Chapter 17
Marcellious
The incessant chittering of cockroaches grated against my eardrums as Balthazar and I crashed into a dank, dust-choked room. A howl of agony ripped from my throat as pain radiated from my shattered leg. My breath hitched at the grotesque angle of my bones, twisted and bent like broken twigs.
Wisps of spiderwebs clung to the ceiling, trembling in the hot breeze that slithered through cracks in the floor. The eerie glow of ever-burning torches illuminated the tangle of silk, casting flickering shadows like skeletal fingers reaching for us.
I pressed a hand over my nose and mouth. The stench of rot seeping up from the room below, where the cockroaches nested, was suffocating.
I knew this place—Balthazar’s dungeon.
Panic gnawed at my gut. He always took us to his gilded lair, never here. He must be in worse shape than I thought.
I scanned the room, tracking the old baby buggies strewn about, their sightless dolls slumped in eerie repose—remnants of the torment Balthazar once designed for Olivia.
Something writhed in the corner.
I lurched forward, dragging myself in a three-limbed crawl. The acrid scent of burnt flesh curled in my nostrils, and I recoiled as steam hissed from the deep, gaping slash in Balthazar’s abdomen.
He lifted his head, his face half-swallowed in shadow, his skin ghostly pale. “What the hell are you gawking at?” he rasped.
I swallowed hard, trying not to breathe too deeply. “We need to get you somewhere cleaner—”
“Do I look like I can move?” he wheezed.
A fat cockroach wriggled through a crack in the floorboards.
“Go.” Balthazar’s voice was barely more than a breath. “Get me my Calabar tonic. The one I used to heal you.”
“What if the cockroaches get to you before I return?” I lurched upright, balancing unsteadily on my one good leg.
“I’ll bite off their heads. I don’t know.” Pain tinged Balthazar’s voice. “Can you stop asking so many fucking questions and just do as you’re told? Go!”
I didn’t argue. I staggered into the next room—a stark contrast to the dungeon.
This space was cleaner, and the air was less suffocating.
On an old fireplace mantel, a vial labeled Calabar gleamed in the dim light.
The liquid inside was dark, thick, and viscous, gleaming like fresh blood spilled across the pavement.
My breath hitched. Memories slammed into me, dragging me back to the moment that same vile substance had been used to heal me. My mind spiraled, trapped in the searing flashbacks—Balthazar standing over me, the acidic goo oozing over my torn flesh, the unbearable burn, the scent of scorched skin.
I forced myself to move. He didn’t have time for my hesitation.
When I returned, cockroaches had broken free, skittering toward Balthazar in hungry waves.
I stomped on the closest ones, feeling their brittle bodies crack and burst beneath my heel.
Their brethren didn’t flee. Instead, they swarmed the fallen, tearing into them with snapping mandibles, devouring their own like ravenous beasts.
Balthazar barely reacted. His breath came in ragged gasps, his skin glistening with sweat. He waved a jittery hand over his abdomen.
“Pour it over the wound. Then do the same for your mangled leg.”
His shirt was damp, clinging to his chest, his body racked with pain.
I didn’t hesitate. Clamping down on the cap with my teeth, I twisted it off and recoiled as the stench hit me—burnt hair, mold, and spoiled milk. My stomach lurched.
Still, I tipped the vial over Balthazar’s open wound.
The second the liquid touched his flesh, he let out a scream so mangled, it sent the cockroaches scuttling back into the cracks.
“More!” Balthazar rasped in agony.
I let another thin drizzle fall from the glass bottle.
He screamed again. “Pour it on your leg. Do it before infection takes over.”
I hesitated, gripping the bottle so tightly my knuckles turned white. I knew the kind of pain this so-called healing elixir inflicted.
“Do it!” Balthazar bellowed.
My hands trembled so violently I nearly spilled the tonic, but I forced myself to tip it over my distorted bones.
The moment the liquid touched my skin, a firestorm of agony erupted through my body. I howled—an inhuman sound—before darkness swallowed me whole.
When I came to, I was draped over Balthazar, my cheek pressed against his damp, feverish chest. The bottle of tonic was still clenched upright in my stiff fingers.
I jerked back, disoriented, my breath coming in ragged gasps. My gaze snapped to his wound. The flesh was still raw and angry, an oozing pit of torn skin, but the steam had stopped, and the scent of decay no longer clung to it.
I lifted my leg. The grotesque twist had lessened—still maimed but not as ruined as before.
Balthazar groaned. “Help me up.”
