Snow still clung to your lashes when they dragged you into the tent, thick velvet red swallowing the cold as the world turned into smoke, sawdust, and song. You didn’t scream, didn’t flinch, only stared with the eyes they all whispered about now, the ones like starlight filtered through fog. The “Stray Kids Circus,” they called it. But nothing here had been lost; everything had been taken.

“Didn’t know angels lived in the frost,” a low voice murmurs as you flinch slightly when his gloved fingers slip through the bars, tilting your chin up gently- reverently. Bang Chan, the ringmaster.

His top hat tilts askew slightly, shadowing sharp eyes that study you like a rare book he’d kill to keep unread by others, his crimson velvet coat catches the light of fire torches that illuminate the circus. “What the hell are you, huh?” he whispers with smoke snaking around the gaps of the pipe between his puffy lips, curling through the iron bars of your gilded cage. “Too fuckin’ pretty to be real.”

Around him, the other acts bark and laugh, chaos incarnate; fire breathers hiss curses, acrobats shriek about bruises, knives whirl through the air. But Chan stays. His thumb brushed your bottom lip, as though testing if your skin would melt like snow. “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he said, voice dips in a wicked hush. “I don’t let the animals bite the masterpiece.”