Chapter 29
Chapter twenty-nine
The familiar weight of food in her pockets should have been comforting, but shame made each step toward the dungeons feel heavier than the last. A week. She'd left Thomas alone for an entire week to survive on whatever reserves the first feeding had given him.
The familiar shimmer of the hidden door appeared in her peripheral vision. She touched the handle, and reality bent to allow her passage. Down, down into the oldest parts of the castle where even dust seemed afraid to settle.
The moss responded to her touch with eager light, painting the ancient stones in phosphorescent green. Each step down felt like sinking into another world, one where the careful warmth Eliam had cultivated in her rooms couldn't reach. Where the air tasted of centuries and forgotten things.
Her chest felt strange tonight. Lighter, somehow. The decision had been forming all day like morning frost, delicate, inevitable. She didn't want to leave anymore. Didn't want to chase freedom when captivity had begun to feel like... something else.
"Thomas?" Her voice echoed strangely in the chamber.
Movement from the far cell, quicker than she remembered.
He met her at the bars with surprising energy, and in the moss-light she could see the change.
The hollow cheeks had filled out slightly.
His shoulders no longer looked like a skeleton's frame.
Even his hair seemed less limp, catching the green glow with hints of gold she hadn't noticed before.
"My savior returns." His voice had lost that broken quality, though he still rasped slightly. "I was beginning to think I had just dreamed of you."
"I'm sorry. I was... unwell." She pulled the food from her pockets: bread still warm from dinner, cheese, dried fruits, even meat wrapped carefully in cloth. "But I brought extra."
His eyes tracked the bounty with sharp focus. When he reached through the bars, his hands barely trembled. The food had worked better than she'd dared hope.
"You're an angel of mercy." He took the bread first, but ate with more control now. Savoring rather than devouring. "Tell me, what kept you away? You look..." He paused, studying her face. "Different."
Heat crept up her neck. "Things have been... complicated."
"Ah." Something knowing flickered in his eyes. "The Forest King's been keeping you close?"
She nodded, settling cross-legged on the cold stone. The warmth in her chest pulsed with each heartbeat, content in a way that should disturb her more than it did.
"Thomas," she began, watching him eat with careful precision. "I've been thinking about what you said. About escape, about the flowers..."
His hand stilled, the cheese halfway to his mouth.
"I don't think I want that anymore." The words felt strange on her tongue, it was the first time she had spoken the words aloud, but it made them no less true. "To escape, I mean. I think... I think I want to stay."
Silence stretched between them. Thomas lowered the food slowly, those bright eyes fixing on her with unsettling intensity. In the moss-light, she could swear his features looked sharper. More refined. Less human, somehow.
"Stay? You want to…" The words came out carefully neutral. "That's quite a change of heart."
"I know it must be difficult to understand. I don’t even… it doesn’t matter. I thought—I still want to help you. I could talk to Eliam. Plead your case. You've suffered enough. Maybe after the Wild Hunt ball, when he's in a good mood, I could ask him to show mercy, to let you—"
Thomas laughed, startling her into silence.
The sound started low in his chest and built to something rich and dark that made her skin prickle. He laughed until tears gathered in his eyes, until he had to grip the bars for support. But his hands, she noticed with growing unease, bent the ancient iron slightly.
"Oh, child." His voice had changed to something deeper, more cultured. "Dear, sweet, naive little thing."
She scrambled backward, but he moved faster than any emaciated prisoner, any human, should. His hand shot through the bars, catching her wrist with shocking strength. The other hand... the other hand was peeling back iron bars like they were made of clay.
"Do you know," he said conversationally as metal groaned and gave way, "how long I've been down here? Century upon century spent in the dark, sustained only by hatred?"
Centuries?
"You're not human." The words came out whispered, her mind struggling to process what her eyes were seeing.
The bent bars, iron that had stood for centuries, now twisted like taffy.
His frame, no longer the skeleton draped in skin but something that filled the space with presence, with power.
