Chapter 11
When she woke, Ellaryn’s lungs seized as if she had surfaced from the bottom of a dark sea.
The alley was gone.
In its place was a room carved from shadow.
Her chest throbbed, an echo of a blade sliding through it, and her vision bled at the edges, colours warping into one another like wet ink. It always happened after she returned.
Death never let her come back clean.
Her hands were bound above her head, wrists chafing against rope that felt strangely alive, tightening the more she resisted. They held her in place, tethered to a metal pipe bolted into the wall. Her ankles were shackled too, tight and immovable.
She tugged once, but the pipe didn’t flinch.
The air tasted stale. Dust and damp and something colder—something that reminded her of the dungeons.
A lantern swayed overhead, the flame inside flickering in and out. The light was a dull, bruised orange, like a dying ember refusing to surrender.
No windows. No sun. No sky. Only a room that breathed like a tomb.
Ellaryn didn’t fear death.
Fearing something intangible was pointless. In fact, she craved it—the simplicity of it, the certainty. It had felt almost gentle to her, a strange comfort in its inevitability for mortals.
It was living that terrified her.
She closed her eyes, inhaling the thick quiet, waiting for the footsteps she knew would come.
It wasn’t long before the door at the top of the stairs creaked open.
Boot steps descended, and when she opened her eyes, the outsider stood there, his presence like a crack of lightning in the dark.
“Oh good, you’re awake.” He said with that same stupid smirk that made Ellaryn want to end him right there and then. He dragged a chair across the concrete floor and sat before her, elbows on his knees, bright blue eyes catching the wavering light like shards of a forgotten sky.
“You don’t know what you’ve done,” Ellaryn warned softly. “The King will come for me when he realises I’m gone. He’ll end you for this.”
She tried to pull her wrists free again, but the rope constricted, tightening its bite. It wasn’t normal rope. It was stronger and almost sentient.
“I’m not too scared of the King,” he said, leaning back in his chair.
Ellaryn couldn’t help the scoff that escaped her.
He really was an outsider—na?ve, untempered by the suffocating grip of Cinders. An edge that had never had the pleasure of being brandished by steel and fire, never had to cut to survive.
“Then you’ve got another thing coming,” she said, a muscle ticking in her jaw, trying to hide the flicker of unease curling in her chest.
“Maybe.” He shrugged, almost unbothered, his calm brushing against her nerves like sandpaper. “Maybe not.”
And there it was—the impossible spark. Him. He was the thread of hope the city clung to, the one stubborn defiance against the crushing darkness. Yet his carelessness, the way he laughed in the face of danger, made her stomach knot with anxiety.
Change could happen… couldn’t it?
Ellaryn wanted to believe that. But now, watching him, she felt the weight of her own doubts press down harder. Her hope, fragile and fleeting, seemed to evaporate with every careless grin he flashed.
He couldn’t save the city. He could barely save himself.
“Please.” She hated how the word sounded as it left her lips. “Please, you have to let me go.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that.” He shook his head, almost apologetically.
Ellaryn exhaled through her nose.
“I should have killed you when I had the chance.”
A chuckle of disbelief escaped him.
“That’s no way to speak to the only man capable of freeing you.”
“Ah.” She lifted her brows, feigning surprise. “Forgive me. Where are my manners?”
A slow, wicked smile spread across her face.
“I should have killed you when I had the chance, Sir.”
He shook his head, lips quirked at the edges in a devious smirk.
“Quite the tongue you’ve got there.”
“So I’ve been told,” Ellaryn muttered, holding his stare.
“Another defence mechanism, I presume.” He gestured vaguely at her being, and she set her jaw, eyes flicking away from him.
“What, no quick remark?” His eyes widened. “Don’t tell me you’re going quiet on me now.”
“Figured I’d just bide my time until the King finds you.” Ellaryn smiled sarcastically, though the thought of the King finding them made her stomach roll; this man was setting fire to her last nerve.
“You could,” He said before shrugging. “But then you would never get the answers you crave.” He smirked, which made Ellaryn’s pulse spike.
“I don’t crave anything from you, other than my freedom.”
“Is it really freedom?”
The words caught her off guard.
“Coming from the man who traded his for a cage.” She scoffed.
“I broke through the shadows once; I can do it again.” His smile darkened, but his eyes remained alarmingly bright.
“You wont be doing anything when I’m finished with you.” She hissed, like shooting venom.
