Chapter 49
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
IN CHAINS OF GRIEF
For one frozen moment, nothing happened.
Valen stood perfectly still, his expression unchanged, as if his mind couldn’t process the sudden reversal of our positions. Then his eyes rose to his wrist, to the cuff that now bound him to the chain hanging from my cell ceiling.
Confusion flickered across his features first—a furrowing of his brow, a slight parting of lips. Then understanding dawned, followed immediately by disbelief. His eyes snapped back to mine, searching my face for some explanation, some indication that this was a misunderstanding or a lovers’ game.
He found neither.
I stepped back quickly, putting distance between us before he could grab me with his free hand. The motion was awkward, my legs still unsteady after being suspended from the ceiling, but urgency lent me speed. One step. Two. Three. The cell door within reach now, held ajar as Valen had left it.
“Mireille?” My name was a question, confusion and the first stirrings of anger warring in his voice. He tugged at the manacle, testing its strength, still not fully comprehending that he was trapped. “What are you doing?”
I didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. My throat had closed around any words I might have offered—explanations, apologies, farewells.
There was nothing to say that would make this easier, nothing that would soften the blow of my betrayal.
Better to be silent than to offer hollow justifications for what we both knew was an unforgivable act.
I slipped through the cell door, my bare feet silent against the cold stone floor. Only when the bars stood between us did I allow myself to breathe, staring at the god who had nearly broken me.
The shock on his face was fading, replaced by something harder, colder.
The Valen I knew—Vharok, the God of Blood and Conquest—was returning, the momentary vulnerability burned away by the heat of betrayal.
He yanked at the manacle again, harder this time, his supernatural strength testing the limits of the restraint.
It held.
I gasped out a sob, nearly falling to my knees. I had done it. I had escaped my prison. My plan worked.
I did it, I did it, I did it.
My breath came fast, my fingers tightening around the bars. I hardly knew what to do, where to go from here.
No, I had my plan. I needed to free Death, to make it out of the dungeons, to flee this castle and perhaps this kingdom entirely.
“Mireille.” There was no question in Valen’s voice now, just my name, flat and dangerous.
I reached forward, my hand seeking the reassuring weight of the cell door. I needed to close it, to lock him in as he had locked me in for so many weeks. My fingers closed around the cold iron bars, ready to swing the heavy door shut.
“Don’t,” Valen said, the single word vibrating with power. Not a plea but a command, one that seemed to resonate in the very stones of the dungeon.
I hesitated, my grip tightening on the door. In that moment of stillness, I saw something cross Valen’s face—not rage, not yet, but a deep and terrible grief. As if he had been offered a glimpse of paradise only to watch it crumble to dust in his hands.
“Please,” he said, and this time it was a plea, a beg, raw and achingly sincere. “Don’t do this. Stay with me. Please.”
My knees buckled.
How many times had he told me he never begged?
How many times had he said I would never escape him?
How many times had he treated me like I was nothing more than a pet to him?
And now he was the one in chains. Now he begged for me.
“No,” I whispered.
Then I slammed the door shut, the metal bars crashing together with a finality that echoed through the dungeon like a death knell.
Our eyes met through the barrier—god and mortal, husband and wife, torturer and victim—connected by a thread of crimson and silver that pulsed with an almost unbearable light.
I knew then, with absolute certainty, that if I failed in my escape, if Valen freed himself before I could get away, there would be no more mercy. No more gentle kisses or tender touches. Only the full, unrestrained wrath of a god betrayed by the one creature he had wanted to trust.
“You little deceiver,” he whispered, the words slithering through the space between us. “You beautiful, treacherous creature.”
His lips twitched, an expression that might have been mistaken for a smile if not for the murderous gleam in his eyes.
Then, unexpectedly, a laugh erupted from his throat—a crazed, broken sound that bounced off the stone walls and crawled along my skin like insects.
It built in intensity, transforming from disbelief to manic hilarity, his shoulders shaking with it.
“Of course,” he gasped between bursts of laughter, yanking at the manacle that held him. “Of course you would betray me. How perfectly, tragically fitting. After everything, you still chose greed.”
I took another step back from the bars, putting more distance between us even as I felt an inexplicable urge to defend myself, to explain that this wasn’t about greed but survival.
I knew it was pointless. No explanation would matter to him now.
No justification would soothe the wound I had just inflicted. But I couldn’t stop myself.
“Greed?” The word burst from me. “You think this is about greed?” Rage, indignation, and beneath it all, a crushing sadness surged through me. “You tortured me. For weeks, Valen. You hung me from those same chains and cut me open every night for a revenge that had nothing to do with me.”
