Chapter 29 #2
Ciaran’s gaze went wild, scanning me like he wanted the answer carved out of my throat. “Are none of my wives loyal?” he hissed. “Not one? Not Therynne. Not Isolde. Or Maris. Not even you.”
Lyra’s nostrils flared at Isolde’s name, like it was a wound she refused to acknowledge.
Marisella watched him unravel with quiet fascination.
I stared at him, bone tired and trembling, and couldn’t stop myself.
“If you want loyalty,” I rasped, “maybe stop collecting wives like they’re treaties you can sleep beside.”
Lyra surged forward.
Marisella lifted her hand first.
No gesture. No warning.
The pressure hit my arm like invisible jaws.
My elbow jerked. My wrist twisted. My bones shifted inside my skin with sickening precision. Pain ripped through me, white and immediate, so intense it stole sound from my throat for a split second.
Then it came.
A scream that didn’t feel like mine.
My arm bent at an angle it was not meant to bend.
I shook, eyes wide, breath tearing in and out like my lungs were panicking.
I could feel her in my skeleton the way you could feel a hand inside your mouth, controlling, invasive, intimate in the most horrific way.
Marisella watched my reaction with pleasant curiosity.
“You do love provoking people,” she said softly. “It’s almost admirable.”
Ciaran’s gaze didn’t soften. “Where did Therynne go?”
I panted, pain rolling through me in nauseating waves. “I don’t… know.”
Lyra stepped into the cell, grabbed my jaw with her free hand, and forced my face upward.
Her knife kissed my skin.
Not a stab.
A drag.
Cold metal slid along my jawline in a slow line, just deep enough to sting, just shallow enough to warn. I felt warmth gather where the blade passed. Blood. Not much. Enough.
“We know you shared a friendship,” Lyra murmured. “We know she favored you. We know she gave you books. Told you things.”
My vision pulsed at the edges. My arm throbbed. My stomach twisted, hunger turning everything dizzy and surreal.
I tried to smile anyway.
It came out ugly. Crooked. Defiant.
“Therynne had pity,” I whispered. “Not loyalty.”
Ciaran leaned closer, rage trembling under his skin. “What did she say to you?”
I blinked hard, pain making my thoughts slip.
Ink-stained fingers. Glasses pushed up the bridge of her nose. The way she paced, thinking faster than the world could keep up.
Prophecy.
Fragments.
Ice. Light. Fire meeting frost.
I bit down on the inside of my cheek so hard I tasted blood.
“Mostly that you’re exhausting,” I said.
Lyra’s hand tightened in my hair.
Marisella’s power shifted.
My shoulder seized, then my ribs tightened, like she’d found a new angle inside my chest and decided to explore it.
I gasped. Pain spiraled, bright and endless.
Marisella’s expression remained serene.
“You see,” she said mildly, “I could do this all day. That is the beauty of my gift. I can break you into shapes you never imagined.”
She leaned slightly closer, as if sharing a secret. “And then I can repair you.”
My stomach dropped.
The threat was not death.
It was continuation.
“Over and over and over,” Marisella murmured. “Until you decide honesty is easier.”
Ciaran crouched in front of me then, close enough that I could feel heat radiating off him, smell something clean beneath the dungeon rot. His amber eyes locked onto mine.
He looked… unhinged.
Not just angry.
Afraid.
“My wife is missing,” he said, and his voice shook just enough to show the crack beneath the crown. “My court is collapsing. My enemies are laughing. And you’re going to sit there and pretend you know nothing?”
I swallowed, choking on pain and hunger and the awful bitter satisfaction curling in my chest.
Therynne was gone.
Good.
Let him feel it.
Let him feel what it was like to reach for something and find only empty air.
“I’m not pretending,” I rasped. “I’m surviving.”
Lyra’s blade hovered closer to my throat. “Say where she is.”
I met her eyes, shaking, furious, refusing to beg.
“I can’t,” I whispered. “I don’t know.”
Marisella sighed like I was dull.
Then she broke my wrist.
I screamed and the sound ripped something inside my throat. My body convulsed against the chains, vision blackening at the edges. The dungeon tilted. The world narrowed into sensation. Cold stone. Metal biting skin. Heat of blood.
Ciaran’s voice cut through the roar. “Tell me!”
“I don’t know!” I screamed back, and it wasn’t defiance anymore, it was truth being torn out of me.
Marisella repaired it.
Then she broke it again.
Over and over.
Each time, my mind tried to leave my body and couldn’t quite find the door.
Lyra started using the knife like punctuation. A shallow cut across my collarbone. A nick on my shoulder. Just enough blood to make the dungeon smell like iron and inevitability.
Ciaran’s light filled the cell, flaring and pulsing, washing the dungeon in gold that made everything look holy and wrong. Sweat slid down his temple. His eyes shone too bright.
“She’s my wife,” he said again, like the word should summon her back.
And I almost laughed.
Almost.
Because somewhere outside this dungeon, Therynne was free.
And if there was any justice left in this world, she would never come back.
Marisella’s fingers flexed once more.
My ribs compressed.
My scream came out wet.
My vision tunneled.
The last thing I heard was Ciaran’s voice, ragged with fury and panic, echoing through the stone like the world owed him answers.
And then the dark took me.