Chapter 5
FIVE
The lock surrendered on the third try.
I can't believe that worked. First attempt at unlocking a door with a hairpin. Beginner's luck. Hope it lasts.
Octavia stood in the doorway of her prison, her heart hammering against her ribs. She withdrew the hairpin and held her breath, waiting for alarms, for footsteps, for anything. Nothing came. The door swung inward on silent hinges. She stepped into the corridor and listened.
Silence echoed off the twelve-foot vaulted ceilings. Walls of dark stone, polished to a mirror-like sheen, threw her reflection back at her: her locs hanging loose down her back, shoes in hand, and bare feet on the floor so she wouldn’t make a sound.
She made her way down the hallway, noting how the sconces along the walls were sculptures in their own right. Each one was probably worth more than her last gallery show had earned. She continued on toward the north wing. She needed to find an exit more private than the front door.
She moved left, and the corridor split. She chose the wider branch, her bare feet silent on the stone. There was more art. Everywhere, more art. As if it had been placed there purposely to distract her.
It was working.
A painting on the north wall stopped her mid-step.
Oil on canvas, massive—six feet tall, four feet wide.
A Thessari landscape rendered in colors that shouldn't exist together but did, singing against each other in harmonics that made her chest ache.
The brushwork was confident. Fearless. She didn't recognize the artist, couldn't read the alien script of the signature, but her hands curled at her sides with the phantom weight of her brushes.
She forced herself to keep moving.
The next corridor held sculptures on pedestals.
Carved stone, blown glass, even one that looked like frozen light given form.
Museum-quality pieces displayed with perfect spacing, perfect illumination.
Curation that spoke to a genuine eye rather than purchased taste.
Whoever had arranged this collection understood composition.
Understood that art needed room to breathe.
She wondered if Skarreth had taken the time to place it himself, then quickly pushed the thought aside as she reminded herself to get moving.
The corridor split again. She chose left.
The same dark stone, the same golden veining, the same sconces, but different art—a series of small portraits, alien faces she didn't recognize, each painted with a tenderness that slowed her pace despite herself.
She shook off the observation. Right now, she needed to find the exit.
She counted doors. Fourteen in the last three corridors, all closed, all locked when she tested the handles.
The architecture repeated with deliberate confusion—hallways that curved when they should have been straight, intersections that offered three choices when she expected two.
A labyrinth designed to swallow anyone who didn't already know the path.
A prison wearing a palace's clothes.
She turned a corner and found a vast library.
Two stories of shelves climbed toward a domed ceiling painted with constellations she didn't recognize.
Books, data crystals, scrolls in cases, tablets of carved stone.
Reading chairs upholstered in deep blue fabric.
A fireplace that burned with a pale, heatless flame.
And Lord Skarreth, seated in one of those chairs with a book open across his knee, dressed in black from collar to boot, his ice-blue eyes already fixed on the doorway where she stood. He’d been waiting for her.
"Leaving so soon, Octavia?"
His voice was the same as at the auction—cultured, resonant, filling the room without effort. His elongated fangs caught the firelight when he smiled.
Every nerve in her body screamed danger. She took a step back. Then another.
She ran.
Back through the split corridor, left where she'd gone right before and through a new hallway. New art she didn't stop to see. A door at the end, heavy wood banded with iron. She threw herself against it with both hands. Locked. Another corridor. Another door. Locked. Another. Locked.
Skarreth’s deep voice reached her from somewhere behind, unhurried, carrying through the marble-floored hallways.
"Octavia."
Just her name. No threat attached. No raised volume. Worse than shouting—a confident calm with no need to rush.
She found a staircase and took it down two steps at a time, her bare feet slapping the stone.
Ground floor, finally. A wider hallway with windows—actual windows, the first she'd seen—showing darkness outside, starlight, the suggestion of open ground.
She pressed her hands against the glass. Sealed. No latches, no mechanisms.
"Octavia."
Closer now. Still calm.
She followed the wall, searching for a break.
