The ballroom inside Ivory Crest Palace shimmered with a billion dollars worth of silk, diamonds, and egos. The rich and rotten, the elite and eerie, swirled under chandeliers shaped like constellations.
Tonight was The Dance of Heirs — an ancient tradition where each trillionaire family offered up their most beautiful, most cunning child as tribute to form future alliances. The catch? They had to win a partner through dance alone. No words. No identities. Just movement.
Ochieng stepped in, mask back on, moving with the rhythm of someone who had danced with death too many times. Women melted in his path.
But only one caught his eye.
Cassira Vance — 24, from the Vance Dynasty, rumored to own half the diamonds on Earth and all the secrets of the dead. She wore a red dress slit to the heavens and had a scar shaped like a star down her thigh. Her flaw? Obsession with perfection. Her curse? She couldn't feel love.
They danced.
It wasn't passion.
It was war in rhythm.
And when they stopped, the crowd held its breath.
A voice whispered, "They're descendants of enemies."
---
In a private tower of the estate, Lazarus slipped a ring onto Nyra Sade's finger — gold laced with a toxin so rare it killed memory, not life.
"I do," he whispered.
But behind his back, he held the antidote.
He'd only give it if she betrayed him.
What neither of them knew: the priest was a spy from the Lucent Family, and every vow was being livestreamed to the Hidden Chambers of Seven — a council older than the nations themselves.
--
Far from the glamor, in Glaciera, a city carved out of ancient ice and kept off maps, Kiara Belle woke up inside a coffin of glass.
She wasn't dead.
She'd been taken.
The room around her was white, sterile, too quiet. But in the corner, a girl with silver hair braided like vines sat reading a book upside down.
"Who are you?" Kiara whispered.
"I'm Eira," she replied. "Your cousin."
"But I don't have cousins—"
"You do now. And one of us will die before sunrise."
Eira stood up, revealing her tattoo: the symbol of the same family that ruined Ochieng's life.
---
Meanwhile, Gloria Rêve sat in a crimson-lit lounge above the ballroom, legs crossed, surrounded by men who ran entire nations.
"I want Ochieng," she said.
"You want to love him or ruin him?" a man asked.
She smiled, swirling her glass.
"Why not both?"
---