Chapter 12 Roxana
ROXANA
Ipretend to be still asleep as Silas gets ready and leaves for work.
But the moment the front door shuts behind him, I’m on my feet and rushing about.
I don’t even bother brushing my hair or changing out of my pyjamas and gulp down my coffee quickly, letting it scald my throat in my haste as I stand in the kitchen.
I leave the mug in the sink and hurry upstairs, in my hand the secret key to his office that Silas doesn’t know I have.
I scan his bookshelves, open his cupboards and search his desk drawers, making sure to put everything back where it was. But I don’t find anything that would either confirm or deny my mounting, otherworldly suspicions.
Perfunctorily, I turn the rest of the house upside down, but just as I expect, there are no discoveries to be made here.
My failure to unearth anything incriminating—for a lack of a better word—in itself doesn’t mean my outlandish hunch is incorrect.
If what I think might be happening is really happening, the proof would likely not be found in our house.
It would be found somewhere Andrew Wilson had access to.
I don’t waste another minute. I throw some clothes on, tie my hair up, wash my face.
There are bags under my eyes, my cheeks look dull, and my lips are pale.
I look exactly the way I feel, tired, unsettled, like I need a break.
But for once, I don’t care enough to put any makeup on.
Let people see that I have bad days too.
There are only so many opportunities in a day I may have, and Silas’s morning lecture is one of them.
I don’t even stop to button my coat up before I step outside into a world shrouded in swirling mist, my earlobes and the tip of my nose burning in the bitter cold. Walking swiftly, I rub my hands.
The walk isn’t pleasant, but damn if it isn’t impressive. This kind of weather suits the campus like no other.
I fell irrevocably in love with Thornedale the minute I stepped through its wrought iron gates.
With the Cumbrian-slate buildings, their shapes varying, but their dark gable roofs unifying their serene, gothic look.
With the creeping ivy that snakes around the tall, narrow windows of the old asylum buildings, connected by long archways.
With the rain-sheened stone that always looks a little wet.
With the gravel paths that run underneath sprawling branches of ancient oaks and beech trees.
With a tug at my heart, I recall that distant day when I first arrived, completely enchanted and feeling like the luckiest girl in the world for getting in on a scholarship.
For years, I had worked so relentlessly hard to achieve it, burning midnight oil to cram for exams, volunteering, sacrificing whole weekends and summers to English language courses.
Only to throw it away, not two years later, to marry Silas.
The magnitude of what I gave up for the chance that a man might love me still takes my breath away any time I think about it.
But at least I got to stay at Thornedale forever.
The cheery click-clack of my heels against the flagstone floor carries me through the winding corridors until I reach Goodwoman Stubbs’ little nook right next to Silas’s office.
“Roxie! What a pleasant surprise! How are you, my lovely?”
As I mumble something non-committal in response, she stands up to greet me, her starched tweed garments so stiff that they nearly creak with her movement.
Her tone is affectionate, but with that familiar, patronising undertone that never fails to grate against my nerves.
As one of the rare few, Goodwoman Stubbs sees me as something much worse than just the Eastern European hussy who “fucked an older man’s brains out to marry him for citizenship”—as I’ve heard some of Silas’s more outspoken colleagues put it when they thought they weren’t being overheard. She sees me as his fucking victim.
I really wish that she would keep her condescending pity for me to herself. Her sympathy never fails to make me feel worse about my life. Because, honestly, could I possibly sink any lower than to have a pitiful creature like her feel sorry for me?
No matter what I do, though, I’m unable to make myself off-putting to her.
“How’s your writing going?” she asks, and suddenly I see another chance to make her like me a little bit less.
“Really good actually,” I lie enthusiastically, my smile widening to maniacal proportions. “I got a new idea. A new direction, you could say.”
I have nothing of the sort yet, just a vague feeling that I might soon. The same way I can smell rain in the air sometimes before it comes, I’m sensing that I’m close to an idea. One I’ll enjoy writing.
“Oh, really?” Goodwoman Stubbs beams at me. “Isn’t that nice! So, what is it?”
I’d like to know as well, I think, as I blurt out the first thing that comes to mind, “It’s kind of a twisted love story about the dark side of ambition.”
“Ooooh, isn’t that intriguing!”
There’s nothing sincere about her excitement. I’m sure she’s never read anything I’ve written, nor is she ever going to. She just wants to be supportive. Again.
“It’s about a girl who gets accepted to her dream university,” I say without thinking. “But its most renowned professor becomes obsessed with her.”
Her eyes widen, and her smile falters, and just like that, I’m having fun talking to her for the first time ever.
“He makes her do extra work and is harder on her than on any of the other students in the name of realising her full potential.”
Goodwoman Stubbs frowns and clears her throat, likely readying herself to interrupt me politely, to stop me from telling her anymore.
I don’t let her.
“She is so unwilling to give up on her dreams that she doesn’t quit even when he pushes her past her breaking point.”
It’s hard not to beam from ear to ear, the way I’m savouring her expression.
“But that’s horrible!” she protests.
