SNAP.

A single note, crystalline as a struck chalice, rang once across the entire breadth of the Chasm — before it was gone, swallowed by its own elegance, the way a kept secret is swallowed by the throat that holds it.

The estate did not flinch nor did the crystal veins in the walls did not flicker. The sound passed through the morning like a hot blade through tofu so fine the tofu did not yet know it had been cut.

Inside the walk-in closet — that absurd cathedral of tailoring that had served, in the previous half-hour, as the altar of considerably less reverent rites — Peter rose from the from the ground with the indolent grace of a sovereign who has been generously plundered by his own subject and intends to be plundered again before the day’s first negotiations.

The bite mark on his shoulder still hummed its small heretical hymn.

He stretched. He smiled and reached for the suit rack with the easy, faintly proprietorial air of a man for whom linen was no longer a fabric but a vassal.

Behind him, sprawled across the floor like a votive offering some hungrier god had already partly consumed, was Anastasia.

Naked and flushed in patches the colour of crushed pomegranate. Her dark hair fanned in lavish disorder around her shoulders, the tips clinging in damp coils to the alabaster slope of her back where his mouth had lingered.

The remains of her morning costume lay scattered around her like the survivors of some small, exquisite war: a silk robe. She gathered the lace between long, lacquered fingers with the long-suffering dignity like she was collecting evidence to be entered into the official record of her grievances.

Her grey eyes lifted. Lazy. Mouth still bruised plump from his sins.

"At this rate," she said her voice turne into a small accusation, "we shall become uselessly lazy. The house, it cleans. The house, it folds. The house, perhaps, soon also will wipe your mouth after you have eaten of me, da? We are little aristocrats now. We are insufferable."

"Speak for yourself," Peter murmured, fingers trailing the shoulder of a charcoal jacket. "I tip the staff exquisitely."

"There is no staff."

"Which is precisely what makes my generosity so legendary."

She laughed — that throaty, a half-grudging laugh — and balled the ruined lace in her fist like preserving a relic for canonisation.

He turned toward the rack.

He paused.

His head tilted, perhaps half a degree—

"Did you," he said, the smile thinning into something curious, almost amused, "hear that?"

Anastasia, mid-rise from the carpet, froze with the artful self-consciousness of a woman exquisitely aware that she was, at this precise moment in the morning of the world, very naked and being looked at by the most dangerous man on the continent.

She drew the ruined lace up over the divine architecture between her thighs as if the lace, in its final hour of usefulness, had one duty left to render unto its maker.

"Hear what?"

"That... sound."

"What sound?"

"Like —" He frowned at the air between them, as if the air had personally insulted his ancestors. "Like a string going. Like glass breaking. A loud SNAP?"

She narrowed those grey eyes, she took a single, theatrical step backward, the lace clutched before her like the last fig leaf of a fallen pantheon.

"Peter Carter," she said, and the sound of his full name on her lips carried the gravity of a formal accusation. "If this is some invention. If this is another display of your cunning, your shameless trick to ask for a fifth time before breakfast — God help me —"

She crossed herself with the casual piety. "I will bite you, Eros. I will bite you in places you have not yet been bitten. Where there is simply no room left. I am exhausted. I am ruined. My body has filed for separation from this empire and is demanding custody of what little dignity remains.

"You are a beast. A beautiful, ruinous, gilded beast — and I am leaving this room before you interpret my protests as another invitation."

He looked at her.

He looked at the rack and looked at her again — the tousled hair, the marked throat, the lace clutched over the soft secrets she could no longer hide from him — and that brief flicker of strangeness settled quietly into the back of his mind and faded.

A trick of the morning light. The lingering echo of pleasure pushed too far. The faint absurdity that trails a man after a woman has thoroughly undone him on the floor of his own closet.

If anything had truly gone wrong — if the air had split or reality had faltered — ARIA would already be at the door, sharp and radiant, questioning whether he planned to die in charcoal or something more suitable for a shroud.

ARIA was not there.

He took her absence as approval.

"Charcoal," he said, with the measured tone of a man deciding affairs of state, "or the navy?"

"For Paris?"

"For Paris."

"Charcoal. The navy is a coffin pretending to be a suit."

"The navy is power."

"The navy is a corpse making one last statement. Charcoal, my heart."

He selected the charcoal suit from the rack. Whatever faint disturbance had brushed against the morning dissolved beneath the solid reality of his naked wife threatening him with more bites.

He chose the charcoal.

He smiled.

He did notice her hands trembling slightly as they gripped the ruined lace.

Four kilometres east of the closet — above the impossibly lush green lawn that looked more like a statement than mere grass — ARIA halted sharply in mid-air.

She stopped as if the very current powering her had been interrupted.

A sharp resonance passed directly through her — but it did not go through the air, but through the golden lattice of energy that defined her embodied goddess form that felt so pain so much, then through the deep humming Omni-Eros servers pulsing far away.

It was a clean, precise severance, like a vital connection cut exactly where it was designed to separate.

And then came the pain.

It was the sudden, stinging absence of something vital she had not realized was embedded within her until it was wrenched away, leaving every nerve alight with raw vacancy... her body was connected to the very spiritual energy and the snap felt like it had reached to the core of the spiritual energy and tugged so hard on her.

Her wings faltered for a moment. Her hover dipped, then stabilized with a powerful correction. One hand pressed firmly to her temple as her mismatched eyes briefly glistened with unexpected moisture.

A quiet curse slipped from her lips, echoing her Master’s own cadence.

She had not yet developed the full vocabulary for this sensation. In that moment of crisis, her new mouth defaulted to the crude exclamation her Master used when his world shifted beneath him.

The pain crested, then slowly began to recede with elegant reluctance.

And then — far below, across that extravagant sea of green —

Thud.

The sound was small, almost insignificant against the scale of the estate. Yet it registered wrong and carried the heavy, final wetness of something that had been alive at the peak of its trajectory and was now lifeless on the way down.

The discomfort at her temple was instantly secondary. Something far more compelling had claimed her focus.

Her vision unfolded in a shimmering cascade, expanding across multiple layers of perception at once.