Chapter 7 Secrets of the Nunnery （Part II） #2
I step forward again, so close she can feel the threat in my silence. “What? Who?”
Before she can reply, the old grandfather clock down the hall begins to chime.
The sound breaks the moment, reverberating through the stone. When it fades, she’s gone—slipped past me like mist.
I stand there, staring at the space she occupied, the scent of lilies lingering in her wake.
It should make me furious that she still eludes me.
It does. But beneath the fury, something darker coils: fear.
Because I recognize that tone in her voice.
The edge of inevitability.
Something is coming.
And this time, it won’t just take her.
It’ll attempt to take me, too.
And I know I’ll die before I allow it.
Elara
I can still feel his eyes on my skin long after I leave the solarium.
Lucien has always looked at me like I’m a miracle and sweet sacrilege in the same breath.
That hasn’t changed.
What has changed is the weight of what I carry now.
He thinks the danger ended when I walked out of the nunnery’s tomb.
He’s wrong.
The palazzo’s corridors breathe with old magic—the kind that recognizes him. The walls whisper as I pass, the chandeliers flickering as though in warning. Every step I take is borrowed peace.
My feet transport me along hallways and secret passages until I reach the small chapel at the far end of the ancient mansion The servants don’t come here; they think it’s haunted. They’re not wrong.
I light a candle anyway, the flame trembling in the draft. The wax runs down my fingers before I whisper the old words that used to comfort me in the dark. The language of my captivity.
Silencium, sanguis, lumen. Custodi quod ligatum est.
‘Silence, blood, light. Guard what is bound.’
The flame flares, answering.
And then, beneath the light, the shadows move.
It’s faint at first, a ripple and a tremor. The scent of lilies sharpens to something fouler, copper and smoke. My pulse quickens. I close my eyes, breathe through the panic clawing up my throat as a tremor rolls through my spine, deeper than the sigil, deeper than pain.
Something old shifts inside me, hungry and impatient. A thing I once heard whispered behind locked doors, a name I prayed I’d never speak again.
I cannot tell Lucien. Not when I barely understand how it still lives inside me.
But the sigil in my back won’t be ignored. It burns my skin, reminding that it followed me here, are an indelible part of me.
And even worse, something worse lingers. The residue of the darkest magic the coven sacrificed to feed the ward. The same thing that nested in my blood and kept me bound while I slept.
The Shackle-Soul.
When I agreed to drink the potion and bind myself, I thought I was buying Lucien’s life. The Mother Superior told me the seal would silence everything but my pulse. That I’d drift between life and death, untouched, uncorrupted.
She lied.
The spell was a feeding ground. For them. For it.
The unknown horror lurking in the darkness learned me from the inside out—my heartbeat, my voice, my memories. It took what it needed to survive, and in return it let me live long enough to remember every whisper that reached the veil.
Lucien’s name was one of them.
He spoke it in anger, in longing, in despair.
Every curse he uttered kept me tethered to the waking world. I wanted to scream back through the centuries, to tell him it wasn’t betrayal, but every time I tried, the darkness sank deeper into my chest.
Now it’s part of me.
When the wards finally crumbled and the tomb opened, I didn’t emerge alone.
I brought it with me.
It wears no face. It moves when I breathe. Sometimes I hear it whisper his name, as if tasting it for the first time. Sometimes, when the moon is full, I feel its hunger stir.
It wants what I wanted.
It wants my love.
Lucien.
I kneel before the candle, my reflection quivering in the wax pool. “You can’t have him,” I whisper. “I’ll die before I let you.”
The air shifts. Cold fingers graze the back of my neck. I don’t flinch. I learned to my nightmarish cost that my fear gives it strength.
“You forced me to harm him but he didn’t die,” I hiss. “So you will not touch him now.”
The flame gutters low, then steadies, as if mocking me.
In the silence that follows, I hear Lucien’s footsteps echo faintly somewhere beyond the hall. That measured, predatory rhythm I know by heart.
He’s stalking me like he always does, because we’ve never been able to stay apart from one another, no matter my request for privacy.
It’s only a matter of time before he comes, and if he finds me here, he’ll smell it…the taint, the shadow that clings to me.
And then he’ll do what he’s always done.
He’ll destroy first, question later.
He thinks jealousy is his worst sin.
He’s wrong.
His sin is his mercy and his weakness is his love.
And when he learns what I’ve brought into his home, what festers in my blood, mercy is the only thing that can save either of us.
I blow out the candle.
Darkness swallows everything but the echo of his name on my lips.