Chapter 43
FORTY-THREE
ARWEN
The spiral staircase winds upward into darkness.
Each step I climb brings memories rushing back—the cold stone beneath my bare feet during those first terrifying weeks, the way my legs trembled after hours of kneeling, the particular quality of light that filtered through the tower’s narrow windows at dawn.
I climbed these stairs dozens of times during my captivity.
Climbed them when summoned. Climbed them knowing what waited at the top.
The Abbot’s sanctum.
The place where he broke me.
Zrynok’s hand closes on my shoulder, and I realize I’ve stopped moving. Frozen on the landing where a faded tapestry depicts the Bloom’s supposed divine origins—crimson flowers rising from the bodies of the faithful, their expressions twisted into something the weaver probably intended as ecstasy.
“We can turn back.” His voice is low. Private. “The prisoner has waited five years. Another hour won’t matter.”
“It will to me.” I force my feet forward. One step. Then another. “If I don’t do this now, I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering if I could have.”
“Wondering what?”
“If I’m really free.” The words come out harder than I intended.
“The Abbot is dead. The Garden is destroyed. But this place—” I gesture at the staircase, at the tapestries, at the tower that rises above us like a monument to everything I survived.
“This is where he really had me. Not in the cells or the Chapel or even the Garden. Here. In his private space. Where he taught me what I was worth.”
Zrynok doesn’t offer comfort. Doesn’t try to tell me that my worth isn’t defined by what happened in these rooms. He just stays close, his presence a steady warmth at my back, and lets me climb.
I’ve never been more grateful for his silence.
The sanctum door is unlocked.
Of course it is. The Abbot is dead. The Keepers who guarded this place are scattered or slain. There’s no one left to maintain the pretense of security.
I push the door open.
The smell hits me first—incense and wine and the particular sweetness of flowers that never stop blooming. The Abbot’s personal greenhouse, I remember. He kept rare specimens in crystal containers, tending them with more care than he ever showed his human subjects.
The room beyond is exactly as I remember.
Lavish. Obscene. Silk hangings in deep reds and purples cover every wall, their surfaces embroidered with scenes from the cult’s mythology.
Cushioned furniture clusters around a central brazier that still holds the ashes of whatever offering the Abbot burned before his death.
Wine bottles stand open on carved wooden tables—expensive vintages that the faithful were forbidden to taste.
All of it built on suffering. All of it purchased with lives.
“This is where he lived.” Zrynok takes in the luxury with an expression I can’t read. “While the prisoners starved in cells below.”
“He called it the burden of leadership. Said that maintaining the cult required sacrifices—and that his sacrifice was bearing the load of comfort while others achieved purity through denial.” The words taste like ash.
“I believed him, for a while. Convinced myself that the disparity was necessary. That he deserved what he had because of how hard he worked to save us.”
“And now?”
“Now I want to burn it.” I cross to the nearest bookshelf—carved mahogany, polished to a gleam, filled with leather-bound volumes that document every practice the cult ever developed. “But first, I need to find something.”
I start pulling books from shelves. Throwing them to the floor when they prove irrelevant. Financial records, ritual manuals, notes on the cultivation of particularly potent Bloom strains—the Abbot documented everything with the precision of a scholar pursuing legitimate research.
Zrynok joins me without asking what we’re looking for.
He takes the opposite wall, methodically removing volumes and checking behind them for hidden compartments.
His hands move with the efficiency of someone who has searched many spaces for hidden things—contraband, weapons, evidence of crimes.
The executioner’s toolkit includes more than just killing.
We work in silence for several minutes. The pile of discarded texts grows. The shelves empty.
Nothing.
“It’s not in the books.” I step back. Survey the room with eyes that know its secrets. “He wouldn’t keep something this valuable where anyone with access to the sanctum could find it.”
“What are we looking for?”
“Records. Names.” I move to the tapestries.
Start pulling them aside, revealing the bare stone behind.
“The Abbot had patrons. Noble families who funded his work in exchange for... services. Some of them paid for initiates they could ‘train’ privately. Others wanted the Bloom’s effects without the inconvenience of actually joining the cult. ”
“You’re saying this place had powerful backers.”
