Chapter 6
Chapter
Six
Vale
Somewhere in this realm, a dam burst mere hours ago, flooding the lowlands. Currents are sweeping through rotting families, letting an avalanche of souls tumble into a void where they cry out for direction. And what is their guide, the darker half of the universe, doing?
Getting married.
Standing beside an iron sconce inside this old chapel, adjusting my white cravat as I suppress a groan at this farce. What a waste of a perfectly good Tuesday.
I look down at the rope tied around my chest. A symbol of union, the scrawny priest behind the altar explained, but all that coarse, primitive thing does is destroy the fine velvet of my umber coat.
Wed him. Bed him.
Slit his throat and break the curse.
I shift my weight, the stone floor hard beneath the boots of my mortal form as I wait for my…wife. Does Elara really think she can end the curse with this lunacy? Chain me with a ring on my finger, and save the remnants of her brother’s life?
The thought is almost adorable.
But only almost…
My chest clenches as it often does when I think of her.
Had Elara been sensible, she would have wished for her brother’s health.
Then she could have chosen a mortal man whose nature doesn’t leave her shivering under a table.
A mortal to put a child in her belly with excitement rather than fear, securing her succession before she kills him to feed the crown.
A man she can love.
Images flash before my mind, unbidden and vivid. Elara smiling up at some faceless noble, her hands tangling in strands that aren’t mine. Blond, probably. A kind man. A wholehearted man.
A man I can never be for her.
Something curls beneath my ribs, strange and sudden. Not pain exactly. More like a stretching, a tightening.
Utterly foreign…
I look down at the culprit, at that damned ceremonial cord strapping down my lungs. I roll my shoulders. Exhale hard. Then I expand my chest with a deep inhale, fighting the trapping sensation.
It doesn’t yield.
It cinches relentlessly against my sternum, forcing my breath into something shallow. The pressure draws attention to what lies beneath: not a heart of muscle and valves, but hollow numbness and scar tissue clinging to the remnants of my heartstrings.
Torn. Forever broken.
Exactly how it needs to be.
I lean against the nearest column, arms crossed, and glance back at the priest. “How much longer can this possibly take?”
“Her Majesty is almost ready,” someone says, who is most definitely not the lanky priest, his face unmemorable in the way most mortal things are.
I turn my gaze toward the voice.
Miss Hampshire walks into the chapel with two candles and a tight mouth, that aura around her still pulsing with a vigor that started to bore me too many months ago. That woman just won’t die…
She pauses when her gaze crosses mine, recognition narrowing her eyes. “Good morning.”
I scoff. “Is it?”
Miss Hampshire doesn’t flinch. It’s a quality of hers I always respected, earned over decades of service to blood-crowned kings and slaughtered queens.
She moves to the altar, placing the candles in their proper places, adjusting cloth, setting out a braided cord—all ceremonial nonsense—with what’s left of her hands.
A soft scrape of shoes on stone pulls my attention to the chapel doors. A woman’s. Elara’s mother.
She enters quietly, wrapped in a plain shawl that has been mended more times than it has been washed, hollow eyes immediately finding mine. When she stops in front of me, she doesn’t hint a bow, doesn’t fidget, doesn’t do what sensible peasants do in palaces. She simply looks, long and slow.
For a heartbeat, my veil tightens over my true nature, as if the way her aura dims with each blink frays the edges of my illusion, letting her see who will come for her soul soon enough. But there’s no fear, only an unknowing recognition that pricks even at my patience.
Finally, her wrinkled mouth parts. “You look like a man who doesn’t sleep.”
Indeed, and it’s her stubborn daughter who’s to blame for it. “Work keeps finding me endlessly.”
Mother hums as if she expected as much. “Elara has always had work, too,” she says.
“Even when she was small, she’d rather carry a bucket than play with dolls.
Always hauling something heavy, like it was her birthright.
” Her mouth curves. “When she was upset, she’d go sit among the stones behind our home.
Said the dead listened better than the living. ”
A faint tremor runs through my hands, so slight I’d deny it if anyone could see.
I don’t like that I can picture her so perfectly: little Elara, crouched among headstones, making a home out of the very stillness mortals fear, moving through death like it’s a room she belongs in—my domain, my purpose.
The fact that she fits there, that she fits with me, twinges at that tightness in my chest. It’s…unnerving.
