Liam blinked once. "What a painfully elaborate name."
"The heirs of Agaron tend to be named like stars, rivers, or divine warnings," Mirelle said. "Try to keep up." She tapped one manicured finger against the table. "The point is this: the Crown Prince is known to keep three consorts in Agaron, and all of them are omega men. Blonde ones."
Liam stared at her for a beat.
Then another.
"I'm sorry," he said. "Was that meant to sound reassuring?"
"No," Mirelle said. "It was meant to sound specific."
He leaned back in the chair, careful of his face. "I'm still failing to see why Felix needed to stage a room full of dominant omegas if the prince already has a type, and I am very clearly not it."
He took another bite, chewing with all the concentration of a man trying not to declare war on his own jaw. Brown hair, long and usually tied back in a practical ponytail, was currently half-dry from the shower and left loose around his shoulders because Colette had declared anything that pulled at his scalp 'a threat to symmetry.' His red eyes, his mother's eyes, Armstrong's eyes, sharp and vivid and impossible to mistake for Canmore blood, lifted back to Mirelle over the edge of his glass.
"Unless," he said after swallowing, "Felix wants me to dye my hair."
Mirelle stared at him.
Then she laughed. A short, rich sound of genuine offense on his behalf.
"If Felix sends anyone near your head with bleach, I will have that person's license, inheritance, and status investigated."
Liam's mouth twitched before the pull of his bruises reminded him that facial expressions were now a luxury item.
"So that's a no."
"That," Mirelle said, recovering her composure and lifting her wine again, "is a declaration of class warfare."
He set his fork down for a moment. "I'm serious."
"I know. That is why the idea is so offensive."
Mirelle studied him over the rim of her glass, her gaze flicking briefly to his hair where it spilled dark against the collar of the borrowed charcoal shirt, then to his eyes.
"Felix is many things," she said. "Petty. Brutal. Theatrical in private and strategic in public. But he is not stupid enough to erase what actually makes you valuable in a room."
Liam arched a brow.
"Charming."
"Don't interrupt compliments. They are rare."
He made a vague gesture for her to continue.
"Your coloring is not the problem," Mirelle said. "If Felix wants someone groomed to perform prettily on command, he already has better candidates for that. You are there for another reason." She tilted her head conspiratorially in a way that only made her seem more dangerous. "My sources tell me the owl brooches George and Felix imposed on Agaron's diplomatic corps are failing."
Liam laughed.
He couldn't help it.
The sound came out low and a little sharp, partly because the idea itself was funny and partly because laughing with a split mouth was apparently one more thing Felix had managed to make expensive.
Mirelle watched him with a faint, satisfied curve to her mouth.
"Yes," she said. "Exactly."
"That is almost embarrassingly predictable," Liam said. "They took one of the most ether-saturated empires in the region, pinned ceremonial suppression devices on its diplomatic corps, and now they're surprised the devices are failing?"
"Not cheap," Mirelle corrected. "Just pushed far beyond what Wrohan actually intended them to do." She swirled her wine once, watching the red catch the light. "The brooches are restricting more than even Felix and George originally planned, and the prince is getting angry."
Liam let out a short, humorless laugh.
"I imagine being half-strangled by policy does that."
"Yes," Mirelle said. "And I had fully expected Felix to make you the scapegoat." Her gaze lifted to his. "Throw you to the wolves, let the room tear at you, and then step in at the perfect moment to 'save' you with some appalling marriage you would spend the rest of your life regretting."
Liam went quiet. His fingers tightened once around the stem of his water glass.
"That," he said after a beat, "sounds exactly like him."
Mirelle inclined her head.
"Of course it does. Felix has always preferred to engineer gratitude through terror. Ruin the floor under your feet, then offer you a smaller cage and call it protection."
Liam looked down at the notes in front of him, but for a moment he was not seeing the pages.
He was seeing Felix's face in Ray's office.
That poisonous smile.
'You will have your part in the night.'
His mouth thinned.
"A marriage to whom?"
Mirelle gave one small lift of her shoulder.
"Whoever best serves the correction. A house that wants Canmore blood but can be trusted to keep you contained. A political ally. A creditor owed a favor. Perhaps someone old, perhaps someone useful, perhaps both." Her expression sharpened. "The ugliness would not matter. That would be the point."
Liam sat back carefully, then sighed. "How is this still possible in the modern world? Why is marriage still being used as a trap?"
"Because, my dear," Mirelle said, lifting her glass, "we are aristocrats."
Liam stared at her.
She did not look remotely ashamed.
"Titles modernized," she went on. "Technology advanced. Laws improved just enough for everyone to write essays about progress and feel handsome in print. But the old machinery remains exactly where it has always been: in the family, in the contracts, in the expectations, in the panic people feel when bloodlines start behaving like individuals instead of assets."
"That is bleak."
"That is inheritance."
Liam let his head tip back against the chair for a second, then regretted it when one side of his face reminded him that existing had become an expensive hobby.
"So the answer is that society evolved cosmetically and left the rot load-bearing."
Mirelle smiled faintly. "There he is."
He looked back down at the papers.
"A marriage," he said, more to himself now. "In this age. Amazing. I build ether regulators and somehow still live in a decorative prison threat."
Mirelle took a slow sip of wine. "You say that as though the two things are unrelated. Families like Felix's are perfectly happy to fund modern industry as long as the people producing it remain socially medieval."
Liam huffed a laugh.
Then winced.
"Careful," Mirelle said.
"I would be if everyone would stop giving me reasons not to be."
Mirelle ignored that.
"Marriage works as a trap for the same reason it always has," she said. "It is respectable violence. It can be dressed as concern, stability, opportunity, reconciliation, or even love if the family is feeling particularly artistic. It gives control a better wardrobe."
Liam's red eyes lifted to hers again.
"That was a disturbingly elegant sentence."
"I know."
He drummed his fingers once against the stem of the glass, then stilled them.
"And the best part," he said flatly, "is that if I object too strongly, I become unstable, ungrateful, difficult, emotional, unsuitable for my own future, and presumably bad for national morale."
"Now you're understanding the genre."
He closed his eyes briefly.
"Wonderful."