Ophelia Ashvale's POV
The needle slipped.
Blood bloomed across the white silk, a dark stain spreading like a flower opening in fast-motion. Ophelia cursed under her breath—a word she'd learned from drunk dock workers, one Marta pretended not to hear—and stuck her bleeding fingertip in her mouth.
"Careful, love," Marta called from across the shop, not looking up from her own work. "You'll stain the merchant's order if you bleed on it."
It was past midnight. The city beyond the shop windows had gone quiet—the kind of quiet that only happened when even the poorest people of the slums finally gave up and went to sleep. Ophelia had been stitching for fifteen hours straight. Her eyes burned. Her back ached. Her fingers were raw.
She wouldn't stop.
"Just one more hour," Ophelia murmured, dabbing the blood away with her apron and repositioning the needle. The thread caught. Held. Pulled through the silk with a whisper of resistance. "The merchant needs this by morning, and we still have the hem—"
"We have the hem because you insist on perfection when 'good enough' pays the same," Marta said, though there was warmth in the complaint. The old seamstress set down her own needle and stretched, her joints cracking audibly. "And because you're stubborn as a mule."
Ophelia smiled despite her exhaustion. "You taught me the mule part."
"I taught you the excellent part. The stubbornness is all you."
They worked in companionable silence for another stretch—the kind of quiet Ophelia loved. No screaming neighbors. No drunken arguments bleeding through thin walls. No sounds of someone getting beaten two rooms over. Just the soft scratch-scratch-scratch of needles through fabric and the occasional crackle of the oil lamp.
This shop was her sanctuary. This work was her salvation.
Five years ago, Marta had found Ophelia half-starved behind a tavern, stealing scraps from the garbage. The old seamstress could have walked past. Most people did. Instead, she'd offered work—honest work, paid work, work that fed her and kept her alive.
Now Ophelia was nineteen. Tomorrow would be her birthday. And she had a plan.
"Marta?" Ophelia didn't look up from her stitching. "When I finish that order tomorrow, the merchant said he'd pay double?"
"He did."
"If I save that payment, plus what we already have hidden in the jar, I'll have almost enough for the deposit on the corner shop. The one with the front window on Miller Street."
She heard the smile in Marta's voice. "The one you've been staring at for three years."
"Not three years—"
"Three years, Ophelia. I've watched you stare at that shop like it contains the answer to every prayer you've ever whispered."
Ophelia's needle paused. She looked up at the old woman—gray-haired, lined with exhaustion, but smiling like she'd just won something precious. Marta wore the life of a widow and a poor woman in the set of her shoulders, but her eyes were always fierce with hope.
"We could do it together," Ophelia said quietly. "Our own shop. We wouldn't have to work for anyone else ever again. We could hire other girls from the slums, teach them the trade, pay them real wages—"
The sound came first as a distant tremor. Then louder. Horses. Many horses, moving fast through the cramped streets of the slums where nobody owned horses.
Ophelia and Marta exchanged a glance. Fear flickered between them like a shared breath.
"Hide the valuables," Marta whispered, standing quickly. Their valuables were pitiful—the jewelry orders they were mending, some quality thread, Marta's good scissors. Not theft, technically, since they were temporary custody. But "technically" didn't matter to imperial soldiers. "And get to the back room. If it's a raid—"
The pounding came before Marta could finish.
The shop door shook on its hinges. Not a knock. A demand.
"Open! Imperial order!"
Ophelia's heart didn't race. It dropped. Fell straight through her body like a stone down a well.
Marta moved fast—faster than her aging joints should allow—shoving the orders toward the back and pushing Ophelia toward the rear exit. "Go. Through the alley. Hide at the Kellers' place until morning. They won't—"
"Open this door, or we burn it down!"
"Marta, I'm not leaving you—"
"You're leaving me now, child. Go!"
But there was nowhere to go. The pounding came again, and Ophelia heard the crackle of torches being lit. They would burn it. The Emperor's soldiers burned first and asked questions in the ashes. She'd seen it happen to the baker's shop three streets over last month. Seen the old baker coughing ash out of his lungs for weeks after.
