Chapter 36
OPHELIA
The second day after Cain brought me back to Alistair Estate.
I woke up, and for the first time in a very long time, I wasn't disappointed to be alive.
That was the strangest part. Usually, waking up in there—or even before that, in my father’s house—felt like a sentence. A return to the cage. But when I opened my eyes and saw the heavy velvet canopy of my bed, the only thing I felt was a greedy, desperate need to breathe.
I was safe.
The realisation didn't come all at once.
It came in fragments. The smell of lavender from the sheets.
The weight of the duvet, heavy and expensive, nothing like the damp straw that had scratched my skin raw.
The warmth of Poppy, a small furnace of golden fur curled against the curve of my stomach, her heartbeat syncing with mine.
I moved my hand, testing the reality. My wrist was bandaged, the skin beneath raw from the rope and iron manacles. I flinched at the sting, and the memory assaulted me.
Malathor’s hand on my thigh. The sound of tearing silk. The way he smelled of alcohol and entitlement.
I squeezed my eyes shut, my breath hitching in a panic that felt like a fist closing around my throat.
One, two, three.
"He is not here," a voice whispered in my mind. Not mine. Poppy’s. Faint, sleepy, but fierce.
I buried my face in her fur, inhaling the scent of wild grass and sunlight that she somehow always carried. "I know," I whispered back.
I looked toward the window.
Cain was there.
He was sitting in a high-backed armchair, his profile cut from granite against the grey morning light. He hadn't moved since he laid me down last night. He was still wearing the same shirt, now dry but wrinkled, the sleeves rolled up to reveal the lethal corded muscle of his tattooed forearms.
He wasn't looking at me. He was staring out at the rain, a glass of amber liquid resting on the arm of the chair. He looked... eroded. Like a cliff face that had taken the brunt of a hurricane and was waiting to crumble into the sea.
He smelled of petrichor, pomegranate, and a lot of brandy. A storm bottled and drowned.
I wanted to call his name. I wanted to ask him to come closer, to prove that he was real and not a fever dream conjured by the darkness of the cell.
But the air around him was jagged with tension.
The Void inside him—that dark, hungry thing I had sensed since the day we met—was louder.
It wasn't screaming; it was vibrating, a low-frequency hum of violence that made the shadows in the room stretch toward him.
So I stayed silent. I watched him watch the world, and I let the silence build a wall between us that I was too weak to climb.
The third day since Cain brought me back to the estate and one since going back to my chambers.
Silas brought me soup.
It was a rich, creamy broth with chunks of root vegetables, served on a silver tray with a single Lumina Blossom flower in a crystal vase.
"You must eat, My Lady," Silas said, his voice unusually soft. He stood by the bed, his hands clasped behind his back, looking at me with an expression that sat uncomfortably between pity and reverence. "Lord Cain will... be displeased if you wither."
"Where is he?" I asked, my voice scraping against a throat that still felt bruised from screaming in my nightmares.
"In the dungeons," Silas said. He didn't elaborate. He didn't have to.
I knew what Cain was doing. I could feel it. The estate felt different—there was a heaviness in the floorboards, a distant, muffled echo of agony that vibrated through the stone foundations. Malathor.
I should have been horrified. I should have told Silas to stop him.
But as I lifted the spoon to my lips, my hand trembling, a dark, vicious part of me—the part that had snapped in the cell—felt a cold flush of satisfaction. Let him rot, I thought, the venom of the thought shocking me. Let Cain peel him apart like he tried to do me.
Later that afternoon, I used the stone.
The velvet pouch Cain had given me sat on the nightstand like an oferring. I opened it with shaking fingers, pulling out the small, smooth obsidian disc.
"Aemelia?" I whispered, channeling a sliver of my intent into the rock.
The response was immediate. The stone flared with a soft blue light, and her voice filled the room, tinny but unmistakable.
"Ophelia! Oh, thank the gods. Oh, you stupid, reckless, beautiful idiot!"
I broke. The sound of her voice—my sister, my tether—shattered the numbness I had been wrapping myself in.
"I'm okay," I sobbed, curling around the stone, rocking back and forth. "I'm okay, Em. He came for me."
"I know he did," Aemelia sniffled. "I watched him leave, Ophelia. I've never seen anything like it. He looked like he was going to murder the sun for daring to set on you. Are you... are you whole?"
“Mostly," I lied.
I didn't tell her about the dress. I didn't tell her about the way Malathor had looked at me, or the things Rosette had said about Cain. I didn't tell her that every time I closed my eyes, I felt hands on me—phantom touches that made my skin crawl.
