A House of Cloaks & Daggers (The Gift War #1)

1. Falling Asleep to Sleep Token

Chapter one

Falling Asleep to Sleep Token

T he dreams began when the leaves outside my window turned orange and brown with decay, and their branches relinquished custody of them to the smallest breath of wind.

It was nothing at first.

Glimpses of glass, iron, and blood. They were memories that belonged to somebody else. The shards of a shared nightmare piercing through the subcutaneous layer of my subconscious mind. The final piece of a difficult puzzle. The echo of a word—a place or a name—that I once overheard and had since made its eternal home on the very tip of my tongue.

The dreams were bad enough to set off the warning bells in my head, yet not realistic enough to tempt me back to the surface of sleep. It took a couple of weeks for me to realise that each night was getting darker as I tumbled deeper into the bottomless phantasmagoria.

One dream, replaying in my head over and over again.

I saw a wall of glass so pristine that it held my own reflection hostage, offering a mirror to my panicked display of awe. It rose from the meadow like a crystalline tidal wave and disappeared beyond the grey clouds suffocating my sky.

The sense that I was being watched—no, observed —sank its teeth into my spine, blurring the lines of reality and gnawing along the very edges of my being as I raised a hand towards the frozen wave—

Darkness. It’s late at night. I’m asleep.

Writhing in my bed sheets, I fought to keep hold of the sliver of consciousness that bled through, but the visions held fast.

There was a glitch, and suddenly trees were towering over me. Their trunks were impossibly large and wider than townhouses, their feather-soft branches dangling limply at their sides like unfastened braids spilling over gnarled wooden shoulders. As I traipsed over the muddy ground, there was not a single corner of the forest that openly acknowledged me. I clambered over unearthed roots as tall as cars in complete solitude and stillness. The breeze from the meadow was denied permission to follow me, but despite the heavy silence, I knew I was not alone.

Diamond-white lights sparkled in the underbrush, tiny pairs of inquisitive eyes blinking up at me. Each knife-sharp whisper of breath I gambled was amplified by the hush like I was the only creature left on the entire planet. However, in my peripheral vision, the diamond eyes were tracking my movements, and the trees were trading places with each other at my back. I could not be sure if they were trying to confuse me or conceal me.

I tried to turn away, tried to get out—

A fitted sheet, cool and creased. The knotted tassel of my throw blanket between my fingers.

Another glitch.

Wind tore at my hair, my clothes. It stung my dream-snared eyes into submission, and they squeezed shut as I fell to my knees, groaning when my bones slammed into a slab of rock that sent shockwaves of pain splintering through my skeleton. When the air turned stale and cold, I opened them to a room full of unnatural darkness.

It was the colour of night, only… more .

Oozing into the room like an oil spill, it was not the absence of light calling the shadows to life in that place, but rather the presence of something wrong and other.

Stone walls, dripping with filthy water, surrounded me. There was a wrought-iron gate bolted into the ground and a small window fixed with the same iron bars high above me. The floor was damp, dirty, and bare save for a large, sturdy wooden bucket, some straw, and a few threadbare rags.

I knew very well that I had found myself somewhere I shouldn’t be.

The alarm bells started singing in my head—a rich, angsty melody—and though the song was haunting, it was also hollow. I was not in my own body. My control had been outsourced to the dream maker, and I was left at their mercy as I stood in the corner of the cell, silently begging to be allowed to leave so that I could never, ever return.

And yet, each night, I did.

I returned to that wall of glass, to that forest of eyes and ears, to that cursed prison cell in some forgotten corner of the gloom. My mind spiralled further into unattainable darkness as the shadows bloomed beneath my eyes, and my dreams were plagued by images from someone else’s twisted imagination.

By the middle of winter, I had started to scream in my sleep—and I couldn’t tell anyone why. I couldn’t possibly explain what I’d seen happening to him in my dreams. I didn’t even know who he was.

I was never allowed to see his face—only the iron shackles around his wrists, hissing as they scorched his skin, and the chains clanking and scraping against the stone floor as he paced back and forth across a beam of pearlescent moonlight that seemed to drive the sentient darkness into the corners of the room. I’d seen the iron-tipped whip that tore his back open from his shoulder blades to the base of his spine, shredding through flesh and muscle until his blood spilled out like a waterfall. I watched as they crushed his hands beneath enormous stones that sparked as they rolled over his splayed fingers, as they shoved his head into a bucket of water and held him there until he stopped thrashing, and as they beat him with iron bars that left burn marks as well as bruises.

He was so strong.

He fought them every step of the way, muscles rippling and fists and feet flying like a wild horse, but he bit back whatever inner turmoil his pain provoked. He caged it, as they had caged him.

I was never certain if he could hear me—never knew if he resented the sound of my fear, or if he was surviving off it. Either way, I couldn’t stop myself. I screamed .

For the body of a man, beautiful and mutilated, whose face was forever hidden from me, I screamed at them to stop.

If they heard me, they did not let on. And they didn’t stop; they didn’t even slow down.

Each night, they began anew. Tearing open the wounds that had almost healed from the night before, changing their tactics, breaking his body in ways I could hardly fathom.

My heart was coming undone, hanging in my chest by a thread as it strained against the agony of watching him suffer. An agony to which I quickly and shamefully became addicted.

I curled up under the covers as soon as the daylight was chased away by the darkness. I was so revoltingly eager to touch that glass wall again, to fight through the intrusive nature of the forest, and to find him still a prisoner in the dungeon.

While the origin of my eagerness was not enjoyment, it was no less disgraceful. I could offer him nothing more than some privacy, and yet I couldn’t even bear to give him that.

My punishment was simple and fitting. The more I slept, the more tired I became. And the harder I fought to save him, the louder I screamed, the longer it took for me to wake up again.

In the end, I took the sedatives and then the antipsychotics. I saved the meditation playlists, and I stopped falling asleep to Sleep Token—most of the time. I tried to talk about what I was witnessing, the things that had become so real to me despite being so impossible.

That first night, when my mother came running into my bedroom, the words simply snagged on the petrified lump in my throat. By the time I saw a psychiatrist, they had become permanently lodged there. Even when my little sister asked what was frightening me, I couldn’t give her an answer.

Every single time I opened my mouth to tell someone about the nightmares, I felt the sting of a hot silver spoon scalding my tongue. Or I had to run to the bathroom to be violently ill. Or my mind just went…

Blank .

So, I stopped trying to talk about it. But I could never give up my useless attempts at rescuing the man from my dreams. The man who didn’t exist, who had sleeves of tattoos with shapes and symbols from a language I didn’t recognise inked into his skin, and who had a body of muscle as hard as the stone he slept on after the beatings each night—when the worst part of the dream occurred, once they left him alone in his cell and invisible forces restrained me from going to him.

Coiled up, always facing away from me, he didn’t even flinch as I called his name over and over again.

“Lucais.”

I’d given my prisoner a name.

And so, he remained within the confines of my wicked subconscious, tortured by my dreams every single night.

Until my twenty-first birthday, that is. When they just…

Stopped .