Chapter 33 An Unbinding
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
AN UNBINDING
The silence in my cell had structure now, pressing against my eardrums like water at the bottom of a deep well.
I hadn’t moved from the bars since Death released my hand, though my fingers no longer reached through the gap between our cells.
Instead, they rested in my lap, one thumb tracing the exact spot where his had drawn that slow, possessive circle on my skin.
The memory of his touch burned brighter than the alien heat that coursed through my veins—Valen’s blood, still singing its corruption through my body like molten silver.
I should be exhausted. The feast, the humiliation, the confrontation with Death—all of it should have left me empty, ready to collapse into dreamless sleep.
Instead, I was awake. Vibrantly, unnaturally awake, as if every nerve had been stripped bare and set afire.
My heart beat too fast, too loud, a rhythm that seemed to echo off the stone walls.
My skin felt too tight, too warm, as though something foreign had taken up residence beneath it and was slowly stretching me beyond my natural boundaries.
This must be what divine blood does. It has no simple purpose, in nourishment or poison. It transforms. Changes the very fabric of what it means to exist in mortal flesh.
My free hand rose to touch the collar at my throat, fingers finding the smooth leather, the cold silver that had warmed against my skin.
The moment I made contact, that surge of defiance flowed through me again—not the desperate rebellion of a cornered animal, but something cleaner.
Sharper. The rage of a creature that remembered it had claws.
I am not some trinket to be passed between beings.
But even as I recognized this truth, the memory of the feast rose unbidden, souring my tongue with its lingering humiliation.
The laughter. Gods, the laughter still echoed in my ears like the cries of carrion birds.
Not the cruel amusement of enemies, but something worse—the casual entertainment of those who viewed my degradation as mere spectacle.
They had watched me kneel at Valen’s feet, had seen me eat from his fingers like a trained pet, and they had laughed as though witnessing a particularly clever trick performed by a well-broken hound.
Lady Elinor’s titter when Valen fastened the collar around my throat. Lord Talbett’s approving nod when I lowered myself to the cushion. The Countess of Wesmark averting her eyes, not from shame or sympathy, but from boredom—as if my humiliation was too commonplace to hold her interest.
These people had known me my entire life. Had bowed when I entered rooms, although begrudgingly. And now they watched my subjugation with the same dispassionate interest they might show a mummer’s play or a display of exotic animals.
I swallowed down bile as I remembered their faces, the casual way they had resumed their conversations after Valen’s performance. As if my transformation from princess to pet was simply another course in the evening’s entertainment, something to be consumed and forgotten.
But it wasn’t their reaction that haunted me most. It wasn’t even Valen’s calculated cruelty, his deliberate orchestration of my humiliation for the court’s amusement.
No. What haunted me is that moment when everything changed.
When Eriseth leaned over Valen’s shoulder, her hair cascading like silk, her blood-red lips nearly touching his ear.
The way she whispered to him, intimate and knowing, her fingers trailing up his arm with proprietary familiarity.
The way his attention—his complete, consuming attention—had shifted away from me.
And the white-hot fury that had erupted in my chest.
It was defiance. Rebellion against his casual dismissal, his treatment of me as a possession to be ignored while he entertained more interesting company.
It was the natural response of a prisoner pushed too far, a spirit that refused to be completely broken.
Right?
But lies taste bitter on the tongue, and I had grown too weary for self-deception.
It was jealousy.
Pure, primitive, possessive jealousy that had driven me to sink my teeth into divine flesh.
The sight of another woman claiming his attention, touching him with casual intimacy while I knelt forgotten at his feet—it had ignited something primal, something that demanded recognition, demanded that his focus return to me where it belonged.
Where it belonged.
The thought terrified me more than any torture Valen could devise. Because it implied ownership that flowed both ways—not just his claim on me, but mine on him. A connection forged in blood and pain and something darker, something I’m not ready to name.
I pressed my palm against my mouth, as if I could push the truth back down my throat, swallow it like his blood and let it burn in my stomach where it can’t hurt me.
But truth, once acknowledged, cannot be unseen.
I had bitten him not in defiance, but in jealousy. Not as rebellion, but as possession.
And the most damning part? I cannot blame his blood for that moment of madness. The divine essence hadn’t yet passed my lips when I lunged forward, when I marked him with my teeth. That jealousy, that possessive fury—it was mine. Pure and undeniable.
The alien warmth in my veins pulsed stronger, as if responding to my admission.
Valen’s blood recognized truth when it encountered it, and it rewarded honesty with heat that spread through my chest, my limbs, my very core.
