17. A Heart Still Beating #2
So it pulled me past the racks and the barrels toward the far end of the vault, where the smell changed.
Where the comfortable mustiness gave way to something colder and the stone turned slick beneath my feet.
There were doors down here. More than one.
Heavy, iron-banded things sunk deep into the walls, and one of them stood ajar as if waiting for me.
It opened onto a second stairway that fell away into darkness.
A black, breathing throat of a passage that sank down and down, deeper still and beneath the very foundations of the castle.
Cold poured up from it, raising the hairs along my arms, and every animal instinct I owned told me that whatever waited at the bottom of those steps was not something I ever wanted to meet.
But the voice wouldn’t release its grip on me.
It drew me on instead, but this time through a narrow archway I would have sworn hadn’t been there a breath before. So down I went, one last tight coil of steps, until they ended at last, opening into a small chamber.
This far below the foundations, I’d expected even more darkness, dampness, and rot.
Instead, the room was well lit, firelight bouncing off the walls and making the space seem larger than it was.
And that was the thing that unsettled me most. Because the sconces all the way down the stairwell, and the ones ringing this room, burned bright and steady, as though they had only just been lit.
As though someone had been expecting me.
The voice called again, and the flames flickered violently in answer.
‘Alexandra.’
I turned a slow circle, my face scrunched in confusion, because the chamber was empty. There was no woman here. There was nothing here at all, save a single, solitary pedestal standing in the center of the room.
And upon it sat a single ornate box.
Impossibly, the voice seemed to pulse from within it. The box’s wood gleamed dark and polished, its curved lid etched all over with curling gold filigree.
I edged closer, my heart slamming so hard I half believed it would leap clean out of my chest. The latch on the lid wiggled, a faint rattle of metal in the silence, and I jerked back, dread and curiosity tearing me in two.
Every sensible cell in my body screamed at me to turn around and run back up those stairs into the safe, warm circle of Atlas’s arms.
But I no longer seemed to have any say in the matter.
‘Alexandra… open… me’
Without letting myself think, I grabbed the box and shoved the latch hard. It popped open with a creak, and I fumbled it back onto the pedestal. Then I stepped away, needing a moment, both hands pressed to my racing heart. I half expected something to come surging out at me.
Nothing did.
Instead, a new sound filled the chamber. A wet, rhythmic thumping that turned my stomach over. I crept closer, every sense on a knife’s edge, and even before I looked, some deep, certain part of me already knew what I would find.
Resting on a bed of deep purple velvet was…
A heart.
A real human heart.
Raw and organic and shockingly, obscenely out of place.
And it was beating!
“No… impossible,” I muttered, shaking my head as if this would help rid me of the sight.
It looked fresh, slick, and visceral, as though it had been set there only moments before.
I wanted to run from it, yet my fingers drifted helplessly above it as if they were no longer my own.
I felt the cold pouring off it in waves, stinging my skin, as if the thing were drinking the very warmth out of the room.
I shouldn’t have touched it.
I knew that. Every fiber of my being knew that.
Yet the tips of my fingers brushed the slick, cold flesh anyway.
And then the chamber… dissolved into darkness.
I found myself standing in a cramped little workroom, dirty pots stacked high beside a great tub of water. A young man lounged against a narrow worktop, his dark hair falling in waves to his shoulders, and the breath caught in my throat.
Because I knew that face.
Or near enough. He looked like both Atlas and Lazaros, a blend of the two. The same proud bones, the same dark eyes, though his mouth curled into something far more arrogant than I had ever seen on either brother.
A crown I recognized was nestled in his hair.
Hyperion.
It had to be… their father.
He was looking right at me, and I started back before I realized he was actually looking straight through me.
His mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear a word of it.
I turned and found myself face to face with a young woman of about his age, her dress patched and threadbare, a world away from his fine clothes.
When I looked back, he was still speaking, in silent words, and her eyes crinkled at the corners before she threw her head back in a laugh I couldn’t hear.
But I could see it in every line of her, in the bob of her throat, the rise and fall of her chest. The young king’s eyes lit like a struck flint, and I could clearly see the love blooming between them.
The room began to fade, and I dropped to a crouch as vertigo rolled through me.
A stone step rose up beneath my hands, and I stumbled upright.
They were there again, the same man and woman, he in his exquisite clothes, she in her servant’s rags.
Only now we stood in a narrow, winding stairwell, her back pressed to the cold stone, and he braced over her.
For one ugly moment, I thought he meant her harm.
Then their mouths met, their hands grasping at each other with a passion I knew far too well.
My heart twisted for Atlas as the scene blurred and spun faster and faster until the world melted away, and I squeezed my eyes shut as I braced.