The guest hall doors were still breathing from the last kiss when they flew open. Two men in midnight suits stepped over the threshold like they owned the air. One smiled too wide, teeth a little too narrow, like a row of needles pretending to be human. The other had coin-silver pupils that flashed whenever the chandelier threw a spark.
"Ladies," Silver Eyes purred. "Is this a private rehearsal, or can we sponsor the show?"
Calista's hand moved so fast only Elma felt it: a quick, involuntary clutch at the silk at her hip. Fear, disguised as friction. Elma slid a half step in front of her, weight on the balls of her feet, smile lazy as a lit match.
"You're late," Elma said. "Nitron's calendar doesn't tolerate sloppy."
Needle Teeth laughed and shut the doors behind him. "Nitron's favorite toy thinks she's time."
"Toy?" Elma tipped her head, let her hair fall like a dare. "I'm the timer. When I hit zero, things explode."
Silver Eyes' gaze cut to Calista, lingered a beat too long, and came back. "We're here to… renegotiate."
"With me?" Elma asked sweetly.
"With anyone who makes the Master bleed," he said, smiling without warmth.
Calista's voice was frost. "You are trespassing in the Master's house."
"Wife," Needle Teeth said, savoring the word. "How ceremonial of you to speak."
Elma moved first—fast enough to make the air forget it had weight. Her stiletto kissed the edge of Silver Eyes' jaw, a snapping whip of heel that clipped skin and pride. He reeled; Needle Teeth lunged. Elma's palm shot out, catching his wrist, wrenching hard enough to pop tendons like cheap thread. He hissed; she turned his momentum into a throw. His back hit the banquet table with a sound like thunder getting ideas.
[Quest: Remove the Intruders]
Keep the altercation contained.
Bonus: +1 Level if no staff notice.
Silver Eyes recovered with a smile that didn't touch anything worth saving and showed her the truth of him: a flick of glamour, the outline of horns that weren't there, a scent of old ice. He swung. Elma ducked, grabbed a linen runner, yanked. Crystal slid. She palmed a goblet mid-slide and brought it around in a backhand arc that broke across his cheekbone, scattering light and blood in a glittering halo.
Needle Teeth launched from the table with a snarl, catching Elma around the waist. They crashed into the long window; glass groaned but held. Calista's breath made a small broken sound. Elma drove her elbow into the man's solar plexus, felt the air leave him in a satisfying grunt, then stamped her heel down his instep hard enough to hear bone complain. He folded; she rode him down, knee on sternum, fingers finding the soft place under his mandible. Pressure. Threat. Promise.
Silver Eyes reached for Calista with a lazy hand that said no one will stop me. Calista didn't scream. She didn't run. She flicked her wrist and a thin line of light leapt from the diamond on her finger to the air between them—a pale curtain, a shield the color of expensive snow. The man's hand hit it and sizzled.
He blinked, surprised. So did Elma.
Calista met Elma's look for half a heartbeat. Don't ask. Later.
"Rule one," Elma said, voice cheerful as a razor. She crushed Needle Teeth's throat a little harder. "No one touches the wife unless they paid for the privilege."
"Even you?" Silver Eyes said.
"Especially me," Calista said sharply, and the way she said it made heat crawl up Elma's spine.
Silver Eyes tasted the room again, found the angles, smiled like a man who had just decided losing could be employed. "Another time, then." He nodded to Elma, eyes flicking to her mouth with infuriating intimacy, and to Calista with something like respect. "Our regards to the Master."
"Bring flowers," Elma said. "He loves funerals."
They withdrew without turning their backs, which meant they weren't idiots. The doors whispered shut. Silence pounced.
Elma let herself breathe. Needle Teeth twitched under her knee; she slammed his head into the parquet once, clean and hard, and he stopped being a problem. She stood, straightened her skirt, and only then looked at Calista.
"You carry a shield," Elma said softly.
Calista's chin lifted. "I carry what keeps me alive."
Footsteps ghosted in the hall; staff, distant but heading this way. Both women smoothed themselves into lies. By the time Kade glided in with two attendants, the room looked like a rumor about a hurricane, not the storm itself.
"Guests?" Kade asked, eyes taking inventory too fast to be human.
"They were lost," Calista said, bored as silk. "Elma sent them to the door."
Kade and Elma traded a look that said too much. He inclined his head a degree, and the attendants began righting chairs that didn't need it.
"Mrs. Vale," Kade said, "the Master requests you in the west library."
"Of course," Calista said, already walking. She didn't touch Elma when she passed. She didn't have to. The air between them remembered.
When the room emptied, Elma rolled her shoulders. The system purred.
[Quest Complete: Remove the Intruders]
+1 Level.
New Flag: Calista has protective assets.
Note: Your enemies are not confused; they are patient.
She smiled without teeth. Outside, the house changed clothes: night into black-velvet evening, the kind that drinks secrets and calls them appetizers. The inner circle was coming.
—
Nitron's "gathering" would have called itself a party if it knew how to lie poorly. Men and women with money's posture glided from salon to study, down halls glossy enough to catch a conscience and show it to you. Live strings bled soft in a corner, liquor glowed in decanters like trapped suns, and the talk had that expensive under-sound of threat with a manicure.
Elma wore white because he told her to, and because defiance was sexier when you wore the request like a joke. The gown slung off one shoulder and cut up one thigh, innocence drafted by a filthy committee. She moved through the rooms like a rumor choosing a direction.
Nitron spoke with a cluster of donors near the hearth. He didn't look at her. He didn't have to. His attention grazed her skin the way dry lightning grazes a field: not touching; burning anyway.
