Chapter 60
SIXTY
Istep through the door and into a world that has been built to take my breath away. The air changes on the instant. It is heavier, saturated with smoke and spice and something sweeter that slides along the tongue like rot in sugar.
The chamber is enormous. Black tile veined with gold spreads underfoot. The walls seem to listen. The light is all false fire.
Behind me Deimos calls once, low and raw.
The tug of the bond is there, frantic. I feel him like a hand on my spine, pulling. For a heartbeat I think I can answer. I shape the thought. I gather Cassiel’s ribbon. I will the basalt plates into my shoulders. I will be a weapon before he knows it.
Then a finger brushes the hollow of my neck. The touch is small. It is careful. It is ice and silk at once.
A voice folds into my ear. Smooth. Repetitive. It says my name slow enough that each sound seems to unlace a knot inside me.
I do not have time to be afraid. I do not have time to strike. The room yawns and closes and I awaken.
The sheets under me are red silk. Heavy velvet covers my legs. The bed smells of strangers and perfumed smoke.
He is seated at the foot of the bed, casual as a man waiting for a delayed guest. He watches me with a smile that fits on no honest face.
Zepharion.
Up close the skin on his cheek catches the light like burnished metal. His hair falls dark and glossy. His eyes are pools without a shore. When he speaks the sound goes all the way down into the hollow of me.
“I thought you would be more stubborn,” he says.
My throat works. I force the words out before the fog thickens. “Where am I.”
He stands. He crosses the floor without a sound.
There is a predatory grace to him that makes my bones tense.
He takes my hand and helps me up as if I were fragile.
His fingers find the place beneath my collarbone where Bastion’s mark still nestles.
He brushes it with the gentlest of touches. A collector admiring a rare thing.
“Beautiful,” he murmurs. “A chosen marking.”
The hum at my sternum answers like a caged thing. I pull at it because habit is stronger than fear. I try to call on Cassiel’s thread, a small ribbon of warmth and white. The thought is thin and somehow distant.
Zepharion’s smile narrows to something private and pleased. “Petal,” he says.
He leans closer until his breath is a soft ache against my skin. His voice becomes the rope that tugs at me. He repeats a word. A cadence. He says it and the world slackens. The part of me that wants to fight does not go away. It dulls. It thickens. It becomes a sound in another room.
Attendants arrive. Two women appear in the doorway without noise and without question. One carries a robe. The other holds trays of contents that glimmer. They move like shadows taking shape.
I try to move my arms to push them back. The impulse is sharp and useless. My limbs feel woolen. My hands want to close into fists. My mouth wants to bark Cassiel’s name, to demand Deimos, to drag whatever this is off my skin. The words spread like cotton in my head and never reach sound.
Zepharion’s hand finds the nape of my neck again. His touch is patient. He speaks and his voice is not quite a voice. It is command wrapped in a lullaby. He says that I will sleep. He says that I will listen. He says that I will not remember how easy it was to obey.
An electric cold presses at the base of my skull. The last bright thread of resistance frays. I feel him place something around my throat, cold metal biting my skin. A gold choker, thin and finished with filigree and a small dark stone at its center. His fingers close the clasp.
The sensation is immediate. A pressure blooms across my skin and then a second sensation, more terrible: a small, sanding pull as if something inside me is being drawn out.
Cassiel’s ribbon hiccups and goes silent.
Bastion’s plates slacken as if a muscle has been cut.
Deimos’s tug returns, muffled and small, like a voice on the other side of a door.
I try to scream and the sound is trapped behind a hand of thick velvet.
Zepharion smiles as if he has been given a private joke. He places his palm flat against the choker at my throat and I feel it pulse once, twice. Heat rolls from his hand up into the collar. A faint thread hums toward him. The hum is a thief and I am the pocket it lifts from.
“You are very brave,” he says softly. “Very foolish. But bravery is useful once it is contained.”
The attendants set to work with mechanical gentleness. They bathe me, oil me, dress me in silk that clings and covers and obscures. They adorn me with a circlet that is prettier than practical. They praise nothing at all. Their faces are blank.
I try again to reach for the bonds. A single thought rides up from the well of me and stretches toward Cassiel. It meets the collar like a hand hitting glass. The glass is thin and cold, and the thought hitches and dissolves.
Zepharion notices and hums with delight. “You had power,” he says, as if naming a museum piece. “So many useful things. Now they will be taught how to sing to me.”
He does not need to explain how the choker works. I feel the answer in my limbs, in the silence where my voice used to live. He has not broken the bonds so much as rerouted them. The collar tastes of a slow, clean theft.
I remember, with a clarity so sharp it feels like pain, the way Deimos kissed my hand in the fortress and the promise he made.
The promise slices me open because I cannot answer it.
I cannot tell him I am emptying. I cannot tell him that the thing I trusted most has been harvested in sleep and restraint.
Zepharion takes my hand and leads me to the door. Not roughly. Not forcefully. As if I have been chosen by fate and I am only now learning my part.
He murmurs in my ear as we walk, words velveteen and poisonous. “You will learn to like it,” he says. “You will learn to want your place. But for now, stay quiet and be beautiful.”
I stand in my silk and feel the metal at my throat like a splinter. I want to claw it off. I cannot. The collar hums with a patient, thieving sound. My bonds at this moment are a library closed to me. I am a book locked in a case.
When the doors swing open and the corridor beyond stretches black and gilded, Zepharion gives me a smile that could be mercy or threat. He says nothing more. He does not need to.
I walk after him because my body obeys and my mind is a muffled pool. My feet move and my hands are empty of power. The fortress I left feels a lifetime away and Deimos’s last ragged call is a ghost clinging to the hem of my thoughts.
I step into the black and the choker hums against my pulse.