By the time my name is called, my legs are already numb.
It’s the kind of numb that runs bone-deep, like my body decided to check out five minutes before my life ends and forgot to warn me.
The lights of the Hall bleed down in sheets of white across polished marble, catching on diamonds, on glass, on the lacquered smiles of the city’s elite. Cameras hum like insects along the upper balconies, red recording dots blinking in synchronized judgment. The air tastes of perfume and money and something metallic underneath, a faint rust I tell myself is my imagination.
It doesn’t feel real until he says it.
“Cassidy Bloom.”
Lucien Drake’s voice rolls through the chamber without a microphone, low and unhurried, like he’s making a casual announcement instead of detonating my life. It threads through the murmurs and the shifting silks, glowing on a hundred screens broadcasting the Selection live.
Someone behind me inhales sharply. To my right, a woman’s hand flies to her mouth.
I go very still.
It’s a mistake. A glitch. There were volunteers. Everyone knows anchors volunteer. That’s the rule. That’s the single, thin moral line the Drakes never cross.
My boots feel glued to the floor. Elena’s fingers bite into my forearm.
“Cas,” she whispers, the word a rasp. “Don’t move. Don’t–”
I’m already moving.
I push past her, my shoulder clipping a man in a dark suit. He curses, but the sound is distant, swallowed by the roar building in my ears. My heartbeat has abandoned rhythm, thudding too hard, too fast, competing with the amplified hush of the crowd.
There is a stage. Of course there is. A raised platform at the far end of the Hall, backed by a wall of glass that looks out over the city—a glittering promise of what the curse protects. On the stage, the city council stands in a neat line, masks of gravity painted over greed. At the center, one step ahead of them all, is Lucien Drake.
He is not what I expected.
Every news feed paints him as a shadow, a rumor in tailored suits, the cold heir with a stare that can cut deals and throats with equal precision. I braced for some gaunt, hungry-eyed monster.
He is not gaunt.
And that, somehow, makes it worse.
Lucien is all sharp lines contained in stillness. Black suit, black tie, black hair combed back from a face that looks carved rather than born. His jaw is clean-shaven, his mouth expressionless. His eyes—God—his eyes are a color I can’t name from here. Dark, but not empty. Focused. Like he’s already dissecting me.
I meet that gaze and feel something in my spine flinch.
He watches me cross the Hall as if he’s been waiting for this exact walk, this exact woman, for years.
“Cassidy.” Elena is still behind me, her hand sliding down my coat sleeve, then slipping away when I break from the cluster of onlookers and step into the aisle.
“Don’t,” she breathes. “They’re watching.”
Of course they’re watching. Everyone is. This is the decade’s show. The Selection, when a willing woman steps forward, offers herself as the anchor to the Drake curse, and is rewarded with wealth and status and a private, quiet death over ten years.
Except I didn’t step forward.
I shove my way to the front just as a council member in a dove-gray suit clears his throat, no doubt preparing to spin some ceremonial nonsense around my name. Lucien raises a hand, and the man falls silent without being touched.
Power is sometimes nothing more than the expectation of obedience.
Lucien doesn’t look away from me.
“I didn’t volunteer,” I say, loudly enough that the nearest cameras will pick it up. My voice rings back at me, thinner than I’d like but intact. “You’ve made a mistake.”
A murmur ripples through the Hall. The volunteers stand to the side of the stage on a lower platform, glittering gowns and practiced brave smiles. I see one of them—pretty, blonde, expensive—go pale.
Lucien’s head tilts a fraction, as if I’m an interesting phrase in a language he’s almost fluent in.
“There’s no mistake,” he replies.
He doesn’t amplify his voice, but the room catches it. People lean forward, greedy for scandal.
My mouth is dry. “The anchor is supposed to be willing. That’s the law.”
“The law,” he says, “is what keeps the city alive. And tonight, the law named you.”
No. No, the law didn’t. The Drakes choose from the list of volunteers vetted by the council. Everyone knows that. My brain scrambles for the scripts I’ve seen on a thousand screens—tears, gratitude, rehearsed speeches about sacrifice.
“This is bullshit,” I snap. “My name isn’t on any list. Ask them.” I jab a shaking finger toward the row of officials. “Check your ledger. Someone forged–”
“The ancestral book was consulted,” an older woman on the council interjects. Her pearls gleam under the lights like tiny teeth. “Your name has been recorded, Miss Bloom, for fifteen years.”
Recorded.
The word is a hook, tugging at something lodged under my ribs.
Fifteen years.
I was twelve then. Still skipping rocks across the river, still believing my father when he said the old stories were just that—stories. A chill creeps up my arms, prickling the hairs beneath my thrift-store blazer.
“Impossible,” I whisper. “I–I never signed anything.”
Lucien speaks before anyone else can. “Your consent was given on your behalf.”
He might as well have driven a nail through my chest.
My eyes find him again, and this time I don’t look away. “By who?”
There’s a pause. A suspended second that tastes like smoke.
