Chapter 11 A Stone Embrace
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A STONE EMbrACE
Iwoke to darkness so complete it felt like drowning.
My lungs seized, struggling against the press of infinite black, while my mind spun, unable to grasp where I was or how I’d come to be there.
The stone beneath me leached warmth from my body with malicious efficiency, and the air, stale and thick with the perfume of rot, clung to the inside of my nose.
For one merciful moment, I remembered nothing.
Then pain bloomed, a symphony of aches that awakened one by one.
My raw, torn feet. The bruises flowering across my ribs and arms. The burning thirst that had transformed my tongue to sandpaper.
I shifted, and the thin silk of my robe scraped against my skin like burlap.
The movement sent waves of nausea rolling through me, and I curled onto my side, pressing my cheek against the damp stone as if its chill might anchor me to consciousness.
Like a tide rising, memories surged forward, each one more horrific than the last. My wedding vows, spoken with hollow conviction.
Blood mingling with blood as Valen bound me to him.
The sudden, terrible screams that had erupted through the castle.
My desperate flight through the corridors, silk robe clutched around me, feet leaving bloody prints on marble floors as I searched for Lysa.
I remembered finding my little sister hiding, her small body trembling with fear.
I remembered Isolde’s face, streaked with tears as she took Lysa from my arms. I remembered the brutal finality in Valen’s eyes as he executed my family one by one, their bodies crumpling to the throne room floor like abandoned dolls.
A sound tore free from my throat, something between a scream and a sob, and I slammed my palm against the stone floor, welcoming the sharp pain that shot up my arm. Pain meant I was alive. Pain meant this was real.
“No,” I whispered, the word scraping against my parched throat. “No, no, no.”
I pushed myself upright, ignoring the protest of abused muscles.
My hands stretched out, reaching blindly into the suffocating darkness.
Stone wall to my right. Stone beneath me.
I shuffled forward on my knees, hands sweeping the ground before me until they met cold metal.
Bars. Iron bars, thick as my wrist, set deep into stone on either side.
A cell. I was in a cell in the dungeons beneath Vareth’s palace. The dungeons I’d only heard whispered about, where traitors and enemies of the crown were left to rot and be forgotten.
But I was the crown. Or I had been, for one blood-soaked day.
I wrapped my fingers around the bars and shook them with all the strength desperation afforded me. They didn’t so much as tremble. I pressed my face between them, peering into darkness that offered no relief.
“Guards!” My voice broke on the word, a pathetic croak that wouldn’t carry beyond the walls of my cell. I swallowed painfully and tried again. “Valen! You coward! Let me out!”
Only silence answered me, broken by the distant drip of water and the scrabbling of unseen vermin in the walls.
I slammed my fists against the bars until pain radiated up my arms, but the cold iron yielded nothing.
My knees ached from the stone floor, but I couldn’t bring myself to retreat back to the corner where I’d awoken.
I edged to the left, following the bars, mapping the dimensions of my prison.
The cell was small—merely six paces in any direction I would estimate.
Three walls of solid stone, one wall of bars facing what I assumed was a corridor.
No window. No torch bracket. Nothing but darkness and the promise of a slow, wasting death.
My breath came faster, shallower. The walls seemed to press inward.
I imagined the weight of the palace above me, tons of stone separating me from the sky.
Would I ever see sunlight again? Feel a breeze on my face?
Or would I die here, alone in the dark, my body forgotten until it was nothing but bones?
No. I wouldn’t die. Not like this. Not when Lysa was out there somewhere, needing me.
Lysa. The thought of her was a pinprick of light in the suffocating black. I’d held her, felt her small, warm body against mine as I’d carried her through the chaos of that night. I’d placed her in Isolde’s capable hands. I’d watched them disappear into the night.
They had escaped. They had to have escaped. The alternative was unthinkable.
I sank back to the floor, my spine pressed against the cold stone wall, and drew my knees to my chest. The thin silk robe offered no warmth, but I wrapped my arms around myself anyway, trying to quiet the tremors that rattled through my body.
“They’re safe,” I murmured, as if speaking the words could make them true. “Lysa is safe. Isolde will protect her.”
But what of the others? My father, his head severed with a single stroke of Valen’s sword.