There—a door, narrower than the others. The handle turned.
Cool air hit her face, and she nearly sobbed with the shock of it.
She pushed through into the darkness, and the garden engulfed her.
Hedges rose on either side, eight feet tall, walls of dense foliage that swallowed the starlight.
A path of pale gravel wound forward, branching, splitting. Of course. Even the outside was a maze.
She chose a direction and ran.
The hedges were beautiful. Even terrified, the artist in her registered their strangeness—not green but deep indigo, leaves that held an iridescent sheen, and flowers.
Roses, or flora that wore the shape of roses while being nothing from Earth.
Blooms the color of bruised twilight, petals edged in silver that caught what little light filtered through the canopy above.
She brushed against the hedge while turning a corner and gasped.
Pain. Sharp and immediate from a dozen points of fire along her forearm. She jerked back and stared at her skin. Blood welled from thin cuts, slender as paper slices, where the thorns had caught her. The roses had thorns like glass needles, nearly invisible.
She kept going. The gravel path forked. She went right.
The hedges pressed closer, narrowing the passage.
Thorns caught her clothes, her shoulder, the back of her hand when she pushed a low-hanging branch aside.
Each contact left its mark—thin lines of red that beaded and dripped.
She was painting a trail with her own body.
She emerged into a small clearing—a dead end, ringed by hedges with a stone bench at its center. She doubled back and chose the other fork. Another dead end. Another. The maze folded in on itself, recursive, patient, built to exhaust.
From somewhere in the dark, his voice carried.
"I can smell your blood, little human."
The words settled over her like frost. This is it, she thought. This is what those rumored whispers of Lord Skarreth were about. This is the hunt. She pressed her bleeding forearm against her stomach.
A howl split the night.
Inhuman. Animal. Hungry.
Octavia ran until her lungs burned. The cuts stung in the night air, dozens of them now—forearms, shoulders, a long scrape across her collarbone where she'd misjudged the width of a passage.
The gravel bit into her bare feet. She'd been running for—how long?
Minutes? An hour? The same indigo hedges and silver-edged roses repeating in every direction.
The howl came again, closer this time, and ice ran up her spine.
She hit another dead end, and her legs buckled.
She went down on one knee in the pale gravel, breathing hard, blood dripping from her fingertips, her shoes abandoned on the ground.
Her body shook. Sweat and blood mixed on her skin, stinging every cut.
She could keep running. The maze might have an exit.
She could crawl if her legs wouldn't hold her, drag herself through the gravel on bleeding hands.
She'd been running her whole life.
From her mother's hospital room at fifteen, where the machines had stopped, and she'd learned what silence really sounded like.
From her father's slow retreat into a grief so total it left no room for the daughter still living.
From Theron, who'd loved her as well as he knew how, who'd asked her to stay—and she'd chosen the road because the road never asked her to be vulnerable.
She'd run from every warning about the Kael-Voss corridor. Run from the knowledge that she was alone and that she'd built that solitude with her own hands, brick by careful brick.
She'd run from Skarreth's mansion into his maze, and the maze had bled her the same way the running always did—slowly, from a thousand small wounds she accumulated by pushing through instead of stopping.
She stopped.
Octavia planted her palm on the gravel and pushed herself upright. Her legs shook. Her arms dripped. The night air burned in her cuts like salt. She stood in the dead end with the alien roses and the pale gravel spotted with her blood, and she was done.
If this monster wanted her, he could face her properly.
She turned toward the mouth of the clearing—the only way in, the only way out—and lifted her chin. She squared her bleeding shoulders, planted her bare feet, and waited.
The night held its breath. The hedges moved.
Not dramatically—a subtle shifting, branches bending, leaves rustling without wind, the walls drawing back to widen the entrance to the clearing.
In the dark space they created, something breathed.
Heavy. Deep. The sound of lungs built larger than any human chest. The warmth hit her first—a wave of heat radiating from the passage, animal heat, the kind that belonged to predators with furnace hearts.
Then the eyes.
