Envy flickered across her features, quick as a knife drawn and sheathed.
"Seraphina is so lucky," she murmured, her voice barely above a breath.
Then something harder settled into her expression. Something I recognized from the life before, though I had been too blind to see it then.
"But what does noble blood and a sharp mind matter in the end?" The words were almost inaudible, spoken to no one, meant for herself alone. "I still have ways to make you wish you were dead."
The lights in the hall dimmed.
Every screen mounted along the walls of the grand hall flickered to life simultaneously. The conversations died. Glasses paused halfway to lips. A hundred pairs of eyes turned upward.
The images were photographs. One after another, projected in merciless high definition across every surface. Each one showed me, or something designed to look exactly like me, naked, tangled in bedsheets with different men. Strangers. Faces I had never seen. Bodies I had never touched. The fabrications were seamless.
The silence lasted three seconds. Then the whispers began, spreading through the room like poison through a vein.
"Isn't that the Genovese girl? The eldest daughter?"