CHAPTER NINETEEN
I awoke to the sound of soft tapping.
It wasn’t loud, but it threaded through the stillness like a needle, tugging me up from the depths of my dreams. I blinked into the darkness.
My fire had long since died, and only a sliver of moonlight poured in through the tall, frost-kissed windows, bathing the chamber in a silvery hue.
Shadows clung to the corners like cobwebs and the air had gone bone-chillingly cold.
I turned onto my side half-expecting Lucien to still be there, but he wasn’t.
How long had I been asleep?
I let myself lie there a little longer, fingers drifting over the place where he’d been. Where he’d touched me. Kissed me. Held me like he never wanted to let go. My limbs ached pleasantly, and I touched my kiss-swollen lips, allowing myself to replay the memory of my night with Lucien .
The tapping came again. A gentle tick-tick-tick . It was far too rhythmic to be anything natural.
I sat up slowly, muscles stiff from sleep and passion, and reached instinctively for the bones I’d placed under my pillow. They were warm. Not burning, not scalding, but warm. Still, an unease swept over me.
Slowly, I stood and crept to the door, bare feet brushing the chilled stone floor. I crouched, checking the salt line, still solid, unbroken. I exhaled and leaned forward, pressing my ear to the thick oak. Nothing.
Then suddenly. Tap-tap-tap . Louder now, insistent. But no longer was it on the door. It sounded as though the sound had moved down the hall.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.
I cracked the door open, careful not to disturb the salt. The corridor outside was dark, only pale moonlight spilled through the high windows, stretching strange, distorted patterns across the floor like twisted vines.
And then I saw it.
The hallway breathed. The walls expanded and contracted like a sleeping lung, wood groaning faintly, and the floor rippled like skin over muscle. I blinked hard, but it didn’t stop. A sick sensation twisted in my gut. I wasn’t hallucinating. The castle was moving.
It wasn’t collapsing, it wasn’t shifting… It was breathing as if it were alive.
The tapping returned, now to my left. I turned, but there was no one there. Only more corridor, now somehow longer than it had been moments ago. The wallpaper there began to peel, curling in slow spirals like the skin of an orange. Beneath it, black veins pulsed along the stone.
A soft, faint feminine laugh echoed through the castle.
Serena?
A chill clawed its way down my spine. I stepped back, heart hammering in my throat, but the door behind me had vanished. The threshold I had just opened was now a solid wall. My bedchamber was gone.
”No,” I breathed. “No, no—“ I ran my hand down the wall, feeling nothing but seamless, smooth stone.
The castle gave a low groan, almost a sigh, like it had caught me in a lie. The floor moved beneath my feet, buckled gently, tilting like the deck of a ship. The rug unraveled in front of me, thread by thread, revealing glistening stone underneath.
”Lucien,” I whispered, voice trembling.
As soon as his name left my lips, the howling wind outside grew louder.
The shadows along the far wall began to stretch.
Long angular limbs slid into view, reaching out across the floor like the legs of a spider, impossibly slow, impossibly tall.
The silhouette of a hand pressed to the glass of a nearby window and then the tapping started again.
Tap, tap, tap .
I followed the sound, tilting my head back to look up at the ceiling.
I smiled.
Not me—my reflection in a high-mounted mirror hanging crookedly above the corridor.
She smiled wide, blood red blooming across her teeth, head tilting in an unnatural jerk.
Her finger tapped the glass, slow and steady.
Her other hand pointed to the end of the hall.
I turned my head, just as a door materialized where there had been none before.
The castle exhaled and the door creaked open.
“Lucien,” I called out, my voice catching on the silence that pressed too thickly against the air. The castle didn’t answer. But the tapping continued—erratic now, like nails on wood, like something trying to claw its way in. Or out.
Panic flared in my chest. “Lucien,” I said again, louder this time, my voice straining with fear. I let my magic rise, pushed it into the word like a pulse, sent it out into the air with the desperation pounding in my veins.
Please, I thought. Please hear me.
I took a slow step backward, then another—
And slammed into something solid.
A startled breath escaped me as I spun around, heart in my throat.
Lucien stood behind me, his form flickering faintly in the moonlight.
His expression was taut, his eyes sharp as they swept over the twisted corridor.
The tapping hadn’t stopped. The castle walls breathed again, almost like a seethe.
“Mia,” he said, his voice like ice cracking. “What the hell is happening?”
