The banquet hall still smelled of roses. Sweet, cloying, suffocating—like perfume poured too heavily over rotting fruit. The Poison Court had lived up to its name.
Aurora moved through the last currents of the gathering, conscious of every gaze that followed her. Nobles who only hours ago had sneered at the "outsider bride" now watched her as if she were something carved of flame and glass—beautiful, untouchable, and likely to cut them if they drew too close.
The night's games had ended with blood, but it was not the blood that haunted her. It was the silence. The silence that followed her steps, the silence that clung like dust in the air after a storm, thick with unsaid things.
"Smile," Lorenzo murmured at her side, his hand resting lightly at her back. To anyone else, he looked every inch the possessive husband, a king with his jewel on display. But Aurora could feel the tension in him—the tautness of muscle beneath his touch, the storm caged in his stillness.
