Chapter 28 The Simplicity of Touch
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE SIMPLICITY OF TOUCH
Valen hadn’t come.
My body knew the hour, a primal awareness that did not consider clocks or sunlight.
This was when the guards should appear—when the oldest would nod grimly as they entered, when the middle one would avoid my eyes, when the youngest with his crooked nose would prepare the chains.
This was when my heart should pound against my ribs like a caged thing sensing the approach of fire.
But the corridor beyond my cell remained silent, and the silence was somehow worse than the certainty of pain.
I pressed my ear between two bars. Nothing.
Not a whisper, not a breath. The bruises from Valen’s lips and fingers still pulsed with each heartbeat, the darkest ones—those on my inner thighs, the one on my lips—throbbing beneath my skin.
I had expected fresh pain tonight, had braced for it, had wrapped my mind around the inevitable. The absence left me unstable.
Where was he?
I didn’t want him. I didn’t. But routine, even the routine of my own breaking, had become a perverse form of safety. At least when Valen stood before me with blade or power or punishing touch, I knew what the night held. I knew the shape of my suffering. I knew its boundaries.
Now that he wasn’t here, I knew nothing.
I curled tighter against the bars, keeping to the corner where I had held my harbinger’s hand.
My fingers twitched with the memory of his skin against mine—warm and rough with calluses, yet unexpectedly gentle.
I wondered if he waited now as I did, listening for footsteps that didn’t come, sensing the wrongness in the air.
My muscles refused to uncoil, to accept the gift of this unexpected reprieve.
Instead, they wound tighter, anticipation curdling into something darker, more insidious.
My heart beat a strained rhythm against my bruised ribs, each pulse sending dull pain radiating outward through the constellation of marks Valen had left on my skin.
The darkness seemed to press closer, the silence taking on weight and substance.
I found myself straining to hear anything—the scurry of rats, the drip of water, the breath of my harbinger in the adjacent cell.
But even those familiar sounds seemed to have abandoned me, as if the dungeon itself held its breath, waiting.
“He’s not coming.”
The words emerged uninvited, a whisper that sounded too loud in the oppressive quiet.
I wasn’t sure if I spoke to myself or to the prisoner beyond the wall, but saying it aloud made it feel more real, more final.
The relief I should have felt didn’t materialize.
Instead, dread twisted my stomach into knots.
Valen had never broken his pattern. Why now? What did it mean?
Hours passed, marked only by the deepening of shadows as the single torch in the corridor beyond burned lower. My harbinger remained silent, though I felt his presence as surely as the stone beneath me—a watchful, waiting energy that seemed to pulse through the wall at my back.
I couldn’t bring myself to speak to him again.
Not after his offered comfort. Not after he’d held my hand and suggested my soul remained unbroken despite all Valen had done.
The memory of that unexpected tenderness felt too raw, too dangerous to acknowledge.
So I sat in silence, and he did the same, and the quiet between us stretched taut as a bowstring.
When the sound of approaching footsteps finally came, my entire body went rigid. But these weren’t Valen’s measured, deliberate strides. These were quicker, lighter—the familiar cadence of the guards making their evening rounds.
The middle guard appeared at my cell door, a wooden tray in his hands. No chains. No instruments of torture. Just the meager evening meal they always brought after Valen’s sessions. He seemed surprised to find me hunched by the bars rather than lying broken on my mat.
“Princess,” he said, the word holding a note of uncertainty. “Your meal.”
He slid the tray through the small opening at the bottom of the cell door.
Watery stew, a crust of bread, a cup of water.
The same as always, but the timing was wrong.
They usually fed me after Valen had finished with me, after they had cleaned my wounds and dressed me in a fresh shift.
The disruption of this pattern, small as it was, unsettled me further.
“Where is he?” I asked, the question escaping raw and broken.
The guard’s eyes widened in the fact I had spoken, before flicking away, not meeting mine. “The king has other matters to attend to tonight.”
“What matters?” I pressed, desperate for any information, any certainty.
“It’s not my place to say.” His tone closed the subject, his posture already shifting away from my cell, eager to be gone.
“Will he come tomorrow?” I should have been ashamed of how my voice caught on the question, of how it betrayed my need for the predictability of pain over the torment of uncertainty.
