Every autumn the city of Lyravel hung silk lanterns from its bridges and called the moon close enough to hear secrets.
Junia had always loved the Moon Festival from the safe edges of it. As an archivist’s assistant, she spent most days mending maps and translating letters for scholars who rarely remembered her name. Crowds made her feel transparent in a different way — not unseen, but passed through. So she usually watched the celebrations from the palace annex balcony where the music arrived softened by distance.
This year the annex had been reserved for members of the royal household, which meant Junia should not have been there at all. She was delivering a sealed folio to the astronomer royal, late because an entire shelf had collapsed in the archives that afternoon. By the time she reached the upper halls, fireworks had begun painting pale light over the city.
The astronomer was nowhere to be found.
Instead, a stranger stood on the balcony beneath a canopy of sheer midnight silk, his ceremonial mask held loosely in one hand. Silver embroidery traced the collar of his dark robes. The moon struck the angle of his face and made him look less like a man than like a page torn from an illuminated legend.
He glanced toward the folio in her hands. “If that is Master Sorell’s star chart, you may save yourself the search. He abandoned duty for mulled wine an hour ago.”
Junia froze. “I can come back.”
“You could,” he agreed, studying her with disarming calm. “Or you could tell me why a woman carrying the sky looks prepared to flee from a balcony.”
No one with good judgment answered a royal stranger honestly, masked or otherwise. Yet something about the night — the silver lanterns, the drifting music, the impossible softness of the moonlight — made pretense feel clumsy.
“Because,” Junia said, tightening her hold on the folio, “this is a beautiful place to say the wrong thing.”
He smiled then, slow and unexpected. “That depends entirely on the company.”
Only when he stepped closer did she notice the ring on his right hand: white gold set with the crest of the crescent court. Her pulse stumbled.
“You’re the prince,” she said before she could stop herself.
He bowed lightly, amusement coloring the gesture. “Prince Cassian, at your service. Though tonight I suspect I would rather be introduced as a man hiding from formal conversation.”
Junia should have curtsied, apologized, vanished. Instead she found herself looking past him at the city, all its terraces and bridges glowing beneath the silk moon. “Then perhaps,” she said carefully, “I have interrupted the correct kind of evening.”
Cassian turned to follow her gaze. “Perhaps you have started it.”
The chapter should have ended there.
It would have been safer if it had.
Instead, the door stayed half-open, the air stayed warm, and the kind of look that ruins sleep passed between them. Nothing obvious happened. Nothing that could be explained away cleanly. Just a pause, a breath, and the last sentence changes the whole shape of the night.
Then came the message.
Not a confession. Not an apology. Something worse.
"Come back before you decide who you are with me."
The screen dimmed in her hand. The next chapter starts with the answer.