The sensation was not unpleasant. If anything, it felt like coming alive after a long, cold sleep.
I wanted to taste his blood again.
Not because of divine compulsion or supernatural influence, but because I remembered the copper-sweet flavor, the way it had flooded my mouth like liquid fire.
The way he had looked at me afterward—not with rage or disgust, but with something approaching approval, as if I had finally shown him the truth of what lay beneath my carefully constructed masks.
The wanting terrified me. Not because it was wrong—who is left to judge right and wrong in my world of gods and dungeons?—but because it’s mine. For the first time in my life, I wanted something that had nothing to do with duty or survival or the desperate need to be loved.
I wanted him. His blood, his attention, his darkness. I wanted to mark him again, to see that flicker of surprised pleasure in his ancient eyes. I wanted to be the one who broke his careful control, who shattered his divine composure until nothing remained but raw, mutual want.
I had never been taught to want. Only to be wanted, to shape myself into whatever form might earn love, approval, recognition. To smile with empty eyes and bleed in silence and believe that yearning belonged to other people—the lovely, the chosen, the blessed. Never to me. Never for me.
But everyone was gone now. The court that had shaped me, the family that had barely tolerated me, the kingdom that had never truly been mine…
all of it was reduced to ash and memory.
There was no one left to judge me for the darkness of my desires, no one to condemn me for wanting something that a decent woman should not want.
Isolde might have understood. Sweet, rebellious Isolde with her secret affairs and her whispered confessions of pleasure stolen in haylofts and empty corridors.
She had always insisted that a woman’s desires were her own, that society’s rules were chains meant to be broken.
But Isolde was gone, fled to safety as I begged her to do, and I will likely never see her again.
And Lysa—my precious Lysa—was growing up without me, perhaps forgetting the sister who had loved her more than breath itself.
Kassimir had promised they would be safe, but promises from gods are treacherous things, and I had no way to verify his word.
I could only hope that she was alive, that she was loved, that she would remember our stories on the nights when the darkness felt too heavy to bear.
They were gone. My family, my court, my past—all of it severed, just as Valen had told me it would. I was alone in this new world, answerable to no one but myself.
So why should I not want? Why should I not embrace the hunger that grew stronger with each passing moment, fed by divine blood and the memory of claiming what I desired with teeth and fury?
Why should I not explore this new territory of desire, this landscape of want that opens before me like an undiscovered realm?
The warmth in my veins seemed to approve of this new line of thinking, pulsing with applause as I acknowledged truths I had been too afraid to face. Valen’s blood recognized a kindred spirit in my emerging darkness, welcomed the admission that I am not the innocent victim I had pretended to be.
I touched the collar again, and this time the defiance it triggered was different. Not the desperate rebellion of the trapped, but the quiet confidence of one who had decided to stop running from herself.
If I must wear his mark, perhaps I could make him wear mine as well. If I must be his possession, perhaps I could possess him in return.
I leaned back against the wall, feeling the cool stone against my spine.
The black fabric of the gown I still wore pooled around me like shadow, like the darkness I was finally learning to embrace.
My thumb continued its absent pattern on my hand, tracing where Death had touched me, but my thoughts were no longer focused on divine ownership or impossible comfort.
Instead, I thought of copper and heat and the way Valen’s eyes had blazed when I marked him.
I thought of the punishment he had promised, and the ways I might turn his retribution into revelation.
I thought of hunger—his and mine—and the dangerous alchemy that occurred when two predators recognized each other across a crowded room.
The silence in my cell no longer felt oppressive.
It felt expectant, alive with possibilities I was only beginning to understand.
I was alone, yes, but I was also free in ways I had never imagined possible.
Free to want without shame, to hunger without apology, to embrace the darkness that called to me from within.
I had been a princess once. A daughter of Vareth. I had carried myself with pride even when they looked through me, even when Ira’s cold eyes judged me for a sin that wasn’t mine. Even when Father’s gaze slid past me like I was a shadow on the wall.
I had maintained my dignity. My sense of self. I had survived.
But survival wasn’t all I needed now. Something had altered in me—or perhaps it had always been there, waiting for the right key to unlock it. A hunger that transcended mere physical need. A part of me that responded to power, to darkness, to control.
To my own desire.
I was Mireille of Vareth no longer. That girl died in the throne room when her family’s blood stained the marble floor. I was something new now, something unnamed and unbound by the rules that had once constrained me.
And I was finally ready to discover what that something might become.