Chapter 2 #2
“No shit, I am in shock.” Her hands drop, and there it is. The fire I saw earlier, burning through the panic. “You dragged me through a portal to another dimension after monsters attacked Prague because I broke some magical mirror for you...” She stops.
Her expression shifts.
“For you.” Her voice drops, sharper now.
I watch the realization settle, piece by piece.
“You have been hiring me for five years.” Her voice goes cold. Controlled. Dangerous. “Five years of jobs. Weird artifacts, cryptic instructions, millions in payment. That was all you.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve been using me.”
“Yes.”
She steps toward me. Once. Then again. Her hands are shaking. Not with fear now. With rage.
“You manipulated me. You made me risk my life. My freedom. Stealing things I did not understand. You put me in danger without telling me what I was actually doing.”
“You were saving the world.” My voice cuts across hers, sharp enough to silence. “Every artifact you stole was a seal component. Every job prevented rifts from opening. Stopped creatures from pouring into Earth and slaughtering thousands. You were a hero, little thief. You simply did not know it.”
“I didn’t know because you lied to me!”
Her scream ricochets through the chamber. The shadows ripple in response.
She is magnificent in her fury. All that careful precision from the heist gone, stripped down to something raw and blazing. Her chest rises and falls rapidly. Her eyes burn.
“People are dying right now. Because of what you made me do.”
“People are dying because you were careless.”
It is not the whole truth, but it is the truth I can afford to give her. I rise from the throne. Shadows stretch and lengthen around me.
“I gave you explicit instructions. Touch as little as possible. Use gloves. And what did you do?”
“My glove tore?—”
“And you did not stop.”
I descend the steps slowly. She does not move. Brave. Or foolish.
“You grabbed the mirror with your bare hands. You broke the last seal. This catastrophe is yours, Morgana Bellamy. Own it.”
She flinches.
Good.
Then her expression hardens.
“You know what?” She lets out a short, hollow laugh. “I don’t care.”
I stop walking. “Excuse me?”
“I don’t care about your world.” She gestures around her. “Your seals. Your courts. Your dimensional problems. This is not my responsibility. Send me back to Earth when it’s safe and fix your own damn mess.”
She turns to walk away.
The audacity?—
My shadows move before I consciously command them.
They surge across the floor, coil around her ankles and wrists, and hurl her into the wall. The impact knocks the breath out of her. Black glass trembles beneath her weight. The shadows drag her upward, pinning her wrists above her head, suspending her feet off the ground.
The chamber goes still around us, every shadow waiting on the next command. Hers is the only human heartbeat in the room, frantic and loud enough that my magic notices.
I am in front of her before she can react.
“You do not understand, little thief.”
I lean closer.
Her pulse hammers in her throat. I can see it. Rapid. Uncontrolled.
“You are not going anywhere. You broke it. You are going to fix it.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Then you will learn.” My voice lowers. The shadows tighten just enough to remind her they can do worse. “Or I will kill you myself.”
Her breath catches. Her eyes search mine.
Looking for mercy she will not find.
Then something shifts.
Her gaze sharpens, focusing.
“What’s wrong with your eyes?”
Of all the things she could say—begging, cursing, bargaining—she chooses the one question sharp enough to find blood.
I pull back slightly. “Nothing.”
“They just... they went black. Completely black.” She stares at me now with something closer to fear than anger. “And your skin. There is something moving under it.”
The shadows release her abruptly.
She drops, catching herself against the wall.
I turn away before she can see more.
The corruption is getting worse. The breach must have aggravated it.
“You are exhausted,” I say. “You are seeing things.”
“I know what I saw.”
“Kieran.”
My voice echoes through the palace.
“Show the thief to the guest quarters. Lock the door.”
He materializes from the corridor, Chella at his side.
Chella, my spymaster, misses nothing. Her gaze moves from the cracked glass to the thief’s throat to the shadows still coiled too tightly around my hands.
