Chapter 43 A Mirror in Suffering
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
A MIRROR IN SUFFERING
Iwoke with a violent gasp, consciousness returning like a knife thrust between my ribs.
My body remembered pain that was no longer there—phantom agony from wounds now healed. My fingers were still entwined with Death’s through the space between our cells, clutching with desperate strength as though his hand alone anchored me to the living world.
I released my grip immediately, horrified at how tightly I must have been holding him. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, my voice scraping against the silence.
Death did not pull away. Instead, his fingers tightened around mine, just enough to keep me from retreating. His skin was warm, comforting, like stone that absorbed the last whisper of sunlight before twilight fell.
“Stay,” he ordered, his voice low and steady in the darkness. “How do you feel?”
The question seemed absurd. How did I feel? I had been torn apart by a God. I remembered Valen’s face contorted with desire, remembered the moment he lost control, remembered blood and pain and the strange, terrible triumph of knowing I’d broken through his careful veneer.
I remembered dying. I was certain I had been dying.
I looked down at my body, still naked in the dim light.
Where there should have been gashes and bruises, torn flesh and broken skin, there was only the pale expanse of my unmarked form.
My fingers traced the places where wounds should have been, finding nothing but smooth skin.
The only pain I felt was deeper, more abstract, an emptiness nestled beneath my breastbone where I knew a piece of my soul had been taken.
“I feel... whole,” I said finally. “My body, at least.”
Death made a sound that might have been amusement. “Your body was easy to mend. It wanted to heal.”
“But I also feel… empty. Where my soul was.” I rubbed my sternum, its hollowness unsettling. “Why do you need to take it? Why must that be the cost?”
His hand remained steady in mine, but I felt something shift in his touch. A subtle tension, as though my question wasn’t something he wanted to answer.
“My healing is not like mortal medicine,” he said after a pause. “There must be a balance, a push and a pull for each injury I heal. I find your broken parts, and they become mine to mend. The pain I take becomes mine to bear. And your soul... a part of that strengthens me in return.”
I tried to imagine what that meant, to take pieces of someone’s pain and feel it as your own, to stitch together flesh and bone through will alone. The enormity of it made me dizzy.
Then I realized, I was in no pain. None. He took it all unto himself without hesitation. I was dying and he took all—my—pain.
“You felt it all,” I breathed. “Everything I felt. I was in agony.”
Death was silent as I stared at our joined hands, my eyes drifting to the point where his forearm disappeared into the shadows beyond his cell. I imagined him weighing truth against mercy, deciding how much to reveal.
Finally, he sighed, a sound low and worn and full of surrender. “Yes,” he said simply. “I felt it all.”
My lips parted with my next breath. I had thought his healing was merely a transaction—impersonal, mechanical. A piece of soul for restored flesh. The knowledge that he had shouldered my torment, felt every lash Valen had inflicted, made my throat tighten with an emotion I couldn’t name.
“Why?” I whispered, my voice cracking on the word.
“Yshera,” he said, and there was a rawness, an honesty, in his voice I hadn’t heard before. “Taking on your pain is nothing compared to the pain I feel when you experience it.”
I froze.
The cell around me was so still, the darkness so thick, I half wondered if I’d imagined what he’d said—that tenderness in his words. That truth. But his hand was still there, warm and solid in mine. Still grounding me.
I felt my heart begin to race, the gravity of his admission settling around me. “But you—“ I pressed my free hand against my chest, willing it to slow. “But you hardly know me. You barely even tolerate me.”
A harsh, startled laugh escaped him, echoing strangely through the stone barrier between us.
“Tolerate you?” His voice dropped to that dangerous register that made my skin prickle with awareness. “Is that what you think? That I merely endure your presence?”
His fingers tightened around mine, not painfully but with an intensity that made it impossible to look away from our joined hands.
“Mireille,” he said, my name reverent in his mouth. He paused, as though weighing something dangerous. “I do not tolerate you. I… quite like you. More than I should.”
The admission knocked the breath from my lungs. I stared at our joined hands, unable to formulate a response.
“Your stubborn defiance. Your sharp tongue. The way you refuse to be broken, even when others would be shattered beyond repair.” His thumb traced small circles on my wrist, each touch sending shivers across my skin.
