Valeria Embercrown did not invite me to tea.
Valeria did not buy rumors because she trusted them. She bought them because lies revealed who was selling fear.
That would have been too honest.
Instead, she purchased a rumor and let it arrive wrapped in courtesy.
The note appeared beneath my dorm door at precisely six in the evening, sealed with red wax and stamped not with the Embercrown crest, but with a small flame inside a circle of thorns.
That detail mattered.
Official Embercrown correspondence burned too brightly: red wax, gold crest, infernal lilies, the kind of elegance designed to remind recipients that beauty and coercion had once shared tutors. This seal was smaller. Quieter. Personal enough to be denied, specific enough to be recognized.
Valeria had sent me a message that could survive being discovered by pretending it meant nothing.
Political flirtation, then.
How romantic.
I had survived assassins with less complicated intentions.
A private mark.
