Genevieve had finally been summoned home by her father. Her presence was required for all the trappings of future nobility: finishing-school lessons, posture refinement, and the delicate orchestration of her upcoming courting season before the frost arrived. Ayoka stood silently in the upper hallway, hands clasped behind her back, watching the ornate carriage rattle away down the gravel path.

As the dust settled, a smile slowly unfurled across her face. Not one born of politeness. Not survival. But a rare, blooming expression—soft, steady, and alive, like a garden that had waited too long for rain.

In that moment, had anyone dared to look closely, they might have caught the shimmer in her gaze: eyes shifting like myth, gleaming with the eerie brilliance of snake eyes—red-ringed, a stark pupil resting atop pure black, as if ink had swallowed every trace of white beneath. It was a darkness that wasn’t just color; it was memory, instinct, something older than fear itself.

Later that morning, standing before the mirror and brushing out her hair, that same smile remained. Sabine noticed it from across the room while folding linens and raised a brow. “You smilin’ hard today,” she said gently. “Like water slippin’ down stone. Did Mami Wata finally bless your bath this time?”

Ayoka chuckled, but the sound was sharp, cutting, as she applied her lipstick. “Mami Wata don’t come here anymore. The deities… they got their own wounds to tend. Too many cries in the world. Too many broken altars. It’s not that they don’t care—it’s that they can’t always hear us through the noise.”

She paused, her voice softening. “One village begs for rain. Another for revolution. A mother pleads for her child’s fever to break, while a father in another land carves prayers into stone to keep his daughter from the noose. Pain overlaps. Hope gets buried. Maybe even gods get tired.”

Sabine’s hands slowed as she folded the last sheet. “Sounds like you’re givin’ up on prayer.”

Ayoka glanced at her reflection. “Not givin’ up. Just… acknowledgin’. They may still exist. But if they’re fightin’ their own battles, then maybe we need to become our own answers.”

Sabine gave a soft nod, both proud and cautious. “Still… that smile. It’s different today. And your eyes—” She paused. “Girl, they flashin’ strange again. Like moonlight on obsidian.”

Ayoka blinked, and in that instant her snake-like gaze faded, shifting back to its usual deep brown. “Just a trick of the light,” she said lightly, though her voice carried something older beneath it.

Sabine raised a skeptical brow, but there was something else in her gaze, too—something sad, something familiar. As if she understood that moment better than she wanted to admit. Like she’d once looked into a mirror and seen her own power blurred beneath someone else’s history.

She said no more, but Ayoka saw it. That shared weight. That quiet understanding of what it meant to know you came from something divine, only to have the world convince you it was dirt. It wasn’t just forgetting; it was being forced to remember the wrong version of yourself.

Ayoka looked back at her reflection and smirked, a slow-burning light behind her eyes. “Maybe I realized if no one’s comin’ to save me, I might as well become the storm they’re too busy to send.” She paused, her voice curling with thought. “Which made me wonder…”

Sabine frowned but said nothing. She turned back to the wardrobe and resumed folding linens, her silence stretching thin until Ayoka’s voice cut through—direct, unhesitating. “I’m going to seduce Viktor.”

The fabric slipped from Sabine’s fingers and fell to the floor. She turned slowly, her gaze sharp with caution. “You playin’ with fire, cher. I know you ain’t no virgin, but this? This ain’t just heat. I’ve seen people mistake desire for control and burn past recognition.”

But Ayoka was no novice in this dance. She’d played this game before—just never with stakes this high or a board this finely crafted. Her smile didn’t waver. Inside her, something clicked into place. The rules hadn’t changed. Only now, she wanted to be the one moving the pieces.

Ayoka exhaled and shifted her weight, walking slowly toward the vanity. Her fingers grazed the polished wood as she studied her reflection—not out of vanity, but calculation. She wasn’t a doll. She wasn’t a pawn. Not tonight.

Her voice came low, fire stitched beneath calm. “I’m not offering him my soul. I know better than that.” She lifted a small comb and teased her curls into deliberate softness. “It’s just tea, in the right dress. That fiancée of his floats around like she owns every breath in this house, including the ones my child takes. I’m tired of pretending this place is anything but a cage dressed in velvet.”

She stepped back from the mirror, adjusting the curve of her shoulder with practiced ease. “Maybe I can’t buy my freedom outright. Maybe freedom is still a fairy tale with a gate too high for women like me to climb.”

She turned to Sabine then, the smirk returning—not cruel, but certain. “But fate?” Her eyes narrowed like a blade sharpening. “Fate bends. Sometimes it just needs a steady hand… and the right kind of pressure.”

Sabine crossed her arms, tilting her head skeptically. “This for Viktor? Most folks I’ve seen go down this road did it outta love—or what they thought was love. And it wasn’t just slaves, either. Some walked in free and still lost themselves.”

Ayoka let out a short, dry laugh. Sabine caught the faint shimmer of scale rippling beneath her skin, shadows clinging like smoke. “Please. I ain’t no Pinchico. I don’t mix love with lust, and I sure as hell don’t mix either with survival.”

She ran her fingers along the windowpane, voice steady, almost detached. “Ownership is still ownership, even if they let me sleep under silk instead of straw. Whether I’m breakin’ my back in the fields or curled up in a parlor entertainin’ a dozen men, it’s the same game.”

Ayoka paused, gaze distant. “I’m just choosing when to move. When to play my hand. If I act like a jewel, they treat me like I’m rare—even if I’m still locked in a box.”

She looked back at Sabine, quiet resolve in her voice. “This is for my son. At least, that’s the reason I let myself believe. Because if I admit anything else… I wouldn’t be survivin’, would I?”

Sabine wanted to believe her. Truly. But there was something in the way Ayoka smiled when Viktor passed—half-hidden, unspoken. Sabine felt it in her bones and wondered if this role Ayoka wore as armor had begun to turn into skin.

Ayoka smirked again. “You know the kind—made from story dust and scripture. Born into fairy tales and forced to speak nothin’ but truth. Truth ain’t always safe.”

Sabine shook her head, oiling Ayoka’s hair a little too roughly, like a sister shaking sense into stubborn flesh. “Cher, this ain’t no fairy tale. Folks love to talk like Cinderella woke up with slippers fallin’ from the sky. That girl clawed her way up from ash, one blister at a time.”

She leaned in, voice thick with warning. “When somebody becomes a story—glass and shimmer—that ain’t magic. That’s survival. Pain wearin’ perfume.”

She softened, smoothing Ayoka’s curls. “Glass sparkles, but it shatters too.”

With trembling fingers, Sabine handed her a white nightgown—thin, soft, cut low at the front. It hugged her breasts, exposed her collarbones, and flowed like silk down her thighs.

Ayoka painted her lips black, clipped lavender-blue to her ears, and let her curls fall free down her back like a crown, not a veil.