Prologue Chapter IV
Title: The Hidden Edge
She found the blade in a place no girl was meant to be.
Beneath the warped floorboard of the old preparation room—long abandoned, its velvet cushions worn by time and ghosted with ash—there lay a stash of things once hidden and forgotten: half-burned parchment, a shard of a mirror, a vial of something bitter and black… and a dagger wrapped in oilcloth.
Mira touched it as though it might bite.
The hilt was worn, the edge dulled in places—but the weight. The weight was perfect. She pressed it against her palm, closing her fingers slowly, reverently.
She did not steal it that day.
Instead, she returned each night when the house was asleep. She cleaned it. Studied it. Practiced drawing it in silence beneath the stars that winked above her through the lattice roof.
Alia never saw.
Nor did Nessa, her closest companion, the only one she might have told.
It was her secret. Her first.
In the mirror, she began to imagine not only the way her lips curled, or the flutter of lashes that won her favor—but the way she might stand one day, weapon in hand, not smiling, not soft.
One night, a man slapped her.
It was small—a test of control. She did not flinch.
Later, in the silence of the old room, Mira whispered to the dagger.
“You saw that,” she said.
And for a moment—just one—the steel seemed to gleam in agreement.
She wrapped it in silk that night instead of oilcloth. And when she pressed it beneath the hem of her gowns, sewn into the folds with thread only she could see, it became not a tool—
—but a promise.