Chapter 38
CAIN
The air in my private chambers—a vast, obsidian suite overlooking the dead gardens—was colder than usual. It wasn't a natural chill; it was the temperature of my own decaying sanity leaking into the room.
I stood by the floor-to-ceiling window, the silence of the room a thin, fragile shield against the resurgence of the consumed pain that warred with the agonising new pressure of regret and responsibility.
The Void inside me was not sleeping tonight.
It was pacing. It whispered in a language of static and screams, urging me to let go, to stop holding the structural integrity of my mind together and just… break.
I looked at my hands. They were trembling. Not from fear, but from the sheer, overwhelming effort of containing the darkness I had absorbed at Malathor’s fortress. I had consumed too much rot. I had swallowed too much death to save her, and now, my core was a wasteland.
I could see the contamination spreading. The veins in my wrists were no longer blue; they were black, branching out like cracks in a porcelain vase. My skin felt tight, feverish, as if the magic was trying to boil its way out.
And I had just brought her right into the centre of the fallout zone.
"You are a fool," I hissed to my reflection in the glass.
The reflection grinned back—a manic, shadowed thing that didn't quite match my movements.
It blinked when I didn't. It whispered when I was silent.
Behind my reflection, I saw movement in the glass—shadows writhing on the walls, shaping themselves into the faces of males I had killed years ago.
They were mouthing words I couldn't hear, but I could feel the vibrations of their accusations in my teeth.
I squeezed my eyes shut, shaking my head to clear the vision. When I opened them, the faces were gone, but the feeling of being watched remained, a prickling heat at the base of my neck.
I was mad to bring her here. I had snapped in the hallway, my possessiveness overriding my logic.
I wanted to punish her for trying to contact Caspian, yes.
But the truth—the ugly, jagged truth—was that I was starving.
I was a drowning male who had dragged a lifeline into the abyss, not caring if it snapped.
I heard the quiet opening of the main chamber door.
Ophelia.
I didn't need my eyes to know her movements were slow, her defiance a small, stubborn ember I could taste through the bond. She felt like rain on parched earth. She felt like the only thing in the universe that wasn't screaming right now.
She was now wearing only a simple silk nightgown, a direct order meant to strip her of her defences and make her focus on the immediacy of her vulnerability.
But as I watched her reflection in the glass, seeing the way the silk clung to her frail frame, the cruelty of my command turned to ash in my mouth.
I didn't see a conquered wife. I saw the bruises on her arms. I saw the way she hugged herself, not for warmth, but to hold her shattered pieces together.
"Monster," the Void whispered, its voice sounding disturbingly like my father's. "She is broken, and you are the hammer."
“She is in your lair. No matter how grateful I am for what she did, Cain, I can never endorse this. It’s madness.
” Rhana’s mental snarl was muffled. The panther was resting under a heated spell pad near the hearth, still recovering from the magical blow she’d taken from Evar.
Even my familiar was disgusted with me. She had curled her back to me, refusing to look at the bed.
“This means nothing, Rhana. This is necessary stabilisation,” I thought, the lie smooth and practiced, even to myself. But my hands clenched into fists, the knuckles turning white. It was a trap. I was trapping her in my madness because I was too weak to be alone with it.
I finally turned.
Ophelia stood near the edge of the immense, black canopied bed, its pristine white silk sheets a stark contrast to the room's darkness.
Her arms were wrapped around her body, and I felt the raw, chaotic noise of her internal world—the pain of her previous captivity, the cold terror of her new proximity, and the sharp, unsettling hum of her Life-Wielder core fighting my Void for supremacy.
She looked terrifyingly small in this room designed for giants and ghosts.
The ceiling vaulted twenty feet above us, swallowed by shadows that writhed and coiled like living serpents.
To my fracturing mind, the shadows seemed to be dripping, leaking a viscous black fluid that vanished before it hit the floor.
Despite the distance, I could still faintly hear the phantom echo of Friedrik's cynical assessment from the central archway, now trapped in my memory.
("Eight generations and he still hasn't learned manners!
Utterly hopeless!") The gargoyle’s judgment was a constant, irritating static I couldn't quite extinguish.
