Chapter 965: The Girl at the Door
I opened the door and my stomach forgot how to be a stomach.
Pink hair, simple hoodie, black jeans, scuffed white sneakers. Jade eyes like cut glass. No crown, no cloak, no stagecraft—just Alyssara standing in the hallway of my penthouse as if she weren’t the most hunted woman on the planet.
For one useless heartbeat I thought: she looks ordinary.
Every other sense corrected me. The wards along the jamb trembled, then flattened as her presence wrote itself under their skin. The air thinned the way it does at altitude. My Grey reared like a horse that’s seen sunlight on a blade—every instinct screaming now—and the part of me that has survived this long answered not here.
Even with Luna on my right and five fiancées at my back, starting a fight in this room was a sentence with only one ending. Alyssara had gotten stronger; the fact didn’t arrive as an idea, it arrived as gravity.
"Hello, Arthur," she said, cheerful as a neighbor returning a borrowed pan. "May I come in?"
I kept my voice level. "You already have."
Something like disappointment flickered behind the glass-green. "You used to tell me no, just to see if you could."
I stepped aside. She crossed the threshold like she was strolling into a café, eyes taking everything in without turning her head—Luna seated at my right, Reika by the island, Rachel half-risen, Cecilia’s spine straight as a plumb line, Seraphina statue-still, Rose’s hand on Stella’s shoulder.
"Good evening, ladies," Alyssara said lightly. "Congratulations on the promotions." Her gaze drifted to Luna and held. "And you. At last."
The temperature in the room went down a degree.
"Get out," Rachel said, without raising her voice.
Cecilia’s fingers lined her fork with the plate rim—her tell when she wants to throw the table and chooses not to. "You are not safe here," she said, precise. "For you."
Seraphina turned her chair one inch toward the door like she could freeze the air across it by angle alone. "This is a home," she said. "Behave like it."
Reika didn’t speak. She shifted one step so she stood between Alyssara and the nearest path to Stella without making it look like a move. Rose’s hand on Stella tightened.
I put my hand over Rose’s and then slid it to Stella’s shoulder. "Star," I said quietly. "Eyes on me."
She looked up, caught the tone, went very still.
"Sleep," I murmured, and laid Lucent Harmony over her like a warm blanket—no compulsion, just a steady rhythm for her to match. Her lashes fluttered. She fought it for loyalty’s sake. I kissed her hair and let my heartbeat do the work. She sighed once, small and trusting, and went under.
I gathered her into my arms. If I had to die in the next sixty seconds, I would be doing it holding the only measure that has ever made sense.
"Aw," Alyssara said, head tipping. "You’re sweet with her." The smile sharpened. "It will be darling when she’s old enough to understand why you keep choosing rocks you cannot lift."
"Why are you here?" I asked.
"To see you," she said, as if that needed no permission. "To tell you I’m proud." She inhaled, slow, like she was tasting a vintage she’d cellared herself. "You’ve changed. Again. More Grey under the skin. The Crown fits better. It’s beginning to sing."
Luna stood, that fast, all grace and no sound. Purelight came up in her hands like a promise. Alyssara’s eyes flicked to her and back, the smallest acknowledgement.
"I told you you’d hate the way I plan to kill Lust," Alyssara went on, conversational, as if we were on a bench and not on the edge of a blade. "You will. It’s gorgeous. It will make you furious. I came to advise you to get stronger quickly so you can try to stop me when the hour comes." Her gaze cut to the five women and then back to me, jealous heat threaded through with something rawer. "And because watching you in this... domestic theater is educational."
"Educational," Cecilia repeated, dry.
Rachel smiled with no humor. "She means painful."
Alyssara’s eyes slid to Luna again. "And you."
Luna didn’t flinch. "Me."
"You got to him first," Alyssara said, voice still friendly and somehow uglier for it. "You carried him through the part where he was breakable. How diligent of you."
"Love isn’t a contest," Luna said, even and certain.
"Everything is a contest," Alyssara returned, softer now, and that was worse than sharp.
I set my jaw. "Say your piece and leave."