"He's terrified, you know," Aemelia said quietly after a while. "Cain. When he came to me... he was shaking, Ophelia. He hides it behind all that broodiness and leather, but he was terrified."
I looked at the empty chair by the window. "He won't talk to me. He sits there every night, but he won't even look at me."
"Give him time," she said. "He's dealing with the fact that he's not as invincible as he thought. Males with god-complexes don't handle vulnerability well."
I fell asleep holding the stone, wishing that vulnerability didn't look so much like hatred.
Five days have passed since I got back.
Friedrik came in with a deck of cards and a mission.
"Whist," he announced, dropping the worn, slightly singed deck onto the duvet. "Or at least, a variation of it I learned from a drunk sailor who came to bargain with another brooding Alistair centuries ago. Are you up for it, Little Ophie? Or are you going to mope until the moss grows on you?"
I managed a weak smile. "I don't think I have much choice now, do I?"
"None at all."
He climbed onto the foot of the bed—a massive, comical sight, his stone claws careful not to snag the silk. Poppy immediately hopped onto his head, settling between his shoulder blades like a conqueror.
We played for hours.
It was exactly what I needed. Friedrik was loud, boisterous, and completely devoid of pity. He treated me like Ophelia from before, not the Broken Aenite.
"You're cheating," I accused him on the fourth hand, pointing a finger at him. "That card changed suits. I saw it shift!"
"I am a creature of stone and magic," Friedrik sniffed, shuffling the deck with surprising dexterity. "I do not cheat. I merely encourage the cards to reach their full potential."
I laughed. It was a rusty, foreign sound, but it felt good. "You are a menace, Friedrik."
He paused, looking at me with his glowing amber eyes. The humor faded, replaced by an ancient, weary kindness.
"We missed that sound," he said softly. "The house was... quiet without it. Too quiet. Even the shadows seemed depressed."
I looked down at the cards in my lap. "I didn't think I would ever laugh again."
"You will," Friedrik promised. "You are tougher than you look. And besides..." He nodded toward the door. "He needs to hear it too."
I glanced at the door. It was slightly ajar. I hadn't noticed it before.
"Is he there?" I whispered.
"Always," Friedrik murmured, dealing the next hand. "He prowls the hallway like a tiger with a toothache. He is listening to every breath you take, Ophelia. He thinks if he stops listening, you'll disappear again."
The thought made my chest ache. It wasn't romantic; it was tragic. We were two haunted houses standing side by side, wondering why the ghosts wouldn't leave.
The seventh day since Cain saved me.
The dream was always the same.
The smell of damp stone. The flickering torchlight. Malathor’s face, twisting from handsome to skeletal.
“Does he touch you?” the dream-Malathor hissed, his voice overlapping with Rosette’s. “Does he break you?”
In the dream, I was paralysed. My limbs were lead. I watched as his hand reached out—not for my throat, but lower. He grabbed the bodice of my gown. The sound of ripping fabric was deafening, louder than thunder.
I felt his hand on my skin. Cold. Wet. Violating.
"No!" I screamed, thrashing against the mattress. "Get off! Get off me!"
I woke up swinging.
My fist connected with something solid.
"Ophelia!"
The voice cracked through the nightmare.
I gasped, sitting bolt upright, my chest heaving, sweat soaking my nightgown. The room was dark, lit only by the dying embers of the fire.
Cain was standing by the bed. He had caught my wrist mid-swing.
His eyes were blown wide, silver pits in the gloom, his stormy grey swirling with life inside them. He smelled heavily of brandy tonight—sharper, more acrid.
"You were screaming," he said, his voice rough.
I pulled my wrist back, scrambling away from him until my back hit the headboard. "Don't," I choked out, the dream still bleeding into reality. "Don't touch me, please.”
It was the wrong thing to say.
Cain flinched as if I had struck him with a whip. He took a step back, his hands raising in a gesture of surrender.
"I am not him," he rasped.
"I know," I wept, pulling my knees to my chest. "I know, I know. But I can still feel it, Cain. I can feel his hands. It won't stop. Why won't it stop?"
I looked at him, begging him to fix it. Begging him to do something.
But he didn't move. He stood there, frozen in the shadows, looking at me with an expression of such profound self-loathing that it scared me more than the nightmare.
He wanted to comfort me. I saw his hand twitch, reaching out. But then he looked at his own fingers—the fingers that carried the Death Touch—and he curled them into a fist.
"I cannot wash it away," he whispered, speaking to himself. "I cannot cut it out."
“Can you just hold me?” I whispered. "Please."