"The bed is large enough," I stated, my voice flat, stripping the sentence of the desperate need that underpinned it. "You will sleep on the far side. My core requires your proximity for filtration, not... company."
I couldn't look at her eyes. If I looked at her eyes, I would cross the room. I would fall to my knees and beg her to forgive me for the "fit to be fucked" comment, for the cruelty, for the fact that I was currently hallucinating centipedes crawling out of the inkwell on my desk.
I moved past her, my black robes a silent shroud, and lifted a heavy, ancient tome from my bedside table—the Cenitus Lex, the cold law of the Cenites.
I settled myself on the far side of the bed, leaning against the cold obsidian headboard, deliberately creating a vast, chilling distance between us.
The mattress dipped under her weight. That small shift in gravity felt like a tectonic plate moving.
My breath hitched. She was here. In my bed.
The scent of jasmine and soap wafted across the sheets, assaulting my senses, making the Void roar in confusion.
It wanted to recoil from the purity, and yet, it wanted to devour it.
Ophelia moved slowly, deliberately, her defiance a subtle movement. She slid under the sheets, her body held rigid and tense.
"You won't sleep," Ophelia whispered, her voice low, breaking the heavy silence. "You won't sleep because you're terrified of the boy you used to be. And you're terrified of what you might dream."
The accusation, sharp and accurate, hit me with the force of a magical attack.
It stripped away the Heir of Death persona and left only the damaged vessel beneath.
She saw past the power. She saw the trauma.
The consumed pain in my core immediately flared in response, a searing agony in my left temple.
The shadows in the corners of the room elongated, reaching for me like claws. She knows, they hissed. She knows you are rotting from the inside out. She knows you are weak.
I closed my eyes, fighting to contain the surge.
"My sleep is a matter of magic, Ophelia.
Not sentiment. The cumulative pain I consume manifests in night terrors.
If I sleep, the barriers fall. If the barriers fall, the room fills with the screams of the dying.
Do you want to hear them? Your presence is required to dampen the frequency of the consumed emotions and prevent contamination of my core. "
"A living shield against your guilt," she corrected, her voice soft but venomous. "You are forcing me to bear your past."
"I am forcing you to survive me!" The words almost ripped out of my throat, but I swallowed them down, tasting bile. I clenched the book so hard the leather binding cracked beneath my fingertips.
"I am forcing you to fulfil the function of the bond," I returned instead, opening my eyes. I lowered the heavy book. "You are here to provide stability. Not judgment."
I felt the pure, quiet fury rising within her, and then, a profound, agonising loneliness. It mirrored my own so perfectly that for a second, I couldn't tell where I ended and she began.
I wanted to bridge the distance. I wanted to pull her against me and let her Life burn the rot out of my veins and mind.
But I knew—I knew with a terrifying certainty—that if I touched her now, with my control hanging by a thread, I wouldn't just hold her.
I would consume her. I would take everything she had until she was as hollow as I was.
I was a parasite. And I think I needed her more than I needed to feed off her.
I watched her shoulders shake, just slightly. She was fighting tears. She was fighting the urge to run, knowing the door was locked by my will. She was terrified, and that terror was a loud, discordant note in the room, scratching against my already raw nerves.
I couldn't stand it. I couldn't stand the noise of her fear.
I moved.
It was a blur of motion. I shifted across the expanse of the mattress, my body hovering over hers before she could even gasp.
"Cain?" she breathed, her eyes widening in panic.
I didn't speak. I reached out, my hand trembling slightly, and pressed my palm against the side of her face, my thumb resting against her temple.
Her skin was hot. Mine was corpse-cold.
I didn't pull away. I pushed.
I didn't use the bond to comfort her. I accessed the darkest, hungriest part of my magic—the Pain-Eater—and I latched onto her emotional core.
It was a violation. It was theft.
I pulled the fear out of her. I drank the panic, the sorrow, the sharp, jagged edges of her trauma. I siphoned it from her mind and pulled it into my own Void.
The sensation was instantaneous and overwhelming.
A jolt of pure, unadulterated ecstasy slammed into my chest. It was better than brandy.