Calista played queen in crimson, ice in her glass and on her tongue. Every time Elma drifted into a room, Calista's eyes didn't follow her. They landed a minute later, too late to matter and exactly on time to ruin.
"Miss Nuiz," a senator murmured, stepping in her path with a smile that wanted more than his office. "I hear you give memorable tours."
"Only when the art doesn't fight back," Elma said, and slipped past him before his pride could file a complaint.
She felt Calista find her in the corridor behind the music room. No one was there. The light was dim and gold; the wallpaper had the quiet arrogance of old money that had survived new devils. Calista didn't touch her. Her perfume did.
"You had them—those men," Calista said. It wasn't a question.
"You had them first," Elma said. "Nice shield."
"Temporary," Calista said. "Like everything in this house."
"Except him," Elma said. They didn't say Nitron's name. Some names you didn't feed to walls.
Calista's composure trembled, then remembered where it lived. "There are eyes everywhere."
"Then blink," Elma said, and stepped closer.
Calista didn't retreat. She never did. That was half the problem and most of the fun. Her mouth was a breath away. Her gaze fell to Elma's throat the way a prayer falls to the floor.
"Elma," she warned, which sounded a lot like please.
The bathroom door behind them clicked open: empty, gloved handprints on chrome, towels folded like lies people tell themselves. Calista slipped inside. Elma followed and locked the latch with a soft snick that made her heart trip.
White tile. Mirror. The quiet hum of a vent trying not to hear the things it heard. Calista pressed both palms to the countertop and met Elma's eyes in the glass.
"In public," she said, voice low, "I will end you if you look at me like that again."
"In private," Elma said, stepping into the heat of her, "you'll let me."
Calista turned, and the first kiss detonated the line they kept drawing and redrawing between them. It wasn't tender. It was deeper than that—need that had dressed up as disdain for hours now throwing off its coat. Elma's hand slid to Calista's jaw; Calista's fingers found the small of Elma's back, hauling her in. Teeth clicked. Breath tangled. The mirror caught them and turned them into a painting no museum could afford to hang.
Elma dragged her mouth along Calista's throat, felt the thrum there, pressed a smile to it that wasn't kind. Calista's nails bit into her shoulder through the silk, and Elma loved the sting enough to want more. She crowded Calista back against the counter, hip to hip, thigh to thigh, the kind of proximity that wrote its own dictionary.
"Someone will come," Calista whispered, and the way she said someone meant him.
"Then we'll be fast," Elma said.
Calista laughed, short and wrecked, a sound that made Elma want to collect it and throw it at people who confused money with power. Their mouths found each other again, kissing like a crime scene. Elma tasted the wine Calista had pretended to sip and the frost she had let no one see. Calista parted for her, not submission so much as consent with teeth.
Elma's body sang the wrong song at the edges, that familiar pull toward a cliff she wasn't sure she should jump without permission. The system prickled, smug thing that it was.
[Leash Check: Active]
Release conditions: restricted.
Workaround: Public risk modifier applies.
Not now. Not for you, Elma told it, and it shrugged the way code does when it was written by a bastard.
A knock hit the outer door—too polite to be staff, too entitled to be anyone Elma liked.
"Elma?" Nitron's voice didn't need volume to fill a room.
Every muscle in Calista went stone. Elma didn't move. The mirror showed them both: ruin-breathed, beautiful, deciding whether survival was sexier than honesty.
"Yes," Elma called, steady. "One second."
A beat. Two. The latch didn't twitch. His footsteps didn't retreat. He just was, on the other side of the wood, the way a storm is beyond a window, thinking its thoughts.
Calista pressed her forehead to Elma's for one heartbeat, the first gentle contact they'd allowed themselves all night. Then she slid away, smoothed her dress, repaired her mouth with a thumb. Ice collected in her eyes like tears that had learned better.
"This never happened," she said. It sounded like again.
"Sure," Elma said, and it sounded like always.
Calista exited first, the corridor swallowing her like a rumor trying not to get caught. Elma unlocked the door and stepped into Nitron's gravity.
He looked at her face first, then at her shoulder where silk had a new wrinkle, then at the mirror behind her where two ghosts were still deciding whether to haunt.
"Walk," he said, and turned.
Elma fell in at his left, like the good weapon she wasn't.
[Global Rumor Meter: +9%]
Story seeded: The wife haunts the halls at night.
Counter-Options:
— Stage a public loyalty scene.
— Feed the rumor to House Thorn.
"How was your evening," Nitron asked casually, as if the door hadn't just been a confession booth that refused to open.
"Educational," Elma said.
"Good," he said. "You'll need the credits."
They moved through the rooms like a pair of knives pretending to be silverware. Across the salon, Calista laughed at a joke the CFO hadn't finished telling. She didn't look over. She didn't have to. The air between all three of them had stopped pretending to be breathable.
On the balcony, the night stretched itself thin and glittering over the city. The violinist found a dark minor run that sounded like consequences. Elma chose a spot where the breeze could cool the heat on her throat and watched a woman in crimson be adored by men who didn't matter.
"Strings in the dark," Nitron murmured beside her, as if reading her title. "You tug one, the whole room moves."
"Careful," Elma said, "you'll make me think I'm the one pulling."
"You always think that," he said, without heat. "That's why I keep you."
He offered her a glass he hadn't poured. She took it like an insult and drank it like a reward. Down in the garden, the white statue where she'd ruined someone's life with her mouth glowed like a witness.
Somewhere in the house, a lock practiced opening.
Somewhere in the city, two men with damaged throats promised themselves they'd be smarter next time.
And somewhere very close, a woman with a diamond and a shield smiled at a mirror that hadn't forgiven her yet.
Elma finished the drink and set the glass down on the railing without a coaster.