SNAP.
A single note, crystalline as a struck chalice, rang once across the entire breadth of the Chasm — before it was gone, swallowed by its own elegance, the way a kept secret is swallowed by the throat that holds it.
The estate did not flinch nor did the crystal veins in the walls did not flicker. The sound passed through the morning like a hot blade through tofu so fine the tofu did not yet know it had been cut.
Inside the walk-in closet — that absurd cathedral of tailoring that had served, in the previous half-hour, as the altar of considerably less reverent rites — Peter rose from the from the ground with the indolent grace of a sovereign who has been generously plundered by his own subject and intends to be plundered again before the day's first negotiations.
The bite mark on his shoulder still hummed its small heretical hymn.
