Chapter 61
SIXTY-ONE
The doors to the throne room open without a sound.
Two of the women who dressed me stand at my sides, one hand each at my elbows, guiding but not holding. Still I feel caged. My bare feet step onto polished obsidian veined in red like blood frozen in glass. The air smells of sulfur and smoke and something sweeter, like wine gone too dark, too old.
My legs obey, but each step feels like wading through water that resists. There is a cold ring at my throat, metal against skin. A thin circlet of black and garnet that rests at the base of my neck. It hums in a way I cannot parse.
The room is massive. A cathedral of bone and shadow. Arched ceilings lined in gold filigree. Velvet banners hang like throats slit open and hung to dry. Every inch of the chamber screams decadence and death.
And it is crowded. Rows and rows of demons. Creatures in silk and metal, masks and claws. Some human shaped, others not at all. They are laughing, talking, drinking red from jeweled cups.
Until they see me. Then silence. Breath held across a hundred throats.
The crowd parts as I am led forward, the sound of my steps echoing through the sudden stillness. Every eye finds me. I feel them crawl across my skin. Judging. Wanting. Tasting.
And then I see him. Zepharion waits in the center of the throne room. He does not sit. He never sits when he can be the center of every gaze.
He walks to meet me, each step slow and deliberate. His robe trails. His hair glimmers red in the light of the chandeliers, and his smile is all teeth and prophecy.
When we meet in the center of the room, he takes my hand in both of his, cool fingers wrapping around mine.
“You are radiant,” he murmurs, eyes raking down the violet silk of my gown. “You look exactly as a queen should.”
I flush, unwilling. The moment stretches and then breaks, the voices returning like a crashing tide. Laughter. Whispering. Applause. They are cheering for me.
Zepharion raises our joined hands. “Let it be known,” he calls, his voice booming without ever needing to shout. “Isarienne has arrived. My bride. My queen. The one I have waited for across realms and centuries.”
More cheers. Some furious, some fervent. All of them deafening.
Isarienne. My true demon name. I have only seen it once, in a file buried beneath everything they let me believe about myself. It has never been said aloud. Not until now.
I try not to tremble.
Zepharion gestures to the crowd. “You see her beauty. You feel her power. She is already everything I promised and more.”
A pause, then his voice drops, smooth as poison. “However, there is one small complication.”
A hush falls again, immediate and sharp. My heart trips in my chest. Zepharion turns to me, still holding my hand. His smile is almost regretful.
“She came to me willingly,” he says. “But she did not come untouched.”
Murmurs ripple. People laugh. He lets the word sit and rot in the air. “She is bonded to another.”
The room tightens. The laughter dies. A quiet fear spreads like smoke.
“Deimos Tenebris,” Zepharion says, low and almost bored.
Gasps. Flinches. A creature at the front physically steps back. I blink, confused. Why are they afraid?
Before I can move, Zepharion drops my hand. Two guards step from the shadows behind me. Hands are on my shoulders. I hardly register the movement before they push and I fall to my knees.
The silk of my dress pools around me like blood in water. My hands land flat on the cold obsidian. My breath catches. The room holds itself again. Not out of reverence. Not respect. Anticipation.
Zepharion steps in front of me, looking down as if this is routine. “She gave herself to another before she knew what she was meant for,” he tells the crowd. “It is no fault of hers. The world lies to children. But now...”
He lays a hand on my head. His fingers thread gently through my hair.
“Now,” he says softly, “she will be made whole.”
The crowd bows its head in eerie unison. My pulse hammers. I want to scream, to run, to fight. But the world already feels off. My thoughts thicken. Every instinct warns me this is not ceremony. This is sacrifice.
Zepharion lifts his other hand. A blade appears, ornate and carved with markings that shift when I try to focus on them. It glows and pulses with a life I cannot name. He does not press it to my skin. He raises it above me and slices through the air.
Heat, or maybe absence, rolls through me. The bond with Deimos wails. It is not a sound I can hear but a tearing inside my ribs, a ragged hollowing pull. For a second the world snaps sharp and I know everything at once—his face, his promise, the tether humming under my sternum.
Then my thoughts thicken like oil. I reach for that tether and my mind will not obey. The bond dims as if someone has drawn a curtain between us. It does not break. It gutters and thins, a dying ember held in cold fingers.
Something in me fights. I reach, in the dark behind my eyes, for Cassiel’s ribbon, for Bastion’s armor, for Deimos’ ember.
The threads answer faint and thin as cord pulled through wool.
When I try to widen the seam the light stammers into static.
The basalt plates crawl up like a memory with all their hunger stripped away.
The braid we made in the practice chamber unravels to a whisper.
My tongue thickens against the roof of my mouth.
Words dissolve as I try to shape them. I want to tell them to run, to smash everything, to take me and leave, but the sentence will not form.
I can think in images—Deimos’ hand closing over mine, Bastion’s blade flashing, Cassiel humming light—but the plan that would take me to them fragments before I can hold it.
Zepharion watches me like one inspects a specimen. His smile is a white blade. “There,” he says to the court. “Clean.”
He steps back and lifts his arms. The crowd erupts. They call my true name again as if to bind it into me. The choker rests cold and indifferent at my throat. The wool around my mind tightens and I sit in a slow pool of muddled thoughts, trying to drag a single plan through the fog.
For a single, tiny instant I feel Deimos’ ember pulse back—faint but real. I seize it like a rope. It gives me an image, a single sharp thing I can still force into words: run, find, break. I try to move on that image, to whisper a warning, to send Deimos one small signal.
The choker presses at my throat. The thought scrapes and falls silent. The court cheers. They call me queen, and I am a captive of velvet and gilding, moving under a weight I cannot quite lift.