My voice echoed against the stone walls, each word ripping from my throat like it had claws. My hands gripped the bars, knuckles white with tension.
“And now you think I could be your queen? Your equal? Your wife? That I could forget everything you’ve done?
You’re mad!” Tears stung my eyes, but I refused to let them fall.
“We were never truly husband and wife. We will never truly be husband and wife. That ceremony was of blood and death, not marriage.”
“We were married before the gods,” he snarled, yanking again at his restraint. “Before our courts. The ceremony was witnessed, the vows exchanged. We are married, Mireille.”
“Vows spoken at sword-point aren’t vows at all,” I retorted, my voice steadier than I felt. “I was never going to be your wife, Valen. And I never will be.”
Something flashed across Valen’s face then—a ripple beneath the surface of his controlled facade.
For a moment, I thought I glimpsed genuine hurt in his eyes, quickly masked by a colder, more familiar anger.
He yanked at the manacle again, harder this time, and I saw the first signs of transformation begin—his skin taking on a coppery hue, his already imposing frame beginning to expand with divine power.
That was when I saw them. Runes. Ancient runes that lined the manacles holding Valen, pulsing and dancing in the same way I saw in Death’s mind. They flared bright as Valen’s transformation advanced, making me step back in a mixture of fear and uncertainty.
Then his transformation halted. A growl of frustration tore from his throat as his body fought against whatever binding magic was in the manacles, the sound caught between mortal form and divine manifestation.
It was inhuman, vibrating through the stone walls of the dungeon with enough force to send dust sifting from the ceiling.
I knew he had said he was housed in the same cell under my father’s reign.
Poetry, he said it was, keeping me there.
But I did not realize how thoroughly I had trapped him until now.
The runes lining the manacles, lining the cell bars, made sudden sense.
These were cells built to keep divine beings in.
That was why he never closed the door. Because he would be so easily caged.
My widened eyes drifted to the cell beside us, Death’s cell. I could see the same runes etched into his iron bars. What if I could unravel them like I had unraveled the rune while in his mind, in his domain? Would it dissolve the bars like it had the chain?
The sound of Valen pulling at the manacle made me jerk my attention back to him.
His features were blurring again, skin darkening to the deep crimson of his true form.
But as Vharok tried to emerge, the runes flared with blinding intensity.
A roar tore from his throat as his form snapped back to human, the divine power contained by ancient magic.
He yanked against the restraint violently, his free hand clenched into a fist so tight I could see blood seeping between his fingers.
He turned back to me, his expression one of pure malice.
“When I escape—and I will escape, my little traitor—there will be no place in any realm where you can hide from me.” His voice had changed, deeper now, resonating with the power of his true nature even as it was held in check.
“No mountain, no forest, no sea, will keep you from my wrath.”
His free hand gripped the chain attached to the wall, knuckles white with strain. “And those you love? Your precious Lysa and Isolde?” A cruel smile curved his lips. “They will never be safe. I will find them, hunt them to the edges of the world if that’s what it takes to bring you back to me.”
Ice flooded my veins, at the same moment I processed his words. He didn’t know where they were. Kas kept his promise. I only hoped that he would maintain it after this.
I stepped further away, each movement taking me closer to Death’s cell, closer to the next phase of my desperate plan. But then, I paused, needing to know with a desperate intensity if anything, anything, he said to me tonight was real.
“Was it true?” I asked, my voice cracking with the effort of speaking past the knot in my throat. “Everything you said to me tonight? About wanting me beside you?”
The rage in his expression fractured, revealing something underneath that was almost more frightening in its vulnerability. His mouth twisted with an emotion too complex to name—grief, longing, fury, all tangled together like the threads that bound us.
“I would have given you the world,” he said, his own voice sounding like his heart was breaking. “Everything I have. Everything I am. It would have been yours.”
I believed him. That was the cruelest part.
In that moment, with his defenses stripped away by betrayal, I could see the truth of his words written across his face.
He would have tried to be what I needed.
He would have attempted to reshape himself, to bury the monster beneath the man.
And perhaps, for a time, he might have succeeded.
But I had seen my future. I knew how our story ended.
“It wouldn’t have lasted,” I whispered, more to myself than to him. “You would have returned to this. To the torture. To the cruelty. It’s who you are.”
His expression hardened, the vulnerability retreating once more.
“And this is who you are,” he countered, gesturing to the cell door with his free hand.
“A traitor. Just like your father. Just like every mortal who has ever come before you, and will come after you.” He yanked again on his manacle, but almost half-heartedly.
“The difference is, my love… is you now belong to a god. And you will belong to me until the end of time.”