“Suppose now that she’s queen somehow…she has to take a husband.” Mother shakes her head. “The girl can no longer hide in graves now, cozying up with death.”
A chuckle slips out, only to die on the sharp memory of Elara grinding against me in that fresh soil, feigning a desire this traitorous body was all too eager to answer. Why would she ask to see my true form? Strategy? True curiosity?
Certainly not attraction. Her panting would’ve curdled to screams had I revealed myself. Even if her lust was real, it wouldn’t survive the sight of a half-corpse god. A monster.
I give Mother a nod, if only to rip myself out of my mental ramblings. “She does seem to have a penchant for the morbid and the macabre.”
Mother simply shrugs as she glances at the chapel doors. “She’s…late.”
“She’s alive,” I murmur. “That’s enough punctuality for this kingdom.”
Mother’s lips thin at the bluntness, but she doesn’t argue. Instead, she takes one more step closer and lowers her voice.
“I don’t know where you came from,” she says, “or how my daughter wound up wearing that mean-looking crown.” Her eyes flick to the door again. “But if you’re going to be her husband…be kind.”
The request is so earnest it almost irritates me. “I do not believe myself to be particularly kind.”
Mother nods slowly, as if she expected that, too. “Then at least be useful.”
My teeth grind, an instinctive bristle I have to swallow before it shows. The absurdity of this is laughable—Death taking orders from his future mother-in-law. Yet the words sink in with a strange, grating weight, like a hook catching on something I forgot was there.
Just this damn cord.
I stare down at it again, yanking at it with two fingers, buying myself a deeper breath that smooths the ripples of my frustration.
Despite the fact that Death can’t die, I have no intention of letting a blade bleed my throat.
Neither will I indulge Elara’s pathetic attempts at seduction, only further fanning her lunacy. No, I will simply…wait.
What are twenty years to me? Thirty?
A blink. A breath.
I’ll remain true to my word and endure the tedium of her aging, of course. Watch the gray overtake the brown in her hair. Listen to her heart stutter to its inevitable—
“Get away from her!” The command cracks through the chapel.
I look up.
Elara stands in the archway of the heavy oak doors, caressed by deep green silk and velvet that make even the dim chapel light look rich.
The bodice fits tightly around her shapely body before flaring out in heavy, embroidered folds.
Long sleeves adorned with golden threads flutter behind her as she comes down the aisle in long strides that straighten her spine, lending her neck a posture of elegance.
It should delight me. It should amuse me, a dozen taunts lining my teeth like knives. Oh, look at how she finally abandoned her coarse deathcloth. Look how even a vulture can pass for a peacock if draped in prettier feathers.
My mouth parts, and out comes…
…nothing.
Because I’m fucking gaping, not at her gown, but at her hair: pinned up in the most straightforward, most practical twist, a few ornery strands refusing captivity at her temples. No jewels. No elaborate braids.
Just Elara, plain and simple.
Like death.
I ought to sneer. The fact that I can’t seems far more damning than any vow I’m about to speak.
“Don’t talk to her.” Elara gently catches Mother’s elbow and draws her away from me, seating her on a nearby pew as she looks over her shoulder back at me. “You stay away from my family. You understand?”
I’m accustomed to being unwelcome among a mortal’s loved ones, but the raw loathing etched into Elara’s features somehow has my muscles tense. She looks at me with pure hatred.
Which should content me.
The sooner Elara realizes that she can’t possibly love the god who lied, manipulated, and deceived her toward her slaughter, the faster she’ll give up this ridiculous notion of breaking the curse.
And yet, looking into eyes that find me so thoroughly detestable... I find no joy in being proven right.
I simply raise a brow despite the sensation, shifting on the stone to banish the tension from my muscles. “Charming as always.”
“Your Majesty,” the priest says softly from the altar. “The ceremony…”
Elara turns from her mother and approaches the altar with the same sure stride she uses when she’s walking into a house full of rot. She stops beside me, close enough that the heat of her body bleeds through silk and into the air between us.
“If you ever get near my family again,” she grinds out, “I’ll slit your throat for the sake of practice.”
I make a point of not looking at her, and how difficult she renders even that. “Careful. Trust I carry my own frustrations…best not make me indulge you in them.”
The priest clears his throat. “Join hands.”