“I’m saying destroying the monastery isn’t enough.
” My fingers find a seam in the stone—a crack that doesn’t belong, hidden behind a tapestry depicting the first Abbot’s ascension.
“We kill the Abbot, burn the buildings, free the survivors. And in a year, someone with money and influence rebuilds everything. Recruits new Keepers. Harvests new initiates. The Bloom keeps growing because the soil that fed it was never salted.”
I press against the crack. Feel something shift.
A section of wall swings inward.
“Found it.”
The hidden chamber is smaller than I expected.
A single room, carved from the tower’s stone heart, accessible only through the mechanism I’ve just triggered. Inside: a desk piled with papers, a cabinet filled with documents bound in black leather, and a door leading to a staircase that descends into darkness.
I go for the cabinet first.
The documents inside are exactly what I hoped to find.
Names. Amounts. Dates. A meticulous accounting of every noble who contributed to the cult’s activities, along with detailed records of what they received in return.
Some bought influence—the Abbot’s information network extended throughout the region, and the things he learned through confession were valuable to those who knew how to use them.
Others bought bodies. Initiates deemed suitable for private “instruction,” transferred to estates where their fate was never recorded.
Beneath the documents, arranged in a velvet-lined tray: eight crystal vials filled with essence so dark it is nearly black.
His personal reserve. The supply he kept for experiments—and, in the end, the cure he claimed to bargain with when Zrynok’s sword was at his throat.
If he was telling the truth about a cure, no one will ever know now.
I carry them to the stone floor one by one and crush each underfoot, watching the concentrated essence dissolve into nothing.
No one will use these. Not as weapon, not as leverage, not as the seed of something new.
My hands shake as I flip through the pages of the patron ledger.
I recognize some of these names. Lords I heard whispered about in the cells.
Ladies whose servants visited the monastery on mysterious errands.
Even a few figures from the regional court—officials who should have been investigating the cult, not profiting from it.
“This is enough to destroy them.” I look up at Zrynok. “All of them. Every patron, every protector, everyone who knew what was happening here and did nothing to stop it.”
He takes the documents from my hands. Studies the first page with narrowed eyes.
“This is also enough to get us killed.” His voice carries a warning I don’t want to hear. “These aren’t minor nobles with limited influence. Some of these names control armies. Courts. Trade routes that span kingdoms.”
“I don’t care.”
“You should.” He sets the documents on the desk. Turns to face me fully. “Arwen. I will follow you into any fight. Kill any enemy you point me at. But I need you to understand what you’re proposing. This isn’t burning a monastery. This is declaring war on an entire web of power.”
“And if we don’t?” I step closer to him.
Close enough to feel the heat radiating from his infected skin.
“If we take these documents and hide them, pretend we never found this room—how long before someone else fills the Abbot’s role?
How long before another monastery rises, funded by the same patrons, protected by the same officials? ”
“You’re asking me to spend the rest of my life hunting powerful people who don’t want to be found.”
“Yes.” I reach for his hands. Find them. Hold on. “I’m asking you to help me make sure no one ever has to survive what I survived. What the people in those cells survived. What the transformation cases in the basement—”
I can’t finish. The memory of what he did down there—the mercy he delivered, the vomiting that followed—closes my throat.
His hand comes up and covers both of mine where they grip his. Just that — the solid press of his palm over my knuckles, steadying without holding. The way he has of anchoring me without making me feel caught.
“Then we hunt.” His breath is warm against my lips. “Until they’re all dead or we are.”
I kiss him. Not fierce this time—soft, questioning, the kind of kiss that asks for permission it already has. His arms wrap around me, pulling me flush against his chest, and for a moment the sanctum disappears. The memories disappear. There’s just him, solid and warm and choosing to stay.
When we break apart, his eyes hold something that looks like peace.
“The staircase.” I nod toward the door at the chamber’s rear. “The prisoner is down there. We should—”
A sound from below cuts me off.
A voice. Faint but clear. Calling my name.