Her expression remains neutral as she takes in the scene.
The disarray. The tension still hanging in the air.
“My lord,” Kieran says, bowing. “Of course.”
“And post guards. She does not leave. She does not speak to anyone without my permission.” I turn away, already moving toward my chambers. “If she attempts escape, stop her. Nonlethally if possible.”
“Wait.” She pushes off the wall. “You can’t just lock me up.”
I do not slow.
“I can do whatever I want. You are in my world now. My kingdom. My rules.”
Her response is a string of inventive profanity.
I ignore it.
The corridor to my chambers is empty. The servants know better than to remain when I am like this. Drawn to my agitation, the shadows on the walls extend toward me.
I can feel them beneath my skin.
The corruption spreads through my magic like poison through water. Slower than it was. But not stopped.
Fighting it takes more now. More focus. More control.
The thief’s human life force could slow it.
Perhaps even stop it.
But I cannot tell her that.
I cannot give her that leverage.
Behind me, raised voices echo faintly. Morgana arguing. Resisting.
Then footsteps retreat.
Good.
Let her rage. Let her fight something she cannot win.
By morning, she will understand.
There is no escape.
And then we will begin fixing what she destroyed.
I am three hours into reviewing dimensional maps when Chella appears in the doorway of my study.
“My lord.”
She does not wait to be invited inside.
“We have a problem.”
“The thief has been quiet since we locked her in. Too quiet.”
Chella’s ice-blue eyes hold mine steady across the war table. The map beneath us flickers with faint arc-light, tracing fractured borders of our territory like broken veins.
“Kieran checked on her,” she says. “She was pressed against the door, listening.”
My jaw tightens before I can stop it. “To what exactly?”
“To us.” She crosses her arms. “We were discussing your condition. The corruption. How the dimensional breach is accelerating the spread of it.”
Damn it.
The word sits heavy in my mind, sharp enough to cut through the calm I am supposed to maintain.
“How much did she hear?”
“Enough to know something is wrong with you. Not enough to understand what.” Chella tilts her head slightly, studying me the way she always does when she is trying to measure damage. “She asked Kieran what we meant. He did not answer. But she knows, my lord. She knows you are hiding something.”
I lean back in my chair, slow and controlled, like movement alone can keep everything from slipping. The corruption stirs under my skin in response, a low pulse of pressure that crawls along bone and nerve, reacting to my frustration like it has a mind of its own.
The thief is too clever for her own good.
“Double the guards on her door,” I say at last. “And make sure no one discusses my condition where she can overhear. Not until I decide what to tell her.”
“And if she asks directly?”
“Tell her to mind her own business.” My gaze drops to the maps again, though the lines blur slightly at the edges. “Or better yet, tell her nothing. She is human. She does not need to understand our problems.”
Chella bows once, precise and silent, then leaves the chamber without another word.
The door closes behind her, sealing the quiet in.
But I cannot focus on the maps anymore.
Green-grey eyes refuse to leave me alone. The thief’s voice is sharp enough to draw blood even when she is not trying. Her fury burns so brightly, it feels almost wrong in something so breakable.
I should be thinking about the breach. About containment. About the corruption spreading beneath reality like rot.
Instead, I am thinking about her listening at the door.
She heard us.
She heard enough to understand that there is something wrong with me, even if she cannot name it yet.
That is worse than ignorance. Worse than silence.
She will ask questions. She will dig. She will test every boundary until something gives way.
That is what thieves do.
And I know it in the same way I know storms eventually find cracks in stone.
A thief does not need a key if she can learn who carries it, when they sleep, and what they fear losing.
I exhale slowly, forcing my attention back to the glowing lines of the map, back to anything that is not the image of her pressed against a locked door, listening for truths she was never meant to hear.
Because if she discovers what her life force can do to the corruption inside me, she will understand the real reason I cannot let her go.
I just have to make sure she does not find the truth before I am ready to tell it.