Ice-blue. Luminescent. They floated in the darkness at a height that meant nothing standing on two legs at any scale she understood. They caught the starlight and threw it back, cold.
A beast of pure black stepped into the clearing.
It was a hole cut in the night. Darker than the surrounding darkness, it absorbed the starlight and was defined only by the places where light ceased to exist.
The thing that emerged from the hedgerow shadows moved wrong.
Octavia’s brain kept reaching for categories to explain what she was seeing, and kept failing — wolf, no, too large, the shoulders rolled with a jaguar’s coiled weight but a jaguar didn’t stand that tall even on all fours.
Like a bear? No, bears were blunt and lumbering, and this thing was stealthy, each placement of those too-long limbs deliberate as a brushstroke.
The front legs bent at angles that made her stomach turn, articulated more like arms that had decided to become something else, and at the end of them: claws. Not paws. Each one thick as her wrist, pressing slow furrows into the gravel as it walked. A tail dragged behind it, long and muscular.
The mouth — she couldn’t look at the mouth for long, the rows of teeth, the black lips slick and parted — so she looked up, and that was worse, because then she was transfixed by its luminescent, ice-blue eyes.
She knew those eyes.
Those eyes fixed on her with an intensity that should have dropped her to her knees.
But Octavia didn't kneel.
Her artist's eye—that relentless machinery of observation that had never once in thirty-five years shut off when she told it to—engaged. It stripped away the terror the same way it stripped away a surface when she painted, looking past the obvious to find what lived underneath.
The beast’s body was built for dominance, every line communicating threat. The height, the mass, the obsidian skin. This was a creature designed to be feared, and he wore that design like a mask.
She blinked. Blood ran into her left eye from a cut on her brow. She wiped it away with the back of her hand, smearing red across her temple, never breaking eye contact.
The eyes. Look at the eyes. Look.
She'd spent twenty years painting eyes. She'd built an entire artistic philosophy around the gap between what a face presented and what the eyes revealed, and had learned to read the language that lived in that space.
The beast’s eyes were agony.
Not physical pain. Something woven so deep into the ice-blue that most people would never find it beneath the fear his gaze provoked.
But she wasn't most people. She saw intelligence—vast, calculating, but calculating like someone solving a problem, not savoring a kill.
She saw exhaustion in those eyes. And loneliness so acute it had calcified and turned to stone.
Her feet moved before her mind authorized the action.
One step forward. The gravel shifted under her bare sole. The beast halted its advance. Those terrible, anguished eyes tracked her with fixed attention.
A second step. Close enough now that the heat rolling off its body reached her skin, warming the blood drying on her arms. The beast smelled like nothing she could name—dark and mineral and alive, like overheated stone.
Its breathing changed. Shallowed. She watched muscles tighten across its chest and shoulders—not to strike, but to brace itself.
As if it were the one afraid.
A third step. She stood inside the radius of the beast's heat, close enough that one movement of his arm would end her.
Its jaw was locked. A muscle in his neck corded and released as it studied her.
And something in her own body answered — a warmth that bloomed through her, separate from the fear and the exhaustion, drawn out by the unbearable proximity of a creature in pain.
She raised her hand.
It shook. She let it shake. She was done pretending she wasn’t afraid, done performing strength she didn’t have left.
Her whole body was trembling — blood loss, exhaustion, the thorns taking their toll — but she lifted her fingers toward that jaw anyway, the same way she committed to the first brushstroke on a blank canvas.
The one that said I am not looking away.
Her fingertips hovered an inch from his jaw.
“Skarreth?”
Not a plea. Not a challenge. Just his name.
The beast went utterly still. Those eyes widened fractionally, something flickering in their depths—surprise? Hope? Terror?
Then the ground tilted.
The starlight smeared. The roses blurred at their edges, silver bleeding into dark, and she understood distantly that her legs were no longer holding her, that the debt her body had been running up was being collected all at once, and there was nothing she could do about it.
The last thing she saw was his eyes, and then the warmth of someone holding her before the darkness took her.