Elara extends her hand, mumbling under her breath, “Is that a threat?”
I take her palm, calloused from years of digging graves, yet vibrating with life. “There are a great many ways a husband can deliver pain to his unruly wife. Involving my lap. And my hand. On your ass.”
Her brow furrows, her mouth parting, then snapping shut when the meaning lands—red creeping up her throat in a furious flush.
She came to the tower a virgin, fumbling through the act with grit rather than grace.
And I…I met her with nothing but eons of observation.
And yet no amount of watching prepared me for the intensity of it, the overwhelming pleasure of being inside her.
Of coupling like mortals do, of being so heatedly close with someone where I’ve only ever known cold solitude.
And that…that has sparked a hunger that is entirely, utterly inconvenient.
Elara’s grip tightens around my hand, chin lifting in that annoying, stupidly alluring defiance of hers. “Can we get on with this?”
The priest flinches into action. “W-we are gathered here today,” he squeaks, his eyes darting between us, “to join this man and this woman in the godly bonds of matrimony.”
A scoff rumbles under my breath. “The only godly thing here is I.”
“And yet you look like you’re being dragged to your own hanging,” Elara grates out of the corner of her mouth.
I keep my face smooth. “A hanging would have been preferable.”
The priest looks back and forth between our bickering, sweat beading on his upper lip. “If we could… The binding?”
Miss Hampshire steps up with the grim efficiency of an executioner, her gaze fixed on the trailing ends of the cincture already constricting my chest. She doesn’t hesitate.
She seizes the cords dangling from my side and yanks them forward, wrapping them sharply around Elara’s torso.
She loops them once, twice, pulling the knot tight with a sudden, violent jerk that forces the breath from Elara’s lungs. And mine.
That tension beneath my sternum blooms hot and brutal, sharp enough now to quicken my pulse as my gaze snaps to her. “I’m going to make you regret every second of this.”
“Most husbands claim that’s a wife’s job.” Elara trundles up the corners of her mouth, with struggle and effort, yes, but it is no less unnerving a sight. “There are many seconds in twenty years. More so in thirty.”
I lower my voice to match her insolence. “Unless you have the decency to take off that crown before you tragically, but conveniently, fall off a horse next week.”
“The rings,” the priest says, voice thin.
A small velvet cushion is produced, bearing two plain bands. Gold, unadorned. Elara takes mine first and shoves it onto my finger with more force than ceremony, as if she means to bruise the vow into place. Then she holds out her hand without looking at me.
I take the ring and slide it onto her finger the way mortals do. And for a moment, I could swear I sensed my heartstring chime in her crown…
“Do you, Elara,” the priest starts, voice strained, “take—”
“I do.” Her answer is a bark as her fingers dig into mine. “I’ll make it a point to sleep and bathe with the crown.”
The priest blinks, flustered. “Your…Your Majesty—”
“I said yes.” She shifts, letting the rope bite deeper, clench harder. “Get on with it.”
“Do you, Vale,” he continues, “take this woman as your wife, to have and to hold, to lead and to love?”
Something crawls low in my gut, letting my gaze shift to the mosaics set into the wall. Tiny tile kings and queens, forever frozen mid-vow, chests tied, their hearts full of love.
My ribs seem to curl inward.
Mortals are obsessed with it. Love.
It’s a sickness of the mind. A voluntary lunacy.
They chase it, sing of it, long for it—a deluded sentiment they crave as if it could ever end in anything other than pain.
To love is to open your heart to the blade of grief, offering it a bloody sheath to land in before it cracks under the agony of loss.
Love is madness.
But it is a madness that cannot befall me. So what’s the weight of this vow? Air, nothing more. Irrelevant and—
Hot breath shatters my thoughts, searing against the shell of my ear with how Elara has leaned in, her lips dangerously close as she whispers, “Tick-tock. Remember? You have places to be.”
I fix my gaze on the priest with nothing short of a growl. “I do.”
The priest swallows hard, but there’s a sound of relief in the gulp. “In the sight of God, I pronounce you man and wife, ’til death do you part.”
The words leave his mouth, letting ancient law amplify that tightness in my chest to a degree that makes me want to scream. Of all the absurdities I’ve observed over the centuries, my wife turning the rite around on me to break this curse is perhaps the most infuriating one.
Oh, how right she is.
How wrong she is…