious half-hour after dinner when the world slows, softened by wine and snow and wealth. The firelight flickered against the paneled walls of the lounge where they had drifted after dessert. Cognac in cut crystal. A pianist coaxed out a Debussy nocturne on a white lacquered baby grand. Her coat, a pale mink she hadn’t remembered putting on, hung loose around her shoulders like a stolen identity.
“I’ll just step out for air,” she said.
No one tried to stop her. That was the way with these people—assumed autonomy, even in captivity.
The terrace was empty. Below, the valley was veiled in darkness, except for the pinprick lights of chalets clinging to the hills like secrets. The moon turned the snow into crushed pearl. Her breath bloomed like a ghost before her. She was thinking of nothing. Or perhaps of everything.
That’s when it happened.
A shift of air. The crunch of snow behind her, deliberate.
She turned. Too late.
A man—not a waiter, not a guest—stepped forward. His face was blank in the moonlight, unremarkable. But the needle-sharp prick at her neck was undeniable. Cold. Metal. Chemical.
She tried to cry out. Her mouth opened but no sound came.
Then everything slowed, like glass melting.
The last thing she saw was the stars above the mountain—distant, blisteringly bright, uncaring.
She woke in a moving vehicle. Bound wrists. Velvet blindfold. Not brutality—precision. A different kind of violence. The kind money buys.
The scent of pine and leather. The hum of snow tyres on an unpaved track.
She did not panic.
She counted heartbeats. Listened.
Two voices. French-accented English. Low. Professional. Not local. Not personal.
“…assets confirmed…”
“…no media…”
“…the package remains calm…”
She smiled faintly at that. The package.
The blindfold came off just as the car stopped.
They were in a chalet. Remote. Old. Beautiful in the way of things untouched by sentiment.
The room was warm. A fire already lit. Persian rugs, exposed beams. No windows, only heavy drapes. Surveillance cameras were disguised as art.
A woman approached. White wool suit. Military posture. Her heels made no sound.
“You are not harmed,” the woman said. It wasn’t a question.
The main character nodded. “Not yet.”
The woman smiled, thinly. “Good. That makes this easier. You are not here for punishment. You are here for clarification.”
“Clarify what?”
The woman stepped aside. A dossier was placed on the table. Photos. Transactions. Names she recognized from dinner. And names she did not.
“Your knowledge,” said the woman, “has become inconvenient.”
“To whom?”
The woman didn't answer. Only smiled again, tighter this time. “You will remain here until it is decided.”
“By who?”
“That is above both of us.”
She looked around the room. There was only one door. But the lock was on the outside.
“Do I at least get a drink?”
“Of course,” the woman said. “This is Switzerland.”
Moments later, a glass of kirschwasser appeared on the table beside her.
She didn’t drink it. She was calculating, already. Not how to escape—no, she would let them believe she’d surrendered. She would let them underestimate her.
Because someone would come for her.
And when they did—
She would make sure she never had to ask a question again.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Exit Through the Flames
The days passed like smoke curling from a dying fire—indistinct, heavy with meaning she could not quite read.
The chalet was silent. Warm. Tastefully prison-like. The woman in the white suit came daily at 6 p.m., offering curated information like poisoned hors d'oeuvres. No torture, just elegance and implication. Just a mirror turned slowly toward her own reflection.
She had stopped resisting. She was waiting. For what, she didn’t know.
Until the storm came.
It began with the electricity. A flicker. Then darkness.
Then footsteps. Not the usual ones.
Heavy, fast. Purposeful. Not Swiss.
A door slammed open somewhere below. Shouting. A crash. A gunshot.
And then—
The door to her room burst open.
Smoke flooded in.
And with it: him.
He wore black. Tactical. Not bulky—tailored. A gun in one hand, a smile in the other. His face was unfamiliar, and yet she trusted it instantly—like something her mind had dreamt in childhood and misplaced.
“You’re coming with me,” he said, over the roar of the fire now leaping up the hallway.
“Who are you?”
“Later.”
He cut her binds with a blade shaped like a question mark.
She followed.
