Chapter 56 CHAPTER 056
Ari POV:
Then heels clicked against the floor.
Sierra stepped into the hall and stopped, looking at the floor, then slowly looking up at me. Her expression moved through several things before it settled on something cold and theatrical.
"I cannot believe," she said softly, "what I am looking at?"
"It was too much to carry at once—"
"Too much?" She let out a short humourless laugh. "Too much. You can't even carry plates without destroying everything." She stepped closer, her voice dropping. "Useless. Absolutely useless."
The other maids had gathered at the doorway now, watching. Nobody moved.
"I'll clean it up," I said, keeping my voice as level as I could manage. "It was an accident."
"An accident," she repeated. Then her hand moved.
The slap cracked across my cheek so fast I didn't see it coming.
The sting arrived a full second after the sound, spreading from my cheekbone outward, my head turned from the impact. The room went very quiet.
Something in me went quiet too, but a different kind.
I turned my head back slowly and looked at her.
"Don't," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. "Don't do that again."
Something flickered in her expression. Surprise, maybe. That I'd said anything at all.
It lasted exactly one second before her face hardened back into something worse.
"I'm sorry?" She tilted her head. "Did you just—"
"I said don't."
Her arm raised again.
I didn't flinch this time. I held her gaze and I didn't flinch.
But the second slap never landed.
A hand closed around her wrist.
Sierra froze.
I blinked.
Harry stood just behind her, his grip firm around her raised wrist, his face carrying an expression I hadn't seen on him before. Not angry exactly. Quieter than anger. More final.
"That's enough," he said simply.
Sierra's mouth opened. "You don't—this isn't your place to—"
"I said that's enough, Sierra."
She stared at him. He didn't let go of her wrist.
The room felt suspended. Nobody breathed.
Then the air changed again — different this time, heavier, the way it always did when he walked into a space.
Stone stood in the entrance of the hall.
He didn't say anything immediately. He looked at Sierra, whose wrist was still caught in Harry's hand. He looked at the mess on the floor. He looked at me, and I resisted the urge to touch my cheek even though it was still burning.
His gaze moved around the gathered maids at the doorway, the kitchen staff frozen behind them.
"Out," he said.
Feet shuffled. Bodies disappeared. The doorway emptied in seconds.
Stone stepped further into the hall, and the four of us were alone in it — him, Harry, Sierra, and me — surrounded by marble and candlelight and food still scattered across the floor.
Nobody spoke first.
I kept my hands still at my sides and waited.
Chapter 56
Ari's POV
They told me an hour before the banquet started.
Elara appeared in the doorway of the preparation room with her clipboard and her permanent expression of mild dissatisfaction and informed me, without looking up, that I had been assigned to Stone for the evening.
"Assigned how?" I asked.
"You'll stand at his side during the banquet. You feed him, you pour for him, you attend to whatever he needs. You don't speak unless spoken to. You don't leave his side unless dismissed." She finally looked up. "Do you understand?"
I understood. I didn't like it, but I understood.
I spent the next hour making sure my uniform was straight and my hands were steady and my face was prepared to show absolutely nothing regardless of what the evening decided to throw at me. I had gotten better at that lately. Showing nothing. It was starting to feel like survival.
The banquet hall looked like a different world by the time the guests arrived.
Everything we had spent the entire day building had come together into something that genuinely took my breath away for a moment before I remembered I wasn't supposed to be admiring it, I was supposed to be working in it. Candles lined the length of the grand table in perfect intervals, their light warm and flickering against the high ceiling.
Guests filtered in gradually, dressed in a way that made it very clear which part of the pack they belonged to. These weren't the people I passed in corridors or took orders from in kitchens. These were the elders and their families, high-ranking members, people who walked into rooms like they had never once questioned whether they belonged there.
I stood near the head of the table and waited.
The room filled. Seats were taken. Conversation rose and settled and rose again, layered and overlapping. I watched it all from my position near the head chair, keeping my hands folded and my back straight and my expression neutral.
Harry arrived with a few others and took his seat toward the upper end of the table, not far from the head. He looked different and cleaned up for the evening. He found me almost immediately when he sat down, just a flicker of eye contact, brief enough that nobody would notice.
Stone walked in.
I had seen him enter rooms before. I had watched the way people moved around him, made space, adjusted. But there was something different about tonight, something ceremonial in the way he carried himself down the length of the hall — unhurried, his presence filling the room before he'd even reached the center of it. He wore dark formal clothing, nothing excessive, but on him it read like authority rather than fashion.
He reached the head of the table.
He didn't sit immediately. He looked around the room once — slowly, taking in everything like he got all the time in the world, the way he always did — and then he pulled out his chair and sat down.
I stepped into position at his right side.
He didn't acknowledge me. I didn't expect him to.