From the Private Papers of Vlad Dracula — Reverberations in the Ebon Court
The Court spoke of the killing for days.
Not openly. Not directly. Never with Soraya’s name placed at the center of a sentence. That would have been vulgar. Instead, they circled the absence left by Marek of the Ninth Ledger like courtiers circling a removed chair—careful not to acknowledge the space, yet unable to stop measuring themselves against it.
Zakiel reframed the event as procedural correction. The Crescendo dismissed it as an overreaction provoked by an amateur. Several Purebloods insisted it was inevitable—proof that the system still possessed teeth. None of them agreed on the reason. All of them agreed on the result.
The Court learned something they had forgotten.
That my patience is not mercy.
And my silence is not consent.
More interesting was how they spoke of Soraya afterward.
She was no longer discussed as variance or risk. She became weather. Something to be accounted for rather than addressed. A pressure system moving through social space. Invitations adjusted. Surveillance softened. Questions died before they were asked. The wise did not test proximity.
The foolish congratulated themselves on understanding why she had been spared.
They do not.
Soraya noticed all of this. Of course she did. She always notices. What she did not reveal—to anyone—was that she began writing to me again.
Not proclamations. Not confessions. Short letters. Careful ones. Written late, sealed improperly, routed through places that suggest coincidence rather than intent. She does not ask for instruction. She does not explain her choices. She writes as one might write to a dangerous but trusted archivist—someone who will not interrupt, but will remember accurately.
She writes about ordinary things. About the city’s minor cruelties. About Elion’s silences. About moments when she feels herself becoming sharper than she intended. She never asks what she should do. She never asks for protection.
She asks questions she pretends are rhetorical.
Elion does not know.
That is not betrayal. It is compartmentalization. A skill I encouraged in her long before she understood why it mattered. Elion believes himself her confidant. He is not wrong. He simply is not her historian.
She does not write because she needs me.
She writes because she knows I will not misunderstand her.
That distinction is everything.
I do not reply often. When I do, I am economical. I answer only what is asked, never what is implied. She hates this. She continues anyway.
The Court suspects none of it. They are too busy reassuring themselves that the incident is over.
It is not.
A daughter who writes to her father after declaring she needs nothing from him is not retreating.
She is recalibrating distance.
And that, I have learned, is when she becomes most herself.