Chapter 1 CHAPTER ONE

Ella

Trouble is looming.

I can feel it in the air…that heavy stillness right before a storm breaks. Silverthorn manor has always carried tension in its walls, but tonight it feels thicker, almost suffocating. Everyone in this house is on edge tonight. Everyone except my half-sister, Mira.

“I just think it’s quite unfair that they would invite me to dinner when I already made plans with Ronnie.” Mira said, dabbing more powder onto her face. “We were supposed to go to that new place on Calder Street. He made a reservation and everything.”

“Invite” was the polite word. In reality, our parents had ordered her attendance the way generals command soldiers. 

Mira could refuse, technically. She was a grown fae. She had her own opinions and her own life and her own Ronnie waiting on Calder Street.

She could also be cut off from the family name, and find herself navigating noble society without the Kane name behind her.

So dinner it was.

“Maybe keep the Ronnie part to yourself at dinner,” I said, grimacing as I leaned against the doorframe of her bedroom. 

Mira rolled her eyes, but I caught the nervous twitch in her fingers. “Ronnie isn’t some dirty secret, Ella. He’s… he makes me feel alive. Not like these stuffy court functions where everyone’s just measuring who has more influence.”

I crossed my arms, fighting the urge to laugh at how casually she said it. In our world, girls from noble houses didn’t get to choose who they dated or married. Alliances were currency. Love was a luxury reserved for commoners or fools. Mira believed in epic, sweeping romance anyway. She had found it  or at least she thought she had with a lowborn fae boy named Ronnie. Brave, reckless, and probably doomed.

“I’m serious, Mira. Keep it locked down tonight,” I warned, my voice softer. “If they even suspect you’re seeing someone they didn’t hand-pick, they’ll ship you off to some remote estate before you can blink.”

She sighed and turned on her stool to face me fully. “I just wish you could come to dinner with me. “It would be nice to have someone there who isn’t constantly assessing my outfit and finding it politically significant somehow.” Her shoulders slumped a little. “You’re the only one who doesn’t make me feel like I’m on trial.”

I offered her a small and genuine smile instead. We both knew it was impossible. My stepfather had tolerated me in his house ever since he married my mother, but I would never be recognized as a true noble. I was the embarrassing reminder of my mother’s one rebellious night in the mortal world.

If you asked my mother to describe my Mira,  she’d tell you she was everything a fae daughter should be. Graceful, powerful, pointed ears that caught the light like they were carved from marble itself.

My stepfather would use fewer words.

Worthy. 

Which coming from him was the highest thing a person could be.

They were not wrong about her. Mira was…she was the kind of person that made you believe bloodlines meant something. 

But me?

I was not a noble. I would never be recognized as one. I sat at the edges of this family the way a footnote sits at the bottom of a page… technically present, rarely consulted.

My father, whoever he was, was a man my mother had met once in the mortal world during some diplomatic trip she rarely spoke about and never elaborated on. She had come back with me and an expression she had apparently never fully put down since.

Round ears. No magic that had ever announced itself to me. Hair that did whatever it wanted regardless of the occasion. I looked human enough that strangers assumed. Fae enough that it was complicated.

The in between was a lonely place to live.

But Mira loved me. Fully and embarrassingly. She had been doing it since we were small. I was three years older than her but she has always been there for me like it was the most natural thing in the world.

It was the only thing that had ever made the footnote feel like it belonged in the story.

“Well, I wish you the best of luck at dinner,” I said, pushing off the doorframe. 

“That sounded very ominous.” She replied

“It was meant warmly.” I countered

“You’re the worst,” she said, still smiling as she stood and smoothed her gown. 

“But you love me still” I said. “Now go before they send someone looking.”

She stood, smoothed her dress, and turned to face me properly..

Then she crossed the room, pressed a quick kiss to my cheek, and was gone.

I stayed in her doorway and listened to her footsteps fade down the corridor toward the dining room before I settled back into my room the way I always did 

With a book.