“There’s that tongue again.” He mused, which only infuriated her further.
“You don’t get it, do you? This city is relying on you, the people they—”
Her words faltered, powerless against the weight of what she felt. She couldn’t put into language how much the idea of him had probably meant to them. “They see you as hope.”
Her voice wavered slightly with the admission. She wished she could rewind the moment and steady herself, afraid he’d see how fragile she felt.
“And what do you see me as?” he asked, eyes sparking like blue flames.
When she had discovered the outsider, she had hoped it would be someone powerful. Someone who could save the city with the flick of a wrist. Not this man, who made a joke out of every sentence and seemed to think the fate of the city was one big game.
She looked away.
“I see you as a kind of destruction,” she whispered, her voice tight and breaking, as if forcing the words out might somehow protect him.
“Destruction is not my aim,” he said calmly.
“But it will be the result,” Ellaryn replied, her chest aching at the thought of a future that included him.
“How can you be so sure?” he asked, his eyes locking onto hers. That colour. That blue. She felt herself sinking into their depths before she snapped herself out of it.
“Trust me,” she breathed. “You need to untie me and leave before you do something you won’t come back from.”
“You have little faith, Ruin,” he said, his lighthearted expression refusing to crack beneath the weight of her despair.
“And you have too much,” she shot back, though the words trembled as her hands twisted above her head. The rope bit deeper with every movement, enchanted fibres tightening like they were alive. She sucked in a sharp breath, a quiet wince she failed to hide.
He noticed.
With a casual flick of his fingers, as if performing a parlour trick, the rope loosened—just enough. Not freed, not broken. But the pressure eased, and air rushed back into her wrists, burning and sweet all at once.
Ellaryn stared at the slackened bindings, her pulse thudding. The enchantment hadn’t been undone—only persuaded.
The ropes were magic.
And so, unmistakably, was he.
“If you fight them, they tighten,” he said, his voice calm but carrying an edge of warning.
Ellaryn nodded, silent, her gaze sliding over him like she was measuring every angle, every nuance.
Trying to read him. Trying to understand who he really was beneath the easy grin and steady composure.
Her mind ticked through possibilities—ally, threat, something in between—and for once, the uncertainty made her pulse quicken.
“How long do you plan on keeping me here?” she asked, careful to keep her voice even, careful not to provoke the shackles into tightening around her wrists. Every word felt like it carried weight—one wrong inflexion and the magic would punish her for it.
“That depends,” he said easily, rising from his chair and leaning it against the wall with deliberate slowness. “Are you going to cooperate?”
Her jaw tightened. Cooperate. The word scraped at her nerves.
No one in Cinders dared talk to her like a child. No one even dared breathe too loudly around her. Where she walked, the people tiptoed. That’s just how it was. How it had always been. But now she found herself in unknown territory; captive when she had always been the captor.
“It’s going to be difficult to cooperate,” she replied through gritted teeth, “when you haven’t told me what you’re doing here.”
Her heartbeat quickened with every second she spent shackled. The longer she remained here, the deeper she sank into danger. It was only a matter of time before the King knew of the outsider’s presence. He had a way of snuffling out the light before it could become a fire.
“Oh, my mistake… I’m going to kill the King.”
The words landed cleanly. Final. Unshaken.
Ellaryn didn’t react at first. She simply stared at him, waiting for the moment when he would laugh, or soften the declaration into something less insane. A joke like he was so used to making. It never came.
Her stomach dropped.
Was he mad?
Fear slid into her bones, cold and invasive, rooting itself so deeply it made her shudder despite herself. The King was not a man you challenged. He was a force. A God wearing a crown or maybe a devil. People didn’t plot his death—they vanished for thinking about it.
He saw it then—the flicker in her eyes, the crack in her composure.
“What?” he asked, frowning slightly, lines carving themselves into his brow. “You don’t think I can?”
Ellaryn swallowed hard. The shackles gave a faint, threatening hum.
It wasn’t that she didn’t think he could try.
It was that trying meant the end of everything.
She forced herself to breathe through the panic clawing up her throat. Slow. Careful. Fear fed the magic in the ropes, and she could already feel them listening—waiting for her to break.
“You don’t understand him,” she said quietly. “You think killing him is a matter of strength, or timing, or bravery.” Her lips pressed together, trembling despite her effort to still them. “It isn’t.”
He tilted his head, studying her like a puzzle he hadn’t quite solved yet. “Then explain it to me.”