The guard hesitated, his face betraying nothing. “Eat your meal, Princess.” Then he was gone, footsteps retreating down the corridor, leaving me with more questions than answers.
I stared at the tray, my stomach clenching in anxiety despite my hunger. The sudden deviation from routine had stolen even this simple certainty—the knowledge of when I would eat, when I would sleep, when I would hurt.
With deliberate movements, I crawled from my position by the bars to retrieve the tray.
The stew smelled of overcooked vegetables and too little meat, but I forced myself to eat it anyway, knowing I needed what little strength it provided.
Each swallow hurt, the bruise on my lip throbbing with the movement.
Valen was right, I could no longer eat, speak, swallow, without thinking of him.
I found myself glancing again toward the wall separating me from my harbinger.
Death was there, I knew it. Had he withdrawn his offer of comfort now that daylight had banished the vulnerability of night?
Or did he simply have nothing to say to me, his momentary interest in my suffering passed like a brief fever?
I wondered suddenly why no one ever came to torture him.
While Valen subjected me to ever more creative forms of suffering, Death sat unbothered in his cell.
I remembered his words about touch—how he could cause harm with a single brush of skin against skin.
But surely Valen could torture him without touch, as he sometimes did with me, using his power to inflict pain from a distance.
Unless he feared him. Perhaps Valen, for all his god-like power, feared to provoke whatever lay chained in the cell beside mine.
Who was he, truly? No ordinary prisoner, that much was certain. His voice carried the ache of centuries, his hands bore scars that spoke of battles fought in times beyond memory. When he’d spoken of souls it had been with the authority of one who knew their workings intimately.
“Death?”
His name slipped out before I could stop it, fragile in the stillness between our cells. I hadn’t meant to speak first, some sliver of pride had told me to wait, but Valen’s absence left behind a silence I couldn’t bear alone.
I pressed my palm against the cold stone separating us, as if I might feel his presence through solid rock, listening to the rhythmic sound of water dipping in the dark. I counted each drop like a heartbeat.
One. Two. Three. Four.
And then—
“You called for me, little fawn?” He replied at last, voice low and rough-edged, threaded with the ghost of a smile. “I must say, it’s been... quite some time since I’ve had a female caller. I’d almost forgotten the proper etiquette.”
The smallest huff of laughter escaped me, part shock, part relief. It wasn’t funny, not really. But there was something in his voice—gruff amusement, quiet and tentative—that eased the knot in my chest.
“I wasn’t aware there was proper etiquette for speaking through dungeon walls,” I replied, my bruised lips stinging with the movement. The pain was welcome, a reminder that I was still here, still myself.
“Oh yes,” he said, chains dragging as he shifted position. “Very formal. Usually involves wine, candlelight, and considerably fewer rats.”
Another small laugh escaped me, this one sending a sharp pain through my ribs. I pressed my hand against them, wondering if this strange man had any idea how precious these moments of normalcy were. How they felt like finding a favorite hairpin within the pages of a forgotten book.
“He didn’t come,” I said after a moment, returning to what truly troubled me. “He always comes.”
There was a pause, a considering silence. “Yes,” Death finally agreed. “Your god is absent tonight.”
“He’s not my god.” The denial was swift, instinctive.
“No?” Something in his tone shifted, became flat, as if deliberately removing any emotion. “Yet he marks you as his. Claims you with his touch.”
I pressed my forehead against my knees, squeezing my eyes shut against the memory of Valen’s fingers, his lips, and the terrible pleasure I’d felt from each. “Ownership is not deserving of worship,” I said finally. “And he does not own any part of me that matters.”
My harbinger was quiet for a long moment, as if considering my words. I wondered if he thought of the piece of me he owned, how he’d told me it was the only part of myself that meant anything.
When he spoke again, his voice had softened. Not quite warm. But not cold, either. The dullness had relaxed to something quieter.
“Tell me, then, about the life you had before this cell. Who were you, when you belonged fully to yourself?”
The question caught me so off guard, I hardly knew what to say. The past seemed to belong to a different person entirely, a ghost who had haunted the palace halls of Vareth wearing my face.