“The details can wait,” the pearl woman says quickly. “This is–”
“Her father,” Lucien says, cleanly cutting across her words.
Mitchell. Of course. The sound that escapes me is half laugh, half wound.
For one insane heartbeat, I imagine him stumbling through the Hall doors right now, face crumpling, hands raised, shouting that this is a misunderstanding. He would never sell me. Not really. Not knowingly.
Except he could. He did. My memory supplies the smell of cheap whiskey on his breath, the stack of unopened bills, the way he avoided my eyes when the news played Drake coverage.
“Liar,” I say to Lucien, because I need him to be wrong more than I need air.
He studies me with unnerving calm. “We have the contract, Miss Bloom. Signed in blood, in accordance with tradition. Countersigned by our family. You were promised to us.”
Promised.
My hands curl into fists. The Hall wavers at the edges of my vision, corners smearing like wet ink. For a moment, I smell something else—hot asphalt, burning rubber, a flash of headlights—and then it’s gone.
Not now. Whatever that was, not now.
“This is illegal,” I say. “You can’t just drag someone up there because their father was an idiot. I’ll contest it. I’ll–”
“Cassidy.” Elena’s voice threads through the noise, tight and shaking. “Stop. Please.”
I don’t stop. I take another step forward, until the edge of the stage is a breath away. Two security men in Drake-black suits materialize at the stairs, hands clasped in front of them. Waiting.
Lucien watches me come closer like he’s tracking a storm.
“If you contest,” he says carefully, “the contract is examined. When that happens, every clause becomes public record. Including the one that names what happens to the debtor if the anchor is not delivered.”
A cold weight drops into my stomach. “The debtor,” I repeat.
“Your father,” he confirms.
I hate him. I hate that his voice doesn’t rise, that he doesn’t look eager or vindictive. I could fight a sadist. It’s harder to fight something that looks like quiet inevitability.
“What happens?” I demand.
He turns his head slightly, like he’s giving me a last chance to back away from the answer.
“Retribution,” he says. “The curse reclaims what it’s owed.”
Someone in the back laughs too loudly, like this is a line in a play. But I see a few faces tighten, eyes sliding away. They know. Or they suspect.
“You’re threatening to kill him,” I say. The words come out flat.
Lucien’s jaw flexes for the first time. “I’m stating terms that were agreed to long before tonight.”
My throat burns. My father did this. Signed something with his blood, apparently, in some dark room, and never told me.
Coward, I think, with a vicious, helpless clarity. You sold me to them.
The Hall presses in. The cameras blink. Somewhere behind me, Elena is silently crying—I can feel it without turning.
“You could refuse,” I say to Lucien, the last, thin scrap of logic I have. “You could pick someone else. There are volunteers.” I gesture at the glittering line of women. One of them flinches.
He doesn’t glance their way. Not once.
“The curse chose you, Cassidy.” He says my first name like he tested it in his mouth years ago. “And because of the contract, so did I.”
The way he says I sends a shiver down my back that I hate myself for feeling.
“You don’t get to do this,” I whisper. “You don’t get to own me.”
Something flickers, fast and sharp, in his eyes. Then it’s gone, buried under ice.
“Ownership,” he says softly, “isn’t what this is.”
“Tell that to every woman you’ve anchored.”
For a heartbeat, the room holds its breath. I realize I’ve just implied he personally claimed them all, that their suffering is his.
He doesn’t flinch.
“I’ve anchored no one,” he says. “You are my first.”
The way he says my first makes the world tilt, just a little.
He steps down from the stage.
It’s a small motion, but it rips a line straight through the crowd. People shift back instinctively, as if distance might save them from splattering in the metaphorical blood.
Lucien closes the space between us with a measured, unhurried walk. He moves like a man used to every eye in the room on him, used to people folding before he reaches them.
I don’t fold.
I brace my feet and lift my chin. He stops an arm’s length away. Close enough that I see the precise stitching along his lapel, the faint shadow under his eyes that makeup didn’t quite hide.
His gaze drops once, quickly, to my throat, where my pulse is punching against my skin. Then back to my face.
Up close, his eyes are a dark, complex brown, threaded with something too sharp to be warmth.
“Miss Bloom,” he says quietly, for me and the cameras both, “this isn’t the place for a legal debate.”
“Is that what this is?” My voice shakes. “A legal issue?”
“It’s a life-and-death issue,” he replies. “Which is precisely why you’re not going to win it with theatrics in front of people who are more interested in the spectacle than your survival.”
I bark out a laugh that tastes like salt. “You care about my survival?”
His eyes cool another degree. “The curse requires a living anchor. It’s in my interest to keep you that way.”
I want to slap him. I want to grab his stupid expensive tie and yank him down to my eye level and ask why he sounds almost offended.
Instead, I say, “You’re a monster.”
“You may find,” he answers evenly, “that monsters are sometimes the only ones willing to stand between you and something worse.”
