22. Clara
CLARA
Gray dawn light seeps through the shutters, and I’m awake before the rooster for once, which feels like a personal victory over that feathered alarm clock.
Aldric sleeps beside me.
Correction: Aldric sleeps under me, because at some point in the night, I apparently claimed him like a body pillow. My cheek rests on his tattooed shoulder, my leg thrown over his thigh, and his arm curls around my back like it grew there.
I lift my head carefully and just… look.
He sleeps like a statue, still and quiet, no snoring, barely breathing.
His black hair spills across the pillow, and the shard in his eye socket glows faintly even now, a nightlight from hell.
The crystal in his chest pulses slowly and steadily through the exposed ribs, blue light washing over the bare walls.
Scars everywhere. Stitches. Places where the flesh gave up centuries ago.
And my stomach does a full gymnastics floor routine.
Oh no.
Butterflies. I have butterflies. For a dead man. A seven-hundred-year-old warlord with a crystal for a heart and a body count that predates the printing press, and my insides are fluttering like I’m fourteen and he just passed me a note at school.
“You absolute disaster,” I whisper to myself.
Because that’s what this is, right? I’ve gone and fallen in love with the monster.
Not lust. Let’s be real, lust I could file under understandable, have you seen him.
This is worse. This is watching him sleep and cataloguing the way his lashes rest against the ruined cheekbone and thinking words like mine and always and what if I just stayed.
I mean, it’s not like I’m giving up some glittering life out there.
My life outside these walls is a dead phone, a mafia fiancé with a search party, eleven foster homes’ worth of nothing to go back to, and an apartment in Bern I probably can’t afford anymore.
The castle has fresh strawberries and a man who carries bathwater up staircases and looks at me like I invented sunlight.
But.
But.
Hair dryers exist. Streaming services exist. Modern dentistry, tampons, antibiotics, oat milk lattes, heated floors… Civilization exists, and I refuse to choose between the love of my life and indoor plumbing. That’s a false binary. That’s quitter talk.
So the answer isn’t leaving him. The answer is breaking the curse and dragging this castle—and its lord—into the twenty-first century, where I will personally introduce him to the concept of a water heater and watch his medieval brain melt.
Which means I need to see the thing he’s been hiding from me.
The goblet.
I slide out from under his arm one centimeter at a time, freezing every time the mattress creaks.
Aldric makes a low sound and turns his face toward my vacated pillow, and my heart squeezes so hard it’s frankly embarrassing.
I pull on his shirt—borrowed, thank you—then my jeans, and carry my boots to the door like a teenager sneaking out past curfew.
Shmoo is waiting in the hallway.
Sitting. Facing my door. Tail wrapped around his paws like he’s been expecting me.
“Okay, that’s not creepy at all,” I whisper, easing the door shut behind me and setting my boots down.
He stands, stretches, and trots off down the corridor without a backward glance. Toward the stairs. Toward, I realize three turns later, exactly where I’m going.
“You know where I’m headed,” I hiss at his upright gray tail. “How do you know where I’m headed? I decided four minutes ago. Are you reading my mind? Blink twice if you’re the witch.”
Shmoo does not blink twice. Shmoo leads me through the kitchen, past the pantry, to a low arched door at the end of a passage I’ve never explored, tucked behind a rack of copper pots like the castle was hiding it on purpose.
The cellar door. Heavy oak, iron bands, and a keyhole big enough to fit my thumb in.
Locked. Obviously.
“Great.” I rattle the iron ring anyway, because hope springs eternal and dies immediately. “Fantastic. Any other tricks, Gandalf? Cough up a key.”
Shmoo sits and stares at the keyhole.
The keyhole. Giant. Old. Shaped like—
Wait.
I’ve seen a key like that. Big, black, ornate, lying in the shallow drawer of the library desk under a magnifying glass and a broken quill, back when I was ransacking the place for revenant lore. I remember picking it up and thinking it looked like a prop from a haunted house.
“Stay,” I tell Shmoo, and sprint.
Up the stairs, past the portrait, into the library, drawer, key, and back down again, taking the steps two at a time, my socks skidding on stone because I never actually put my boots on.
Shmoo hasn’t moved. He watches me fumble the key into the lock with the patience of a creature who has watched empires fall.
The mechanism turns with a clunk.
“There better not be spiders,” I mutter into the darkness.
The cellar breathes out cool air that smells of earth and old wine. I grab a candle from the wall bracket by the door, light it with the matches in my jeans pocket—I always carry matches now, castle rule number one—and descend.
It’s actually kind of beautiful down here.
Wine barrels the size of small cars line one wall, stacked in wooden cradles.
Shelves of dusty bottles. Crocks and clay jars, hanging bundles of ancient herbs, a wheel of something that might have been cheese during the Renaissance.
Standard cellar things, if your standards were set by the Habsburgs.
Shmoo threads between the barrels, tail high, glancing back every few feet to make sure the slow human is keeping up.
“Yeah, yeah. Suspiciously helpful cat leads woman into cursed basement. I’ve seen this movie. The woman dies first.”
He stops at the far wall. A small alcove is cut into the stone there, fitted with an iron grate that stands ajar, and inside, on a shelf by itself, sits a goblet.
The goblet.
Gold, jewel-crusted, exactly as gaudy as a medieval warlord’s tableware should be. A dark residue stains the bowl, dried to a crust that shimmers faintly blue in the candlelight.
My pulse picks up. This is it. The scene of the crime. The murder weapon, if you can murder someone into immortality.
“Just looking,” I whisper, to Shmoo, to Aldric, to the universe. “Not licking. Nobody’s licking anything.”
I set the candle on the shelf, wipe my palms on my jeans, and pick the goblet up by the stem with two fingers, careful, like it’s a hot pan. It’s heavier than it looks. Cold. I turn it slowly, tilting it toward the light, looking for engravings, markings, anything—
The cellar disappears.
One second I’m holding a cup; the next I’m standing in the great hall, except the fire is roaring, and the banners are bright and new, and a woman in gray robes stands at the sideboard with her back to me.
Old. White hair. She opens a small drawstring bag and pours a fine blue dust into a goblet of dark wine—this goblet, glittering and whole—and the dust dissolves like sugar, like it was never there.
I can’t move. I can’t speak. I’m not really here; I’m like a camera recording the past.
The crone turns her head to check the doorway, and the firelight catches her ear.
There’s a mole on it. Small and dark, right on the upper curve of the cartilage.
I have that mole. Same ear. Same spot. Marco used to touch it and call it my beauty mark, and I hated it, and I’m staring at it on the ear of the woman who cursed Aldric seven hundred years ago.
The hall dissolves.
Now it’s daylight, a meadow, elderberry in bloom—and the same woman walks a dirt path, except she’s young, smooth-faced, laughing, holding hands with two little girls who skip along on either side of her. Daughters. They have to be; they have her chin, her nose, her—
Her hair. All three of them. White-blonde, so pale it’s silver in the sun, falling straight and unbound down their backs.
Just like mine.
Exactly like mine.
The young witch turns her face toward me—toward me, like she can see the camera, like she’s been waiting seven hundred years for someone to press play—and her eyes are blue with hints of violet, and her mouth begins to open—
“Clara!”
Aldric’s voice cracks through the silence of the cellar like a whip.
My hands spasm. The goblet drops. I open my eyes as it rolls in a lazy curve across the flagstones. It comes to rest against a pair of tall black boots.
Aldric stands at the base of the cellar stairs, shirtless, chest blazing blue, his one dark eye fixed on the cup at his feet.
“What have you done?”