Down the stairs, across a burning corridor—another guard appeared. Two shots: clean, unshowy, professional.
Outside, a helicopter—blades slicing the storm-lit snow.
He half-carried her through the drifts, into the open night, into the noise.
A leap. Cold metal. Updraft. She was airborne.
Inside the helicopter: silence except for the storm. Her heart beat too fast. Her body hadn’t caught up with what had happened.
He handed her a headset. She slipped it on.
“Who sent you?” she asked.
“Nobody.”
“Then why?”
He turned to her. In the dim red glow of the cockpit, his face was unreadable.
“Because you matter more than you think,” he said. “And some of us are still watching.”
They flew for what could have been hours. Over the Alps, through fog and frost, above politics and betrayal.
When they landed, it was at a private airfield. No lights. Just one jet waiting, open stairs slick with snowmelt.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
He turned at the foot of the steps. “We’re not going anywhere. You are. London. Safehouse. There’s a man named K—he’ll know what to do.”
“You’re not coming?”
He looked at her—really looked. Then he leaned in, touched her cheek once, gently.
“If I come with you, we both disappear. If I vanish alone, they’ll only look for me.”
She wanted to argue. Instead, she kissed him. Not for love. Not even for gratitude. For recognition.
Then she climbed the stairs. At the top, she paused.
“What's your name?”
He smiled.
“Call me whoever you need me to be.”
The plane lifted into the dawn.
She sat back in the cream leather seat. The steward brought champagne. She didn’t drink it.
She stared out the window at the mountains below—burning with sunrise, burning like the past.
She wasn’t rescued.
She was relocated.
And now the real game began.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The House With No Clocks
The safehouse was not in London.
It was beneath it.
She awoke in a room without corners. Everything was curved—walls, windows, even the ceiling—a space shaped like an egg, or a womb, or the inside of a skull. The bed was circular and enormous. The sheets were black silk.
There were no clocks.
No windows.
No sounds from the outside world.
Just her, and the scent of something metallic and ancient.
At first, she believed she was alone.
Until she opened the wardrobe.
Inside were clothes—her clothes—but ones she had never seen before. Dresses she might have worn in another life. Furs that remembered animals. Gloves she recognised but had never owned. Every item tailored to fit her perfectly. Every garment tagged with a number, not a label. Not fashion—preparation.
On the third morning—or what she assumed was morning—a silver tray arrived outside her door. No knock. Just presence. A single object lay on the velvet lining:
A key. Ornate. Gold. Cold to the touch.
It didn’t fit any door she had found.
That night, she wandered.
The corridors were endless and silent. Portraits lined the walls—but they had no faces. Just blank ovals where identity should have been, painted in oils.
Eventually, she found the staircase.
It spiraled downward, into heat and shadow. At the bottom: a door.
The key worked.
Inside was a chapel.
Or something like it.
Stone walls, candlelight, a shallow reflecting pool in the center of the room. And at the far end—a man in red robes. Masked. Not religious. Not political. Something older.
He did not speak.
Instead, he held out a mirror.
She took it.
Inside the mirror: her face. But changed.
Eyes darker. Skin luminous. Lips parted like a wound.
And behind her reflection—a crown of thorns made from gold wire and satellite dishes.
She turned. Nothing there.
She turned back. The reflection had not changed.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
The man pointed at the pool.
She approached. Looked down.
There was no water.
Only screens. Hundreds of them.
All showing her.
Moments from the past. The night of the kidnapping. The garden party. The seduction. Childhood, twisted into fable. Her mother brushing her hair, but the brush was dripping blood. Her wedding. Her laugh. Her betrayals.
She could not look away.
The man spoke.
Only one word.
“Choose.”
When she looked up again, she was alone.
The mirror had cracked.
And in her palm—
A single drop of blood.
Hers. Or someone else’s.
She licked it clean.
She ascended back into the curved room.
Now, on the bed: a file. A dossier marked EXODUS.
Inside: names. Coordinates. A private jet. A pistol.
A note:
“You’ve been made. The game is over. Start a new one.”
And at the bottom of the page, scribbled in handwriting she almost remembered:
“The stranger’s watching.”
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