The words slide under my skin like a splinter. I don’t believe him. I refuse to.
But there is something worse: the image of my father’s body crumpled in some alley, the curse chewing through him as payment. The knowledge that if I keep pushing here, right now, that could become real.
It feels like a rigged choice. My life or his.
I hate that that’s a choice at all.
Lucien raises his hand, palm up. It’s an invitation and an order wrapped together.
“I won’t fight you,” I say, voice low. “Not here. But I’m not yours.”
His gaze holds mine, steady, unreadable.
“Tonight,” he says, “you are under my protection.”
Protection. The word is almost funny.
I look at his hand. It’s long-fingered, elegant, a faint white scar running across the knuckles like old lightning.
If I take it, I walk willingly into the Drake estate, into their curse, into a future someone else signed for me.
If I don’t, my father dies.
I curl my fingers around the edge of my anger until it cuts.
Then I put my hand in his.
Heat. That’s my first impression. His skin is warmer than I expect, his grip firm but not crushing. Electricity doesn’t crackle in the air; no metaphysical bond snaps shut. It’s just skin on skin, contact carrying an audience of thousands.
The Hall erupts in sound—whispers, applause, a few scattered cheers. Cameras zoom. Somewhere, a commentator is spinning this as unprecedented, as dramatic, as ratings gold.
Lucien’s fingers close, anchoring me in place as much as I let him.
“Walk with me,” he says, too quietly for the microphones. “And don’t run.”
“Why?” I hiss.
“Because if you make them chase you, they’ll hurt you.” The way he says they is very clear: not him. Them.
For the first time, I hear something like iron under the ice.
He leads me up the stairs onto the stage. My boots ring against the polished steps. The volunteers watch me with a mix of horror and relief. One of them, the blonde, crosses herself.
I want to scream that I’m not a martyr. I’m a girl who liked coffee and cheap novels and who worked double shifts at a bookstore to keep the lights on.
Now I’m a headline.
The pearl woman steps forward with a velvet-lined box, but Lucien’s fingers tighten on mine, stopping her.
“The formal binding will be conducted at the estate,” he says. “In private.”
A ripple of displeasure passes through the council. This is against script. They wanted blood here, where the cameras could catch the first cut.
“Lucien,” an old man says warningly. “Tradition–”
“Will be observed,” Lucien interrupts. “But I won’t risk destabilizing the curse in front of an unshielded crowd. Unless you’d like to explain to them what happens if something goes wrong.”
The old man pales. He glances at the cameras, at the children in pressed uniforms watching from the gallery.
Silence falls, grudging and thick.
Lucien doesn’t smile. He doesn’t need to. He’s just reminded everyone that their safety depends on whatever dark mechanism he’s about to chain me to.
Without another word, he turns, drawing me with him toward the side exit hidden behind a velvet curtain. The two security men fall into step behind us.
The curtain falls shut on the Hall’s noise, muffling it to a dull roar. The backstage corridor is cooler, the air tinged with dust and stage paint. My lungs seize the relative quiet like a lifeline.
I yank my hand from his.
“What the hell was that?” I demand. My voice bounces off concrete.
He looks at his empty hand once, as if surprised I let go, then at me.
“That,” he says, “was me stopping them from cutting into you in front of the entire city.”
I blink. “You mean the ceremonial slice on the palm? Everyone knows about that.”
His mouth flattens. “The curse hasn’t been stable for years. They planned more than a ceremonial slice.”
My skin goes cold again. “You’re lying.”
“If I wanted to hurt you,” he says, “I would have let them.”
“That’s supposed to make me grateful?”
“No.” His gaze lowers briefly, not to my body, but to the tight wrap of my arms around myself. Assessing. “It’s supposed to make you cautious.”
“You’re the one I should be cautious of.”
At that, something like a shadow moves behind his eyes. “Yes.”
We stand there, two strangers in an empty corridor, tied together by a contract I never saw and a curse I don’t believe in enough, until now, to be afraid of.
His phone vibrates. He glances at it, his jaw ticking once, then slides it back into his pocket.
“They’re impatient,” he says. “We should go.”
“Go where?” I ask, even though I know.
“The estate.” The word lands like a door closing. “From tonight, until the binding is complete, you don’t leave Drake grounds without me.”
I laugh, breathless. “You’re insane if you think I’m just walking into your cage.”
His gaze drops to my wrist, where faint red marks from Elena’s earlier grip have risen on my skin.
“You already did,” he says quietly. “You just haven’t seen the bars yet.”
My heart stutters, then slams on.
I open my mouth to tell him that if this is a prison, I’ll find a way to burn it down from the inside.
But before I can, a new sound slices down the corridor: the sharp click of heels, followed by a cool, familiar voice I’ve only ever heard through screens.
“Lucien,” Vera Drake calls. “I assume you have a very good reason for humiliating our family in front of the entire city.”
He goes still.
I realize, with a painful, electric clarity, that whatever monster I thought I’d met tonight was only the beginning.
