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.