The way shadows seemed to pool around his feet, reaching toward him like supplicants.
His face was changing, filling out, becoming something beautiful and terrible.
The cheekbones sharpening to aristocratic angles.
The hollow eyes now burning with inner light.
Golden-red hair that had seemed lank now gleamed like autumn sunlight, like copper heated in a forge.
Even his height seemed different, or maybe it was just the way he held himself now—no longer curved in on himself but standing like someone who'd never learned to bow.
"Human?" He stepped through the ruined bars with fluid grace, and the temperature in the cell dropped ten degrees. The air tasted of frost and old blood. "No, little mouse."
She tried to pull away, but his grip was iron. "Then what—who—"
"I am Malus." He said it like a declaration, like words that should mean something. When she only stared blankly, he smiled, a sharp, predatory thing. "Eliam's elder brother. The rightful Forest King. The one he buried down here after he stole my throne."
Brother. The word struck hard. She could see it now, the bone structure, the grace, the casual power. Different coloring, different energy, but brothers without a doubt.
"He never told you?" Malus pulled her closer, studying her face with dark amusement.
"Never mentioned the brother he entombed?
The rival he couldn't kill but couldn't stand to see free?
" He inhaled deeply, and his expression shifted to something darker.
"You absolutely reek of him. His scent is buried so deep in your skin.
.. Tell me, does he fuck you sweetly? Or does he make you scream? "
She jerked against his hold, face burning. "Let me go."
"But we're just getting acquainted." His free hand traced the air near her face, not quite touching.
"My brother's pet. His little human toy.
Do you know what he used to say about humans?
That they were good for nothing but fertilizer.
" Another laugh. "And now look. He's been playing house with one. "
"I'll tell him." The words came out fierce despite her terror. "I'll tell Eliam everything. That you're free, that I—"
"Oh, sweet girl." His smile widened. "I was so hoping you'd say that."
He moved faster than her eyes could track. One moment she was pulling against his grip, the next her back hit the cell wall with enough force to drive the air from her lungs. He caged her there, both hands coming up to frame her face with mock gentleness.
"Can't have you running to my baby brother just yet," he murmured. "Not when I've waited so long for proper revenge."
She opened her mouth to scream, but he was already moving.
His lips pressed against hers, and it was nothing like kissing should be.
This was violation wrapped in the mockery of intimacy.
She felt his magic pour into her like liquid mercury, coating her tongue with metallic bitterness, wrapping around her throat like frozen wire.
It burned going down, ice and fire at once, making her teeth ache down to the roots.
The magic burrowed deeper, sinking barbed hooks into specific words, specific places.
Her stomach roiled as the foreign power settled into her voice box like a parasite making itself at home.
When he pulled back, she gagged on the taste of copper and winter rot. She immediately tried to speak. "The dungeons—"
Nothing. The words simply dissolved on her tongue like sugar in rain, leaving only a numbing cold where they should have been.
"The dun—" Again, silence. Her tongue went thick and useless, pressing against her teeth as if it had forgotten how to form the word. She couldn't even form the shape of it.
"Perfect." He stroked her cheek with a tenderness that made her skin crawl.
"You can speak of anything else. Tell my brother about your day, your feelings, your little human needs.
But the moment you try to mention where you've been, who you've seen?
" He demonstrated by pressing a finger to her lips. "Nothing."
Terror flooded through her as she tested the binding more thoroughly.
She could think about the dungeons, picture them clearly, but the moment she tried to voice anything about them—even peripherally—her throat closed like a fist squeezing from the inside.
She tried to write the word in the air with her finger, but her hand cramped and seized.
She attempted to mouth it silently, but her jaw locked mid-motion, sending shooting pain through her temples.
"Clever, isn't it?" Malus watched her struggle with obvious delight. "The binding reads intent. You could say the word 'dungeon' in another context, describing a story perhaps, but try to warn anyone about this place, about my presence?" He snapped his fingers. "Your body simply refuses."