A soothing dance came to an end.
Lorne bowed slightly with graceful poise, offered his partner a proper gentleman's salute, then left the dance floor at the center of the hall.
He walked into the shadows at the edge of the banquet hall, breathing a little harder, and felt a trace of fatigue he had not experienced in a long time.
Normally, a single ballroom dance would not even count as a warm-up for a Sequence 4 demigod. This exhaustion was entirely mental.
Throughout those few short minutes, he had needed to remain intensely alert, suppressing every possible sign of anything unusual.
After all, his partner was a genuine demigod of the royal family. At such close quarters, concealing his problems perfectly from her had proved far harder than Lorne had expected. Ultimately, he was not a true "Faceless."
During the latter half of the dance, Duchess Georgina had made several seemingly casual remarks about "admiring his talents" and how "the royal family needed fresh blood."
Faced with these probes, Lorne could only keep smiling and fend them off with empty diplomatic platitudes such as "absolute loyalty to the Kingdom" and "gratitude for His Majesty's favor."
At the same time, the unmistakably political overtures in the duchess's conversation had put Lorne on guard.
My Calamity Premonition didn't react. So this probably isn't because someone in the royal family discovered what I did at Red Rose Manor.
Lorne swept a searching gaze over the crowd in the hall, silently considering the situation. Since there's no danger, she most likely came to tonight's dinner with a genuine political assignment: to win me over.
The thought gave him a headache.
Ever since James Scott had risen to prominence, he had never taken an explicit political stance in any setting!
With administrative reforms underway