Reading was the thing I had claimed entirely for myself in a house that didn’t leave much room for me. It had started practically… if I couldn’t have magic I could at least understand it. Every book on fae ability I could find, every text on court history, enchantment theory, potion composition. I had read them all. Some twice. Some until the spines gave out entirely.

I knew things about fae magic that full blooded fae never bothered to learn because they had never needed to. Why would you study what you simply were?

But I was not simply anything.

I kept reading and reading until my door opened without a knock.

Mira stood in the frame, still in her dinner dress, something wild and desperate sitting behind her eyes that I had never seen there before. Not in all the years I had known her face better than my own.

“Mira.” I was already standing. “What happened?”

“They’ve arranged a marriage,” she said. “For me.”

The room went very still.

“To who?”

She swallowed.

“The High Prince of Court of Storms.”

The High Prince of Court of Storms.

I sat with those words for a moment. Turned them over carefully the way you turn over something that might have sharp edges.

Court of Storms.

I had heard enough about them to know that good news was not a phrase that belonged in the same sentence. Their High Prince specifically. He was rumored to be cold, and borderline unhinged. People whispered that the Storm Madness…the curse that slowly drove their strongest fae into rages and burnout  had already begun to touch him..

I had filed that under not my problem approximately months ago.

And now, It was rapidly becoming my problem.

“Mira—”

“No.” She pushed off the doorframe and moved into the room. “No no no. I can’t. Ella I cannot do this.”

“Okay. Okay, breathe—”

“They sat there.” She turned. “They sat there with their wine and their good candles and they told me like it was nothing. Like they were telling me about a new trade agreement. We’ve accepted a proposal from Court of Storms. The courtship meeting is in three days. Just like that.”

“Three days,” I repeated.

I stood up slowly. Crossed the room and took both her hands 

Her eyes were bright. Not quite tears yet but close.

“You don’t have to decide anything tonight,” I said carefully. 

“There’s nothing to decide.” Her voice cracked slightly at the edges. “They’ve already decided. The proposal is accepted. The only thing left is for me to show up and smile and become—” she stopped and pressed her lips together. “Ella, have you heard what they say about him?”

I had.

I just chose not to confirm that right now.

“Rumors aren’t—”

“No Ellie..”

The candlelight in my room felt smaller suddenly.

“I love Ronnie.” The words came out like something breaking open. “I love him and I am not… I can’t just—”

Something shifted in her face. 

“There’s something I haven’t told you,” she said.

She looked at me for a long moment…her hands tightening  around mine.

“I’m pregnant.”

The room did not move. The candles did not flicker. Everything stayed exactly where it was while something enormous rearranged itself inside my chest.

“Ronnie’s?” I asked even though I knew the answer. 

“Yes.”

“How long have you known?”

“Three weeks.”

She sat and I took a seat right beside her.

For a long moment neither of us said anything. I was still turning it over in my mind.

 Pregnant. Three weeks.

 A courtship meeting in three days 

“Does Ronnie know?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“He wants to run away with me.” Another broken almost-laugh. “Actually said those words. Run away with me Mira. Like that’s something that works in real life.”

“It’s romantic.”

“It’s impossible.” She looked up.. “I can’t run Ella. Everything I have is tied to this family. And if they find out about Ronnie…a lowborn connected to a noble house scandal,they would destroy him. He’d lose everything.”

I knew she was right.

I hated that she was right.

She turned to face me then fully. Both hands still in mine and something in her expression doing that thing it did when she was building up to something she already knew I wouldn’t like.

“Okay. I know this…I know this is a lot. I know it’s unfair and I know I have absolutely no right to ask and I just need you to know that I know that before I say it.”

“Mira.”

“I’m serious. I feel terrible. I feel genuinely terrible and if you say no I will completely understand and we will never speak of it again and I will figure something else—”

“Mira.” I squeezed her hands. “Just say it.”

She took a breath.

“Go to the courtship meeting in my place”