With a monumental effort, I heaved myself onto my one good leg and pulled Balthazar upright. We leaned into each other, half-collapsing, half-staggering toward the next room.
I steered him toward an opulent red velvet sofa. He dropped onto it, landing on his back.
I barely reached the oversized chair in the same shade before my legs buckled.
For a long moment, we lay there, gasping—the only sounds in the room were our ragged breathing and the distant chitter of cockroaches in the walls.
Balthazar spoke first, his voice filled with contempt. “That son of a bitch. How dare he do that to me? He poisoned me with belladonna! How the hell did he get his hands on it?”
I barely had the strength to respond. “Who are we talking about?” My eyelids were too heavy to lift.
“Malik, that’s who! How did he escape? How did he survive? I saw his damn body steaming, burning—covered in scorch marks and fistulas. Who the hell helped him? No one is stronger than me.”
He tried to sit up but gave up with a grunt, collapsing back against the sofa.
I had no answer, no thoughts, only exhaustion pressing me down like a stone. Sleep dragged me under—dark, merciless. I fell endlessly through vast and shadowed voids, plummeting into nothingness.
A warm, wet touch on my forehead pulled me back. My eyelids fluttered open.
Balthazar knelt before me, dipping a thick cloth into a basin and dabbing my skin. He smiled—soft, almost tender.
What the hell had changed in him?
Something stirred inside me, unfamiliar and unsettling.
“You made me proud today, Marcellious,” he said, his voice lower, almost…fatherly.
I blinked, staring at him as if seeing a stranger—the darkness known as Balthazar was gone, at least for now.
“Thanks to you, we now have the journal.” He squeezed the rag over the basin, water splashing noisily into the pan.
Balthazar wiped my brow, then my neck. “I’m so very proud. You’ve been a good soldier.”
The words sent a strange chill through me.
I glanced around the room. The fire crackled in the hearth, its golden glow casting lambent shadows on the walls. The air carried the warm scent of beeswax candles, starkly contrasting the filth and decay festering in the room beyond.
“I’m glad to hear it, master,” I said, my voice quieter than intended.
Balthazar studied me with a soft expression, so foreign to his usually harsh features, that it tightened my chest. “You’re like my son now. You’re an ally I can count on.”
His unexpected kindness ached in a way I didn’t know how to process.
“Thank you for saying that. You have no idea what it means to me.”
“It’s true.” His rough, callused fingers brushed against my cheek, a fleeting caress that sent a ripple of something unidentifiable through me. “It doesn’t matter that Dahlia is dead. You served her well. You made her last days a blessing instead of a curse.”
He turned, crossing the room in a few strides before returning with the journal.
“Sit up and read it to me.”
I barely had the strength to shift, but Balthazar slid a firm hand behind my back, lifting me out of my slumped position easily.
I took the worn book, fingers brushing over its aged leather cover, and flipped through brittle pages filled with an unfamiliar script. “I can’t read it. It’s in a language I don’t know.”
Balthazar plucked the book from my hands, settling onto the sofa with a thoughtful hum. He turned a few pages, his brows furrowing. “It’s in Italian. That’s where I met her, you know—Italy.”
He smoothed the open book over his lap and began to read aloud.
“July 17th, 1561. Balthazar has been my secret lover for nearly five years now. We meet under the cover of nightfall, coming together with lusty abandon. Thoughts of him consume me. My parents have been pressuring me to marry for some time now…”
His voice wove through the room like a ghost, a past neither of us had been prepared to unearth.
“Ah, yes,” he murmured, bowing his head in reverence. “This is where she bares her heart to her father and confesses what I meant to her.”
His tone had a raw, fractured pain, something deeper than I had ever heard from him. Something dangerous.
Balthazar pressed the journal against his chest, his eyes squeezing shut, his arms tightening around it as if he could hold her memory together through sheer will. “Oh, my dear, sweet Alina. My only true love.”
I watched him. The ruthless darkness, absorbed by grief and longing? The contrast unsettled me. Had Malik’s attack altered something within him? His sudden tenderness, no matter how welcome, felt wrong—like a borrowed mask that didn’t quite fit.
Then, he continued reading—sometimes in English, sometimes in fluid, lyrical Italian. With each passage, his demeanor shifted.
The devotion grew into something darker. The obsession bled through.
His head fell back in a swoon, a guttural groan tearing from his throat. “Oh, my beloved Alina! How I miss you! How I long to see you, feel you, taste you again! Ours was a love of the ages—unsurpassed in all its glory!”
His fingers tightened around the pages, and suddenly, he was flipping through them faster.
The tenderness vanished.