“Even your infuriating gift for provoking every emotion I thought I had buried long ago.”
I swallowed hard, trying to process his words. After everything—our arguments, my provocations, the way I’d deliberately tried to hurt him by turning to Valen—this was what he offered? Not anger or resentment, but... affection?
“But you said—“
“I know what I said.” Death’s voice dropped lower, edged with regret. “Words spoken in anger. You… disrupt me, Mireille. I’ve spent millennia mastering silence, control, detachment. And then you arrived, this bleeding, broken, radiant creature, and I find myself... feeling again. It’s maddening.”
I closed my eyes. “But you hardly know me.”
That truth clung to me like a wound. I wanted to push him away. Tell him he shouldn’t want someone like me.
I was nothing.
A shattered thing.
A wraith in borrowed skin.
How could he feel anything for something so broken?
Death went still, his fingers ceasing their gentle movements against my skin. When he spoke again, his voice held an ancient weight that seemed to press against my chest.
“I know you better than you think,” he said softly.
He hesitated, as if weighing his next words.
“I know the sound of your breath when you’re barely holding on.
I know the rhythm of your heartbeat when you’re lying to yourself, pretending not to be afraid.
I know the way your soul recoils and sparks depending on who or what lives in your mind, and I know the strength it takes for you to survive—night after night. ”
My breath caught, but he wasn’t finished.
“I know the names of the ones you hold dear. I know you would read to Lysa every night, or, if she was feeling restless, you would sing to her. I know Isolde taught you how to press flowers and how to dance outside of courtly steps. I know you never loved your captain, Darius, but he meant something to you all the same.”
I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t—
“And I know your life was lonely,” his voice dropped to a whisper now, as if in some misplaced form of regret.
“I know you were not loved in the way a person should be, unconditionally, without fear of abandonment. And… I know you wished for that love to find you and I am sorry you did not have that, Mireille. I am so very sorry.”
My throat closed around my next breath.
I could hardly process what he was saying, each revelation felt like a soft blow against the fragile walls I had built around my heart, already splintering from the consuming grip of his words. How could he know so much?
Unless…
“You… you listened?” I managed to whisper, each word laced with disbelief and a flicker of something deeper—hope? Fear? Perhaps both. I rolled my lips into my teeth to hold in my whimper. “Since the beginning… you’ve listened.”
“Yes.”
The nights I’d whispered into the dark when I’d first arrived, thinking no one heard. The prayers I hadn’t meant as prayers. The broken lullabies I hummed to keep myself sane.
“Even as the daughter of my captor, I could not stop myself,” he added, his voice rich with the strain of confession.
“You called to me, Mireille. Not with words, perhaps, but with every ragged breath you took in this place. With every tear you shed thinking no one cared. With every moment of defiance, when you thought yourself alone, I wanted to be there for you.”
My heart stuttered in my chest.
“And then, when you were feverish and dying, when he brought you to my cell,” I heard his slow exhale, “after I held you… I wanted every part of you.” He hesitated, and I held my breath. “But I knew I couldn’t have you, Mireille. I’m in chains. I cannot have you.”
I didn’t know how to reply. I didn’t know how to feel. For so long, kindness had been a weapon to be used. This didn’t feel like that. This felt like a hand reaching into the abyss and not pulling away.
I bit my lip hard, unsure if it was to stop the tremble or the sob. To matter to a god—even one in chains—felt like a dangerous thing.
Still, I wanted to bury myself in his words, to unravel their implications until I understood what he meant. I also wanted to run from them, to hide in the familiar comfort of suspicion and distance.
But I couldn’t run. I couldn’t go anywhere. And even if I could, would I truly want to? He was the first man, god or not, that listened. How could it be that this chained god who took parts of my soul could make my heart feel so full.
So full it hurt.
I turned my head slightly, blinking hard, as if that might slow the rush of feeling. I couldn’t thank him. I couldn’t say I fully believed him. But I also couldn’t lie and say I didn’t feel the same way.
So I gave him what I could. A squeeze of my fingers. The smallest gesture. But it was mine.
He said nothing, but I felt the echo of it in the way his thumb stroked mine, reverent and steady.