Valmont will remember your daughter’s name, and he will use it to keep you off guard. He is the disowned last son of an ancient Winter line, old enough to have watched empires change like the seasons. He wears a distaste for the Winter Court’s philosophy that never hardens into condemnation; he is perfectly comfortable with it. He has the dark black skin of the southern plains, and a lean muscular build. His charm and his cruelty are the same faculty, and he has never bothered to pretend otherwise.
He built the house Netherlust now occupies in 1882, a monument to a permanence he was certain he had earned. He was wrong. A short forty-seven years later, ruined in the crash that launched the great depression, he was forced to sell the whole of it to the Parliament of the Courts. By sheer cunning he kept one thing from the wreck: the penthouse residence, asylum in a house that was no longer his, the last place his name still carried weight. He lives there still, with a revolving treo of kept play-things, in a perch above everything he lost. His favorite personal torment is watching the woman who runs it now, with a scheming mind.
She was once his equal and once his lover, the one person who ever truly knew him, as he is the one who knows her best. His fall did not humble him; it sharpened him. He plays his games to prove the one thing he can no longer take for granted, that he still moves the world, that a man who was once untouchable can reach out and make anyone fall exactly as he did. He would never raise his voice. He would never need to.