The theater was full again.
No posters. No invitations. Yet the velvet seats were all taken, as if the city itself bent to her call.

Ezra returned, this time by design—not coincidence. He wore a darker coat tonight. A hunter’s color. And though his footsteps were silent, something in the air told him: she was already expecting him.

The lights dimmed. Then—darkness.

A spotlight snapped open, but Livia was not on stage.

She was among them.

In the audience.

Gasps rippled as her figure glided between rows—draped in midnight silk, eyes smudged in obsidian shadow, holding a glass orb that pulsed faintly like a dying heart.

She paused beside a woman in pearls.

"You," Livia said softly, not to the woman, but to her shadow.

Everyone leaned closer.

She crouched beside the shadow that stretched from the woman’s chair and tilted her head.

"This one," Livia murmured, “doesn’t belong to you.”

She reached down—and plucked the shadow from the floor.

The crowd gasped as the woman collapsed, unharmed, merely unconscious—but the shadow in Livia’s hand… moved.

It writhed.

Livia let it twist in the orb like smoke in water, before placing it delicately on the stage floor, where it slithered into the dark curtains.

She turned slowly to face the room. Then smiled, wicked and slow.

"You keep secrets in strange places," she whispered.
"And I keep finding them."

The audience, stunned, could only whisper her name.

Ezra, seated in the balcony again, didn’t clap. But his lips twitched in what might have been the beginning of admiration.

Or warning.

The room had cooled. Not from temperature, but tension.

Livia stood in the center of the stage like a flame pretending to be still. Her gaze swept the velvet seats, pausing just a fraction too long at the balcony.

She knew.

“Some of you,” she began, tone light as silk on glass, “still believe you’re the puppeteer.”

A few in the crowd chuckled, unsure.

“But what if your strings,” she continued, “are just tangled in someone else’s fingers?”

The lights dimmed further. On the wall behind her, shadows danced—not of her, but of the audience. Mismatched, distorted. One moved differently. A tall one. Watching.

“To the man who always knows the trick,” she said, never naming him, never looking up. “I hope you brought your own mirror tonight. Because mine… doesn’t lie.”

She smiled.

“Some illusions are born from fear. Others—from pride.”

There was no applause. Only breath.

From the wings, Alden watched. As always, silent and still.
A dark silhouette in a tailored coat, with gloved hands resting on a silver-handled cane—he didn’t blink, didn’t stir, but his presence folded into the air like perfume: unmistakable.

He didn’t need to be on stage.

He was the reason there was a stage.

And when Livia smiled at the crowd’s unease, Alden’s lips curled—just barely. Not approval. Not command.
Recognition.