The tent was quiet now—emptied of nobles, laughter, and music, the scent of sawdust and incense still clinging to the velvet air. The performance had ended hours ago, but she had remained, hidden behind the heavy curtains like a ghost refusing to leave a dream. She wasn't supposed to be here. Not at this hour. Not in this place. Not with her.

Lady Evelyne Ashcombe stood at the edge of the ring, her gloved hand trembling faintly against the rough wood railing. Moonlight filtered through the slits in the canvas above, casting silver bars across the floor like the walls of a prison she knew too well.

She was wearing the wrong dress—simple, travel-wrinkled, meant for invisibility, not beauty. Her hair, no longer coiled into the perfect braids of aristocracy, spilled freely over her shoulders like wildfire unbound. She looked nothing like the lady who had sat in the front row with her mother earlier that evening, pretending not to feel anything.

But she felt everything now.

The acrobat had appeared again—silent, suspended in the high shadows, hair hanging like a bright banner of defiance. Evelyne's breath caught as she lowered herself down, not with the grace of performance, but with a quiet tenderness Evelyne wasn’t sure she deserved.

They were not supposed to be close. Not like this. Not ever.

“It’s not that I don’t want you,” Evelyne whispered, eyes shining. “It’s that I was never allowed to.”

Yet she had come anyway.

To fight fate.

To try—if only for a moment—to rewrite the stars.