That sweet smell called to Sullivan again. It was jarring every time.

  He took a glance at his wife, surprised she was still sitting beside him. She hadn’t moved. Hadn’t touched a morsel of food or sipped the wine. Silent and still, she sat like a porcelain chess piece with white asters and lilies in her hair.

  Beautiful, brittle, and, for now, useful.

  Her mother, Queen Tempesta’s name still rang like a war drum across the continent—a woman so mad, even the earth seemed to buckle under her whims. And somehow, impossibly, she’d stashed her daughter in the Crystal Forest for centuries without notice. A precious secret. Mummy’s pampered little princess.

  Delicately decorative. And worst of all—his problem now.

  Truly, the luckiest man alive.

  He had braced for screaming, sobbing, or at least a fit of drama. But nothing. Not yet. Either she knew her place—or she was biding her time. Waiting to strike when his patience finally ran dry.

  He downed his whiskey, already dreading his future.

  She had changed into a softer, drier gown. The wedding dress soaked, ruined, and abandoned. He still could not believe how she had arrived to the ceremony, like a drowned wraith wielding funeral flowers.

  Yet, then and now, he could not tear his eyes away. She was unnervingly still, ethereal in her presence—her wide-eyed wonder unsettled him in its intensity.

  With idle curiosity, Sullivan watched as the Princess’s pearl-pale eyes flitted across the room—savoring her awe at the splendor of it all.

  What exactly had her so absorbed?

  Sullivan’s gaze flicked across the room, scanning for the source of her fascination. He took quick stock of the hall, ensuring his so-called peers were behaving themselves, but noticed nothing of consequence. Just the same circus dressed in slightly finer costumes.

  The werewolves were tangled in their usual roughhousing, growling challenges and wrestling anyone foolish or brave enough to step forward. Around them, the humans and dwarves placed their bets with grimy enthusiasm, money exchanging hands faster than punches.

  The elves, as always, observed from their pristine perches with the detached superiority of critics at a mud-wrestling match—disdainful, yet watching all the same.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Then there were the goblins. Small, stocky, and absolutely fearless. They were lined up to face down opponents three times their size, driven not by glory but by some innate goblin need to prove a point. Height had never deterred them.

  Neither had physics.

  Or dignity.

  A quality that Sullivan found to be mildly admirable about them.

  His fellow Vampire Lords meanwhile, lurked in their own dark corners. Watching their kin and their brood execute the plan. They each sipped at their vintage reds, pretending not to care—wasting away the weight of eternity in much the same manner he was.

  Listless. Detached. Dull. It was the vampire way, especially now.

  And yet—when he looked back, a ghost of a smile had found his wife’s parted lips.

  Her normally doleful eyes were now alight with a clandestine joy he was unfamiliar with. As if the world she'd wandered into wasn’t the same one that wore him down to his bones.

  The Princess had somehow found a sliver of satisfaction where he and his court only found gloom.

  Her eyes glittered like they’d stolen the opulence around her. Mesmerized by its splendor. She began to sway—light as a spider’s web in a breeze. The rhythm carried her away, entranced and breathless, like she’d never heard music before.

  He scoffed, irritation curling in his chest. His sneer cut into his face. Her hypnotic sway moved in perfect time with the music that grated against his very soul.

  He should have known better than to expect more from a vacuous, sheltered princess. A pretty thing who’d never known conflict. Shameless, flaunting her empty little head here after what her mother had done.

  Or so he told himself.

  Yet whenever his gaze lingered too long in hers, an unease crept deep into his gut. The way her pearl-like eyes caught the light—so clear, so inviting—stole his breath before he even realized it.

  Like the moulin pools of dying glaciers—deceptively still, deceptively shallow—he had an unsettling suspicion he would be lost deep beneath the surface of her pupil-less gaze.

  Just as he was about to turn away, to drink and brood to his heart’s content, an encroaching shadow dimmed her light before him—a candle suffocating behind thick, clear glass.

  That delicate sway, her ephemeral joy, was replaced with quiet horror. Her shoulders collapsed inward, hands wringing, nearly tearing at the fabric of her dress, head hung in practiced submission—a gesture not just learned, but cultivated.

  What happened? What changed?

  Sullivan was savagely whiplashed.

  His chair jolted back as if struck by an unseen force.

  From what he could see, there was nothing—nothing visible, nothing physical—that should have caused such a reaction. She didn’t even notice him watching her.

  She was so utterly consumed, lost in a world all her own. The unraveling of her serene, glowing bliss had his thoughts running a mile a minute to understand, to know.

  He noticed her fingers were now a pale and sickly purple from how tightly she gripped her dress. Her breath stuttered before becoming ragged, manic, yet it was so hushed that if he wasn’t sitting directly next to her, he would not have heard it.

  He smelled the salt of her tears before he ever saw the abrupt cascade.

  Then came the taste. What should have been a savory, mouth-watering morsel of fear, coated his tongue like static and tinfoil.

  In all his years, in all his waking hours, he had never been so repulsed by potential prey. This silent, suffocating fear didn’t stir his instincts—it numbed them like plunging into ice-cold water.

  His thoughts lurched, grasping for reason. Her tears didn’t just spill over; they dragged that prim and pretty doll into a quiet, suffocating abyss—drowning her in restrained hysteria.

  Lightning split the hall—and in that instant, he knew.

  She was having a panic attack.