Marta grabbed Ophelia's arm and pulled her toward the front door instead. "I open it and we cooperate," she hissed. "You understand? No running. No fighting. We cooperate, and they have no reason to burn us."
Marta unbarred the door.
The night air rushed in—cold, carrying the smell of horse sweat and armor oil. The soldiers who poured through the door weren't wearing the city watch uniforms. These were imperial soldiers. Different crest. Different bearing. Different cruelty in the way they moved.
They spread through the shop like spilled poison, and Ophelia understood with sudden, sickening clarity that this wasn't a routine inspection. This was a seizure. A taking.
The last soldier to enter stepped aside, making space.
A man emerged from a gilded carriage—the kind of carriage you didn't see in the slums. Silk upholstery. Golden trim. Horses with jeweled bridles. He wore fine clothes, the kind that probably cost more than Marta and Ophelia had earned in their entire lives combined.
He was handsome in the way wealthy men were—groomed, fed, unmarked by survival.
His eyes locked on Ophelia's face, and something shifted in his expression. Recognition. Shock. Something complicated and painful that Ophelia couldn't name.
"Ophelia," he said, and his voice was soft with wonder.
Marta's grip on Ophelia's arm tightened to the point of pain.
"My daughter," the man continued, stepping forward. "At last. I've found you at last."
Ophelia's mind fractured into pieces. Daughter? She had no father. Her mother had died when she was four—a fever in a pauper's grave. The man had been a "gentleman who couldn't stay." That's all her mother had ever said.
"I don't—" Ophelia started, but Marta made a sound—a small, frightened sound—and the old woman moved forward, positioning herself between Ophelia and the stranger.
"This girl is under my guardianship," Marta said, and her voice was steady even though her hands were shaking. "If you're claiming kinship, we'll need documentation from the provincial court. I won't have her taken on—"
One of the soldiers stepped forward. Just a step, but Marta stopped talking.
"I am Baron Roderic Ashvale," the man said, and there was something in those three words—pride, possession, finality. "I have every legal right to claim my daughter. And I'm exercising that right now."
"Marta—" Ophelia reached for the woman who'd saved her life, who was the only mother she'd ever known.
"Baron Ashvale?" Marta's voice had gone high and thin. "From the capital? But that's impossible. She's just a seamstress's girl. She has no—"
"No?" The Baron smiled, and it was the most beautiful and terrible smile Ophelia had ever seen. "Oh, she has everything, Marta. She has everything I've been searching for. She just didn't know it yet."
The soldiers moved. Not violently—they didn't need to be. Their very presence was violence. Ophelia felt them like a closing fist.
"No!" Marta lunged forward, but soldiers blocked her path. "Ophelia! Don't go with him! Don't—"
"It's all right," the Baron said, his voice almost kind. He extended his hand toward Ophelia. "Come, daughter. Come home. I've been waiting for you your entire life."
And Ophelia—who had survived fifteen years of poverty, hunger, and abandonment—made a terrible, fatal mistake.
She believed him.
She took his hand.
The moment her fingers touched his, the soldiers moved. Not to Ophelia, but to Marta. They didn't hurt her. They simply held her—one on each arm, immobilizing her as the old woman screamed.
"Let her go!" Marta was thrashing now, her gray hair coming loose from its pins. "Let her go! She's just a child! Please, whatever you want, just—"
The Baron was pulling Ophelia toward the carriage. Her feet moved in a daze. The shop she loved was already disappearing behind her. Marta's voice was getting smaller, fainter—
"Ophelia! I'll find you! I'll find you, do you hear me? I'll come for—"
The carriage door slammed shut.
The last thing Ophelia saw before the darkness consumed her was the Baron's reflection in the window glass—his smile growing wider, his eyes growing harder, his entire face shifting into something that looked nothing like rescue.
Something that looked like a lie wrapped in expensive fabric.
She opened her mouth to scream, but the carriage was already moving.
And somewhere in the dark, the Baron began to laugh.