It was better than violence. It was a rush of relief so profound it made my vision blur.
The agony in my head vanished, replaced by the sweet, addictive nectar of her suffering.
It mixed with a deep, crushing sorrow that wasn't mine, a cocktail of emotions that made my heart stutter.
Ophelia’s eyes fluttered shut. Her back arched off the mattress, and a low, soft moan escaped her lips—a sound of confusion and release as the weight of her fear was forcibly lifted.
I shuddered, a groan tearing from my own throat as I drank her pain. It felt good. Gods, it felt too good. It was the relief of a starving male finally tasting meat.
It didn't make sense.
Usually, feeding on pain was a burden. Every other soul I had ever drained added a new voice to the choir of the damned screaming in my head. Every drop of agony I swallowed usually hastened the rot, feeding the madness until the walls bled.
But her pain? Her fear?
It didn't feed the noise. It silenced it.
The Void curled around the taste of her sorrow like a lover, settling into a contented, purring slumber I had never felt before. It was a devastating, twisted irony: the world’s suffering drove me mad, but my wife’s suffering made me whole.
I looked down at her face, the revelation chilling me to the bone. She was the Stabiliser, yes. But not because of her light. Because even her darkness tasted like salvation.
I pulled back, my hand lingering on her cheek for a fraction of a second too long, my fingers twitching with the urge to take more. To take it all.
"Sleep," I rasped, my voice unrecognisable.
Ophelia slumped back against the pillows, her expression slack, her breathing instantly deepening into a rhythm of artificial peace. She was once again sedated. Not by alchemy, but by me.
I retreated to my side of the bed, my chest heaving, the taste of her pain sweet and heavy on my tongue.
It was a kindness, I told myself, the lie bitter. I silenced her fear so I could rest. So she could rest.
But deep down, as the ecstasy faded into a dull, satisfied throb, I knew what it really was. It was a feeding. And I had enjoyed it.
I settled back against the headboard, picking up the Cenitus Lex with hands that were shaking violently.
I stared at the pages.
The ink began to move.
First, it was just a shimmer. Then, the letters detached themselves from the parchment. They sprouted legs. Hundreds of tiny, black spiders scuttled across the page, swarming over my thumbs.
I blinked, hard. They didn't disappear.
"Get off," I whispered, flicking the page.
One of the spiders looked up at me. It had Malathor’s face. It opened its mouth and screamed—a tiny, high-pitched sound that drilled into my ear.
I slammed the book shut, the sound echoing in the silent room.
Across the room, near the fire, Rhana lifted her head. Her golden eyes narrowed, fixing on me with a sharp, predatory intelligence.
“Did you speak?” her voice slid into my mind, laced with suspicion.
I froze. I hadn't realised I'd spoken aloud. The scream of the spider was still ringing in my ears, but the room was dead silent.
"Just reading," I lied, my voice tight. "Go back to sleep, Rhana."
Rhana stared at me for a long moment. She sniffed the air, sensing the spike in my cortisol, the erratic beat of my heart. She knew something was wrong. She had always known. But Cain Alistair was a creature of wrongness; she had simply grown accustomed to the scent of my decay.
“Rest your mind, Cain,” she warned softly, lowering her head back to her paws. “The cracks are showing.”
I didn't answer her. I couldn't.
I looked down at the book in my lap. The leather cover was pulsing, breathing like a lung.
I pushed it away, sickened.
I looked at Ophelia. She was sleeping soundly, her face turned toward me, her hand resting on the pillow between us. She looked peaceful. I had stolen that peace for her, and in doing so, I had damned myself a little further.
I wanted to reach out. My hand twitched, longing to touch the curve of her shoulder, to anchor myself in the reality of her solid, warm form. I needed to know she was real. I needed to know I wasn't hallucinating her too.
But I pulled my hand back, curling it into a fist against my chest.
If I touched her again, I wouldn't stop. I would drain her dry.
"I'm sorry," I whispered to the shadows, hoping the spiders couldn't hear me.
I waved my hand, sending a tendril of shadow to snuff the candles, plunging the room into absolute darkness, and waited for the nightmares to come and claim what was left of me.