I couldn’t answer. Relief crashed over me in a wave, and I moved without thinking, stumbling forward and burying myself against his chest. His arms came around me, steady, warm, and real. I hadn’t realized how badly I’d needed him until I was in his arms.
“I—I woke up and the castle…” I choked out, pressing my face into his coat. “It’s wrong, Lucien. It’s alive. The hallway was breathing, and the mirror…”
I looked up, lifting one shaking hand to point.
He followed my gaze, his brow furrowing.
Above us, the mirror still reflected a version of me, but not me.
That thing smiled with a mouth too wide, stretching inhumanly across its face, black eyes sinking like bottomless pits.
It lifted a hand and waved slowly, mockingly.
Its fingers were stained with something dark and wet.
Lucien tensed, pulling me closer against him.
“Not your best look,” he muttered, voice like steel. Then he looked where I pointed next, down the corridor.
My bedchamber door was gone. Every door was gone. The hallway had stretched itself grotesquely, growing longer, darker. Only the one door remained now at the far end, cracked open like a mouth mid-laugh .
“Lucien,” I breathed. “The castle… it moved everything. That door wasn’t there before.”
“No,” he said tightly. “It wasn’t.”
He stared at it with a look of loathing. “It’s her. Serena. She’s doing this. I can feel her.”
The name made my blood turn cold.
He started toward the door, tugging me gently along with him, his hand tight around mine. “We need to move. No point staying in the hall.”
Another tap echoed down the hall, louder this time. Like something beckoning.
Lucien’s grip tightened.
“What were you doing in the hall alone? I told you to summon me.”
”I did,” I said emphatically, hurrying my steps to keep up with him. It wasn’t a complete lie this time. I hadn’t known my door would simply vanish and I had called for him…
He shot me a look, one of annoyance, but also an apology. “I didn’t hear you.”
We stepped through the door and froze.
The moment we crossed the threshold, the air changed, thickened. Gone was the cold stone corridor. We stood now in what could only be described as a ballroom from hell. The door slammed behind us, the lock grinding into place.
The vaulted ceiling stretched impossibly high, shadowed by curling, black vines that crept like veins across the stone.
The chandeliers, once grand, now hung crooked and draped in cobwebs, their crystal arms tipped with flickering, blood-red candles.
Vines crawled along the walls and slithered across the cracked marble floors.
Glistening thorns as long as daggers twisted along their spines, pulsing as if alive.
A haunting melody began to play, sour and strange, as if wrung from broken instruments.
The sound made my skin crawl. Then, from the corners of the ballroom, skeletons in tattered finery began to appear, stepping into an eerie waltz.
Empty sockets turned as one to face us, their bony hands locked together as they spun and twirled in time to the music.
“Lucien,” I managed, barely able to speak as I gripped his arm. “What is this?”
He didn’t answer. His jaw clenched, eyes narrowing as the music swelled… and then she appeared.
Serena.
She stepped from behind a pair of twisted, vine-choked columns, a vision of cruel elegance in a crimson gown that shimmered like freshly spilled blood… the same dress I’d seen in my vision. Her onyx hair was pinned up with thorns, and her eyes—those sharp, unnatural blue eyes—locked onto Lucien .
She didn’t speak, but simply lifted her hand in one graceful, effortless motion. Vines erupted from the floor beneath me.
“No—!” I gasped as they coiled around my legs, my waist, my arms, hauling me into the air like a rag doll. Thorns bit into my skin, and I cried out, the breath ripped from my lungs.
“Mia!” Lucien shouted, turning, but it was too late.
Vines curled around him too, not binding him but guiding him, shoving him forward, toward Serena like he was nothing more than a puppet on strings.
She smiled then. A beautiful, monstrous smile.
“You will dance with me, Lucien,” she purred, her voice like velvet dipped in poison. “You owe me that much.”
Lucien’s fists clenched, his body straining against the vines as he tried to resist. But they pushed harder, forcing him into a bowed posture before her.
I writhed in the air, heart pounding, thorns digging deeper as Serena turned her gaze toward me briefly, coldly, then back to Lucien with a hunger that made my stomach turn.
“Have you missed me?” she asked.
And the music surged.
Lucien tried to resist. I could see it in every taut line of his body, the way his shoulders strained against the pull, the way his fists trembled, clenched tight at his sides. But the vines around his legs jerked him forward again, guiding him step by unwilling step across the ballroom floor.
He reached Serena.