For a while I could not decide what to do about it, and my staff assumed I would simply cancel and eat the deposit and never think about that ballroom again.

But I kept coming back to a stubborn feeling I could not quite name at first.

The room had been reserved to celebrate a lie — a marriage to a man who had built a machine to exploit a frightened girl, a future I had come within weeks of tying myself to.

To simply cancel it felt like letting Dalton keep it, letting that date and that room stay his, a small monument to what he had almost gotten away with.

I did not want to mourn the wedding.

I wanted to overwrite it — to take the exact evening and the exact room he had booked to display his life to the world, and fill it instead with the people his kind spent their careers grinding down.