“It is,” I concede. “He goes from someone she’s greatly admired to the monster of her nightmares.
But! What if he does teach her to fight in a way she didn’t know how before?
Forges an aggression in her to go with her ambition, and that ultimately enables her to fulfil her dreams in a way she couldn’t otherwise?
” Shivers run through me, and I trail off because I’m suddenly interested in where the story goes more than I am in irking Goodwoman Stubbs.
The loose skin on her neck flaps as she swallows heavily. She clears her throat uncomfortably. “What brings you here today then?”
I’m so absorbed in watching her creased neck—and thinking that I will have to kill myself at thirty-five to avoid her fate—that it takes me a moment to react.
“Oh, I just need to grab something from Silas’s office,” I respond, brightly, pretending not to notice her discomposure, and as if there were nothing odd at all about my going into Silas’s office in his absence.
I don’t wait for her to respond, marching past her and pushing the door open, knowing that it would be unlocked. I shut it behind me resolutely with a bang, to signal to her that I do not wish to be disturbed.
I lean back against the door with my eyes closed.
I don’t even have to be looking at the snug oak-panelled nook to be flooded by memories.
The smell of polished wood alone is enough to take me back in time.
I vividly recall the feel of those panels against my bare back and the way the desk’s rounded edge pressed against my crotch when Silas bent me over it.
That scent alone, rich, warm, and upper-class in its character, is enough to make me relive the feeling of holding the whole world in the palm of my hand.
I snap my eyes open. Then I reach to flick the switch, and the ceiling light fixture comes to life.
At first glance, time has stood still in Silas’s office.
I haven’t been here in years, but everything looks the same, down to the square bamboo pencil holder on his desk or the arrangement of books on his shelves.
I go through his desk drawers before turning my attention to the freestanding wardrobe, where I know he keeps his gym bag.
Grabbing the round wooden doorknobs, I wrench both the wings of its door open with a loud creak of the unoiled hinges.
My breath shortens, and blood rushes through my ears, deafeningly loud, as I try to process what it is I’m seeing.
“Oh shit,” I mutter to myself.
I take a step closer and carefully pull at the black chiffon veil, light as a breath and yielding to my efforts without any resistance.
I had my superstitions, true, but I wasn’t expecting to actually find anything suggesting they may be more than just products of my under-stimulated brain and overactive imagination.
But what possible reason could there be to put an ancient, ominous-looking mirror in a fucking wardrobe other than to hide it?
I am mesmerised by the glare of the three-dimensional skull on the top of the frame.
Its gaze should be vacant, yet it feels anything but, its deceptive depth speaking to me in a language I feel a few would understand.
Whilst on the subject of languages a few would understand, I notice for the first time the inscription weaving through the ornate frame.
But before I can inspect it closer, my own reflection captures my attention.
In the mirror, I look ... the way I look in my mind’s eyes. The way I would like to look.
Confident. Attractive. Eternally young.
My hair richer, my skin smoother, and my eyes shining with the verve I only ever used to see in them in this very office when freshly fucked.
And not just that, but the room behind my reflection looks different from the one I’m in, too.
The oak panelling is still there, but it’s much darker because the ceiling light is gone, and instead, there are sconces with lit black candles lining the walls.
The desk behind my reflection is bare; no bamboo pencil holder, no computer, no “world’s best professor” mug, none of Silas’s usual clutter.
My heart speeds up, but not with fear. With chilling excitement.
Could the legends of my ancestors be real?
Either that or I’m going crazy. In any case, things are about to get a lot more interesting.
I turn my attention back to the engraving and gasp.
Were I not already familiar with the words, I likely wouldn’t have recognised the Old Romanian Cyrillic lettering for what it is, and I certainly would not have been able to read it.
I doubt anyone on this campus is. But I already know what it says, because I spent my childhood secretly copying it from various family heirlooms—the kind you don’t tell people on the outside about.
By blood I rise, and in blood they kneel.
The credo that is feared to this day in all regions of Transylvania, synonymous with unspeakable horror, with fears too terrible to utter out loud.
The knowledge of what it represents inherited from generation to generation on a level so visceral that it feels as if it were passed through genes and blood rather than through mere words and folklore.
Tales of prisoners being skinned alive and then left to thrash about in their mortal throes, the torture chambers echoing with wet splats of exposed flesh and ear-piercing screams. Tales of their pink-grey muscle tissue being rubbed with salt to maximise their agony.
Tales of their skin, removed from them in one piece like a coat, and then nailed to the doors of their family homes.
Legends of a whole castle rising from the ground, built of nothing but skulls and spines and femurs. The seat of none other than the Baron of Bones, a ruler whose name was synonymous with that of the Devil himself to those who knew him.
And then, myths of his malevolence being such that it awed even the Underworld, of his wickedness being more powerful even than Death.
He whose name was already destined to live forever in the nightmares of a nation became a shadow, no longer bound by a mortal lifespan.
He became evil immortalised.
A demon.
The very same one for whom the women in my family burned at the stake, and yet still called for him as flames shrouded them in their doom.
Sangrel Morvian.