My Step-Daughters Are The Villainesses

Chapter 141: Hypocrites

Airam stood upright.

So did Ulrich.

And only then did both of them notice the silence.

The hall had gone still around them.

Not completely still. The musicians had faltered rather than fully stopped, leaving one string whining out of place before dying under awe perhaps.

The pairs nearest them had frozen in place. Others, who should have still been moving through the next pattern, had already broken apart without realizing it.

In truth, they had stopped following the proper rhythm some time ago.

Once Ulrich and Airam had turned the dance into a contest, the surrounding pairs had been forced to give way. At first it had only been practical. They needed space. Ulrich and Airam were moving too fast, cutting across the floor with a pace and complexity the other nobles could not match without colliding with them.

Then the reason changed.

People made room because they wanted to watch.

The rhythm the musicians had offered had ceased to matter to the two of them. They had taken hold of their own pace instead, one far quicker and more complex than anything meant for an evening like this. There were faster Skargardian forms, of course, but not here. Not at a royal event where decorum mattered more than mastery, and certainly not during a gathering shaped around the princess’s presence.

What they had done belonged elsewhere.

On a competition floor.

Before judges.

Before trained dancers who understood exactly how difficult it was.

Yet from the outside, it had not looked crude.

That was the worst part.

Airam had pushed, Ulrich had answered, Ulrich had pushed harder, and Airam had answered again. The back-and-forth between them could have turned crude in less capable hands. Instead it had changed into something too fluid to dismiss, too demanding to ignore. What they had made together looked beautiful.

Beautiful enough that the room had forgotten itself.

Ulrich glanced once across the hall and inwardly rebuked himself.

He had gone too far.

Far enough to draw the wrong kind of attention when attention was the one thing he had least needed. Whether it had been pride, irritation, or the simple fact that Airam had challenged him well enough to make him answer seriously, the result remained the same.

Unnecessary.

A waste of focus.

He wondered briefly if, once again, perhaps his past life, what he had with Faith made him strangely pulled into that dance, but as soon as that thought came, he shook his head inwardly.

Now was not the time.

The silence broke with a burst of clapping.

Everyone turned.

Esther stood near the edge of the floor, small hands striking together with bright enthusiasm and no trace of shame. Her blue eyes shone openly as she looked at Airam and Ulrich, as if what she had just witnessed were the most wonderful thing in the world.

There was a brief, awkward pause.

Then another pair of hands joined in somewhere to the left.

Then more.

The applause spread in uneven waves at first, uncertain whether this was allowed, then gathered force as nobles surrendered to admiration more readily than to discipline. Whispers followed with it, carrying surprise, excitement, and the hungry edge of gossip. The room that had shunned the sisters earlier was now looking at Airam very differently.

Airam noticed.

She did not look pleased.

If anything, the change in their faces irritated her more than their contempt had. Before, they had stared at her like a stain dragged into a noble hall. Now they watched as if talent had made her easier to swallow. It disgusted her how little separated rejection from admiration in people like this.

She moved to leave the floor.

Ulrich’s hand still held hers.

The moment she pulled, he looked at her and followed without argument, guiding her off the center of the floor while the applause rolled on behind them.

"Hypocrites," Airam muttered disdainfully under her breath.

Ulrich did not bother denying it.

"That is how the world works," he said. "Get used to it quickly."

Airam shot him a look. "That’s hypocritical."

"If needed, you need to be."

The simplicity of the answer made her mouth harden.

"When will the danger come?" She shifted the subject instantly.

Ulrich’s gaze narrowed.

"You stay silent," he said. "I will handle it."

"I need to know where they are."

"If I knew where they were, I would not be wasting time dancing."

His eyes moved again as he spoke, sweeping past dressed nobles, servants at the edges, musicians adjusting their instruments, guards standing where guards always stood. Nothing in his face changed, but Airam could feel the alertness in him as clearly as she had felt the pressure of his hand during the dance.