Queen Ira, her elegant features contorted in terror in her final moments.
Cordelia, my half-sister who had never loved me but didn’t deserve such an end.
My half-brothers, too young to understand the forces that had brought death to their door.
All gone, their blood soaking into the throne room floor while I watched, helpless.
And Valen. King Valen of Nocthar. My husband. A god wearing mortal flesh.
A hysterical laugh bubbled up from my chest. A god. I’d married a god. One who had slaughtered my family before the blood of our binding ritual had dried. One who had thrown me in my own dungeons. What kind of nightmare had I stumbled into? What kind of hellish fairy tale was this?
I knew of the God of Blood and Conquest only from an image I found in my father’s study.
Vareth was a kingdom that worshiped the Twin Goddesses, and any studies surrounding additional gods was practically banned.
I knew essentially nothing of what I had married, and I felt I was at a severe disadvantage.
I sighed, settling in to wait for my husband.
I didn’t know how much time passed as I sat there, lost in the dark.
Hours, perhaps. Maybe days. Hunger gnawed at my stomach, and thirst scratched at my throat like claws.
I drifted in and out of a light, restless sleep, jerking awake at the smallest sounds—the scurry of a rat, the distant echo of a door closing, the creak of the ancient palace settling.
At some point, I crawled back to the corner where I’d first awakened, curling up on the damp stone, conserving what little warmth my body could generate.
I tried to think of escape, of revenge, of anything but the crushing weight of grief and fear, but my thoughts scattered like leaves in a storm, refusing to be gathered.
I might have been sleeping when I heard it—the distant sound of a door opening, hinges protesting with a rusty shriek. Then footsteps. Slow, measured, confident. The click of boots on stone, coming closer. Drawing nearer to my cell.
I pushed myself upright, heart thundering against my ribs. Light spilled into the corridor beyond my cell—not daylight, but the warm orange glow of a torch. It hurt my eyes after so long in darkness, and I raised a hand to shield them, squinting against the sudden brightness.
A dark figure stepped into the light, and I knew him instantly. Even if I couldn’t see his face, I would have known the set of those shoulders, the precise way he moved. The air around him seemed to thicken, charged with a power that made the hair on my arms rise.
Valen.
He carried a tray in one hand and a torch in the other.
He set the torch in a bracket I hadn’t been able to see in the darkness, then approached my cell.
I could see him clearly now—the sharp angles of his face, the midnight black of his hair, the inhuman stillness with which he observed me.
He wore simple clothing, dark trousers and a loose shirt, but he carried himself with the arrogance of a king. Of a god.
“You look terrible,” he said, his voice smooth and laced with amusement.
I didn’t respond. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of my fear or my rage.
He sighed, a sound of exaggerated patience, and set the tray down. With a casual movement, he slid it through a small opening at the floor of the bars—food, water, and something folded atop it that looked like clothing. A mockery of civility after what he’d done.
I didn’t move to take it, though my parched throat screamed for the water and my empty stomach twisted at the smell of bread.
“You should eat,” he said, leaning against the wall opposite my cell. “Starving yourself would be a pointless gesture.”
I lifted my head, meeting his gaze despite the tremble in my limbs. In the torchlight, his eyes gleamed with an inhuman sheen, like polished onyx. The weight of his gaze crawled over my skin like something alive, assessing, calculating.
“Say something,” he murmured, his tone almost gentle. “I’ve been looking forward to your sharp tongue, my queen.”
I managed to smile, a bitter, cold smile. “What do you want me to say?” I finally asked, my voice a rasp of its former self. “That I’m grateful for your hospitality? That I’m enjoying my stay in your dungeon?”
His laugh was soft and genuine, which somehow made it more terrifying than any display of anger could have been. “There she is. I was concerned that your spirit might have broken already. That would have been disappointing.”
He moved closer to the bars, his fingers trailing above the iron as if greeting an old friend.
The torchlight cast half his face in shadow, transforming his features into something ancient and malevolent.
His eyes—those inhumanly dark eyes—studied me as one might study an insect pinned to velvet, with detached curiosity and the calm certainty that I could not escape.
Finally, he sighed. “Eat, wife. Starving yourself won’t change anything, least of all my plans for you.”