Arik leaned one shoulder against the carved stone rail, champagne in one hand, the other still holding the remaining small plate. "Escaped onto balconies? Constantly."

"No," she said. "Found one visible enough that people will romanticize us and invisible enough that they won’t dare interrupt."

He looked at her over the rim of his glass. "That too."

She took a sip of champagne and had to concede the logic was excellent.

From inside, through the tall warded glass, the ballroom remained bright and alive. Guests moved in elegant currents, jewels flashing, military uniforms catching chandelier light, old money, and newer power arranged in polished clusters. And here, just beyond immediate reach, she and Arik stood under winter light with food and champagne, her diamonds bright at her throat, his black formalwear cut like a promise of trouble, both of them close enough to suggest intimacy and composed enough to make interruption feel almost vulgar.

Natalie looked back through the glass and saw it happen in real time.

A trio of ladies on the inner gallery slowed.

One older countess paused.

A young viscount visibly reconsidered his trajectory.

Someone smiled.

Someone else looked satisfied in a way that made Natalie want to commit a small social crime.

She turned back to Arik. "You know, for someone who is so used to imperial drama and attention, you let me run away from it easily."

"For someone who is supposedly the main star of the evening," he said, "you fled very decisively."

"That is not an answer."

"No," he agreed. "It isn’t."

He lifted his glass, the ether-lit reflections catching briefly along the line of the crystal and the gold in his eyes. Out here, with the winter wards humming softly around the balcony and the ballroom reduced to light and movement behind glass, his calm looked less princely and more personal. Less obligation. More choice.

Then he said, easier now, "I let you run because you wanted to."

Natalie looked at him for a moment. "You changed a lot."

Arik’s gaze stayed on hers over the rim of the glass.

"A few years will do that," he said.

"That," Natalie replied, "is a decorative answer."

"It is also true."

She turned slightly toward him, one hand resting against the cold stone rail, the winter wards breathing softly around the balcony.

It should have felt calm.

Instead, Arik irritated her in a very specific way she had not been able to name properly for years.

Not because Damian or Gabriel had changed around him. They had not. That was part of the problem. Damian was still Damian - terrifying, measured, and impossible to move unless he wanted to be moved. Gabriel was still Gabriel - sharp, elegant, and quietly ruinous when necessary. Neither of them behaved like people tiptoeing around a dangerous secret. Neither of them softened themselves for Arik, nor altered their habits, nor treated him like something fragile or sacred.

No.

Arik had changed, becoming stranger and stronger in all the wrong ways, as if something within him had settled into an older shape waiting for him to grow tall enough to wear it properly. And Natalie, who knew perfectly well what ether did and did not allow, was left standing in front of a prince with impossible eyes and a face far too composed for his age.

"You didn’t just grow up," she said.

He lowered the glass slightly. "No?"

"No."

The word hung between them.

Arik tilted his head by a fraction, inviting without yielding, which was perhaps the most infuriating thing he knew how to do.

Natalie’s eyes flicked once to his and then back to his face. "You became difficult in a different direction."

"That sounds serious."

"It is."

He smiled faintly. "Should I apologize?"

"That depends on whether you plan to stop."

"No," he said.

At least that was honest.

Natalie exhaled slowly through her nose. "There it is."

"There what is?"

"That thing you do. That answer. Like you know exactly what I mean and are choosing to be annoying about it."

He looked at her for a moment, then out through the glass toward the ballroom, where half the nobility was probably inventing a romance from posture and winter light. "You’ve always liked the most direct routes."

"I’ve always preferred useful ones."

"And yet here you are."

"Yes," Natalie said flatly. "Because you’re odd."

"That is a cruel thing to say to a prince."

"That is a very tired shield."

One brow lifted.

Natalie kept going, because she had already let this bother her for too long, and tonight, of all nights, she was too dulled by silk, champagne, and accumulated irritation to leave it alone.

"You were strange before Pais," she said. "But in an ordinary imperial way. Annoying. Now you’re..." She searched for the word, disliked how many came to mind, and settled on the one that felt least like surrender. "Off."

Arik was quiet as he knew exactly what Natalie was talking about.

And that, more than anything, made her want to shake him.

"You know what I’m asking," she said.

"Do I?"

"Yes."

His eyes warmed by nothing at all. "Then ask it well."

She hated that answer on sight.

Natalie stepped half a pace closer. "Fine," she said softly. "How come your eyes are golden?"

Arik’s expression did not change. Not a flicker of surprise, not even the smallest hint that she had caught him off guard. He only looked at her, as if she had asked him something ordinary, something harmless, and then let out a soft breath that was almost a laugh.

"I inherited them," he said, the words easy, smooth, and dismissive in a way that made them worse. "From Damian. Like everyone assumes."

The silence that followed was so loud that her ears were ringing.

Natalie stared at him.

She could still feel the stem of the champagne glass between her fingers, delicate and cool, but it seemed suddenly unreal. ’Inherited. From Damian.’ The lie was so casual, so insultingly absurd to anyone who knew even the first true thing about ether, that it landed harder than any shouted accusation could have. It was the sort of lie one gave to children. Or fools.

He was telling her she was a fool.

The hurt came fast and physical, a tight, hot knot forming beneath her ribs.

It was not even about the golden eyes.

It was about the lie itself. About him being the one to give it.

Arik, whom she had known since they had both been small enough to crawl across palace carpets without anyone expecting anything from them.

Arik, who had shared stolen pastries with her in hidden corridors and whispered secrets in the royal gardens.

Arik, who knew her too well for this. And now he stood in front of her with those impossible eyes and offered her a story fit for gossiping nobles and people too ignorant to deserve the truth.

She could have accepted refusal.

A simple, ’I can’t tell you.’

A cold, ’It isn’t your business.’

Even silence.

She would have hated it, perhaps, but she would have understood it.

This was worse.

This was deliberate.

A measured, elegant insult to her intelligence, and worse than that, to the years between them.

Without thinking, she moved. Her hand rose with the clean, decisive motion of an instinct she could no longer control. The sharp crack of her palm against his cheek echoed across the stone balcony, louder than the muffled music from inside.

Arik’s head snapped to the side.

For a heartbeat, he didn’t move.

He slowly turned his head back to face her, his cheek bearing the faint red imprint of her hand. His eyes, those damnable golden eyes, were fixed on hers. There was no anger in them. No shock. Just a deep, unnerving stillness.

He raised a hand and touched his own cheek, his fingers brushing the spot she had struck, a gesture of mild curiosity rather than pain.

"You should not have done that," he said quietly, but with a new weight, a cold resonance that made the winter air feel like a summer breeze.