Her eyes came back to mine like a magnet finding north. The room fell away for one stretched heartbeat and I hated that she could still do that to me, hated the part of me that looked at a storm and wanted to meet it mid-sky just to see if I could stand.
"I am waiting," she said simply. "I am waiting for you to finish becoming what you are. All this—" she flicked fingers at the table, the chairs, the stupid perfect flowers Seraphina had arranged, "—is charming. It makes you stronger in the small ways. I need you stronger in the big ones. When you are, I will take you by the throat and by the hand, and you will finally stop pretending you were built for anything less than the horizon." Her smile went bright and terrible. "I will tame you."
Luna’s light brightened until the edges of the room threw soft shadows. Reika shifted her stance. Rachel set her palm on the table like a trial oath. Cecilia’s chin lifted. Seraphina’s thumb touched the ring she freezes rooms with. Rose didn’t move at all; her stillness was a blade.
"Try," I said, and my voice stayed quiet because fear is loud and courage isn’t. "Any day you want. Out there." I tipped my head at the glass, the city, the sky rails tracing clean lines. "Not in here."
Something in her face cracked and showed color. Jealousy is too small a word; this was hunger with a woman’s shape. She looked at the five of them, then at Luna, and the temperature went down again.
"My heart hurts," she said softly, as if telling me she’d bruised a wrist. "It hurts, Arthur. I want to kill them." Her eyes moved across them one by one, gentle as fingertips, lethal as a wire. "All six."
The room tightened like a fist. Blood hit my ears. The part of me that is a map measured shelves and angles and sightlines and came back with the same answer as before: Not here. You can’t win here. You can only lose slower.
"Don’t," I said.
"Make me," she whispered.
I didn’t order anyone. I didn’t have to. We moved on the same breath.
Rachel’s Redeemer lanterns—small wrists flick, red-gold comb over stain. Cecilia’s authority—silent wards click into place, invisible lines reinforced by will and schedule. Seraphina’s cold—pressure drop, clean, polite, lethal. Reika’s knife-writing—three sigils across air, slice and bind. Rose’s blue—garden-bloom geometry, kindness turned into law. Luna’s Purelight—warm as late sun, honest as midday. My Grey rose to meet them all and braide into one thing: a house that wouldn’t break.
Alyssara opened her hand.
Crimson threads whispered out like hair in water. No flash, no thunder. They simply were—and everything else was wrong.
My Grey hit them and slid, frictionless. Rachel’s light combed and found nothing to clean; the threads were too clean, malicious order that passed Redeemer tests. Cecilia’s interlocks refused to read them as present; her rules couldn’t see an exception that called itself a rule. Seraphina’s cold crystallized on contact and became powder. Reika’s cuts closed as soon as they opened, edges kissing themselves obediently. Rose’s blue lines filled... with red, as if her grace had agreed to host a guest. Luna’s Purelight wrapped them and found no place to carry them because they didn’t wound; they held.
The threads touched wrists, throats, ankles. They didn’t cut. They wrapped. Weightless, absolute. By the time my Grey decided to be reckless anyway and brute-force a hole, a loop had already settled around my forearm and another around the throat of the man holding a sleeping child.
Every instinct in me that has ever been worth a damn focused to a single point: do not let anything touch Stella.
The loop at my throat tightened one single millimeter. Alyssara watched my eyes and smiled like she’d found a lever.
"See?" she breathed. "You’re beginning to be interesting."
Luna’s light flared hotter. "Release him," she said, and the room understood that if Alyssara said no we would pay the price and pay it gladly.
"Don’t," I said again, because I had to try the smallest word first.
Alyssara looked at Luna. Jealousy sharpened into something unwise. "I said it hurts," she murmured. "It hurts, so much."
Her fingers twitched.
The threads tightened—
—and stopped.
Not slackened. Stopped, as if someone had put a pin through time.
Alyssara’s head tipped, puzzled for the first time since I’d opened the door.
"Hello, dear," said my mother behind her.
Alice Nightingale stood close enough to lay a hand on Alyssara’s shoulder and hadn’t. Her hair was up, her sleeves rolled, her face unpainted and set to the expression she used on kitchen fires and ambitious magistrates. The ward glowed around her palm like it had decided her was the version of law it had meant to be all along.