"They are mixed in," he said, quieter now, to himself. "Disguised."

Airam followed his gaze without turning her head too much.

"Why are they here? What do they want?"

Ulrich looked at her.

"It does not concern you."

The answer landed exactly as badly as it deserved.

He let go of her hand and started to move away.

Airam caught his sleeve, however.

Her fingers closed with enough force to stop his first step cleanly.

"It concerns me," she said, "and it concerns my sisters."

Ulrich looked down at the hand gripping his sleeve, then back at her face.

Airam did not release him.

"We are Rubenhart too," she added, then quieter.

Ulrich fell silent at that.

It was not something he had ever expected to hear from Airam.

For one brief instant, in the strange vulnerability left behind by the dance, he might even have believed her. They had moved together too well, pushed and answered each other too closely, and for a moment the line between calculation and honesty had felt thinner than usual.

But Ulrich knew better than to trust a convenient sentence.

"I hear no feeling in those words," he said.

He moved his arm, and her fingers slipped from his sleeve.

A cunning girl.

He had to give her that much.

She had chosen her words well, chosen them with the precision of someone who already understood what might sway him. House. Name. Belonging. She knew those things mattered to him, and she had reached for them without hesitation. In that, too, she resembled him more than her sisters did.

Hermione and Esther lacked that edge.

Airam did not.

And in a world like this, that edge was worth more than softness.

Ulrich started to walk away.

Then he felt her stare on his back so clearly that he stopped after only a few steps and looked over his shoulder.

"You will not do anything stupid," he said. "Stay with your sisters."

Airam said nothing.

Ulrich turned more fully toward her, his gaze cooling further.

"Do you understand me?"

"How are you going to protect us," Airam asked instead, "when you do not know how many there are or where they are?"

"Do not make me repeat myself. They are not here for you."

"They could still be."

Ulrich looked at her in silence.

That was the problem.

She was not wrong.

He could say the sisters were not the target. He could say the demons had come for something else, someone else, and he believed that to be true. But he could not promise absolute safety in a room full of hidden threats, noble fools, and panic waiting for the first crack in the evening.

Too many things could go wrong.

"I will find them," he said. "I will deal with them."

"I will use witchcraft—"

"You will not use that filth."

The answer came sharper than anything else he had said to her that night.

Colder, too.

There was no hiding the disgust in it, no effort to soften the old hatred buried inside the word itself.

He had allowed her to use witchcraft if she was in real danger, but her insisting always to use it even when it wasn’t needed truly drove him to the edge, especially when he had other matters in his mind.

Airam went silent.

The neutrality she had held onto until now vanished from her face. What remained was colder than anger, colder even than the suspicion she usually turned on him. She did not argue. She did not demand another answer. She only looked at him exactly the way she used to look at him on the very first day he had adopted her.

Then she turned and walked away.

Back toward her sisters.

Ulrich watched her go without calling after her.

Esther and Hermione were already waiting for her, concern plainly written across their faces, one open and one restrained.

Ulrich remained where he was.

He curled his fingers into a closed fist as he watched her.

It was a small motion.

Almost nothing.

But he noticed it.

Perhaps he had been harsher than necessary.

Airam had not spoken out stupidly. She had been afraid in the only way she allowed herself to be afraid, not for herself, never first for herself, but for those two girls. She always reached for the threat before it reached them. She always wanted to know where the danger stood so she could place herself in front of it.

Ulrich lowered his gaze to his hand.

The fingers were still slightly curled.

Slowly, he forced them open.

An unpleasant thought pressed at him then.

Regret.

He stood with it for a moment, almost irritated by the shape of it, by the fact that he recognized it at all. It was an unfamiliar thing in this form, not regret for a failed plan or a wasted move, but regret for words spoken too coldly to one girl with black eyes and too much pride.

Ulrich exhaled once through his nose, pushed the feeling down where it could stop being inconvenient, and turned away.

Then he walked off.