Chapter 17 Lysa
seventeen
Lysa
Iheard a boom, then plaster dust rained down from the vaulted ceiling, coating the shoulders of my tunic in a grey powder. I didn’t brush it off. I stood frozen in the center of the ritual circle, the forged letter crumpled in my fist, clutching the sketchbook to my chest like a shield.
“Lysa!”
The voice that tore through the heavy oak door was not human.
Another impact and another boom followed.
The door rattled in its frame, but it didn’t budge.
Along the seams, where the wood met the stone, the manor’s wards flared bright.
The House was holding him back. It knew what was on the other side of that timber even if I was currently questioning everything I knew about the man inside the beast.
Or the beast inside the man.
“Go away!” I shouted, my voice cracking humiliatingly in the middle.
“Open...” The word dissolved into a snarl. “Open... this... door.”
“I’m busy,” I yelled back. “Come back later.”
“Busy?” The roar rose in pitch, half-shriek, half-shout. “You are... in a room... that does not exist!”
“Well, I found it, so clearly your floorplans are outdated,” I stepped back as the wood groaned under another assault. “You really should fire your architect.”
Kirion, the traitor, scrambled out from behind my legs.
The wyrmling didn’t look at me. He didn’t look at the letter that proved his master viewed me as nothing more than a glorified magical sponge.
He threw himself at the door, his claws scrabbling against the wood, whining high in his throat.
He wanted out. He wanted the monster on the other side.
“Your dragon wants you, he has poor judgment, apparently.”
“Lysa.” The name came out as a low thrum that I felt in my stomach. “I smell... distress. I smell... salt.”
Tears. He smelled my tears. I wiped them away furiously with my sleeve, smearing dust across my cheek.
“It’s just dust, you’re knocking the ceiling down. It’s very messy. Mrs. Crane will be furious.”
“I do not care... about the dust!” He slammed against the barrier again, and this time I saw the wood bow inward before the amber wards snapped it back into place. “The House... fights me. It thinks... I am unsafe.”
“The House has excellent instincts,” I retorted. “Maybe you should listen to it.”
“I am... trying,” he growled, the words labored, as if he were biting them off one by one. “To be... civilized. But you are... hiding. Why are you... hiding?”
“I’m not hiding. I’m reading.” I looked down at the crumpled ball of paper in my hand, at the words a chore I endure. “It’s educational. Did you know you have terrible penmanship when you’re being manipulative?”
A heavy silence fell on the other side of the door. Then, a long, rough exhale, like a steam valve releasing pressure.
“I do not know what you are talking about,” he rumbled. “But if you do not open this door... I will tear the wall down.”
“And ruin the structural integrity of the west wing?” I let out a jagged, humorless laugh. “Very irresponsible for a landlord.”
“Lysa.” A pause. A scratch of claws on stone. “Please.”
The ‘please’ was almost human.
The stone lintel above the door cracked with a sound like a pistol shot. Amber light splintered in the air, the House’s protective wards screaming under the assault of its own master.
If he hit it one more time, he wouldn’t just break the door; he’d bring the entire west wing down on our heads.
“Fine!” I shouted, more at the ceiling than at him. “Fine, you stubborn idiot!”
I threw the bolt and yanked the handle.
The wards snapped with a pop that stung my ears, and the heavy oak door swung inward. Fenrik stumbled into the room, carried by his own momentum.
I stepped back, clutching the papers to my chest, my breath hitching in a throat choked with dust. His shirt was gone, shredded or discarded, leaving his torso bare.
Silver veins writhed beneath his pallid flesh, pulsing with a frantic rhythm.
Shadows pooled in the hollows of his collarbones, and his fingers ended in translucent, lethal claws.
He straightened, looming over me, his chest heaving with the sound of a bellows. His eyes were the worst part, no longer grey, but silver, glowing with a feral luminescence.
“You,” he snarled.
Then he looked past me. His gaze snagged on the cracked ley-window in the center of the scorched circle.
It darted to the half-burned journals on the shelves.
Finally, it landed on the crumpled ball of paper in my fist, the letter that said I was a chore, a tool, a battery to be drained and discarded.
For a heartbeat, the monster dropped away, and he looked like a man waking up in a burning building.
He took a step back, his claws scraping shrilly on the stone.
“You found it, the House let you in.”
“It insisted, actually,” I said, my voice shaking despite my best efforts to sound imperious. I brandished the letter, though my knuckles were white. “It seemed to think I deserved to know that the man that is officially called my husband considers me an appliance.”
Fenrik flinched. The shadows at his neck flared, trying to crawl up his jaw. “That isn’t—Lysa, put that down. This room is poison.”
“Is it?” I laughed. “Funny. It feels like the only honest room in this entire cursed mausoleum.”
“You don’t understand what you’re holding.” He stepped toward me, his silver eyes narrowing. “Give them to me.”
“So you can burn them?” I retreated until my back hit the edge of the heavy desk. “So you can forget again? Or make me forget?”
“I am trying,” he roared, “to keep you safe!”
“Safe?” I thrust the letter toward him, ignoring the way Kirion cowered against my ankles. “Is this safe? Lying to me? Using me to fix your mistakes?”
“It is not a mistake!” He lunged, closing the distance between us in a second.
I didn’t flinch. I let my own magic rise, a golden heat under my skin, ready to Quiet him if I had to. He stopped inches from me, his hand raised to snatch the evidence.
“I won’t watch you die the way my parents did.”
He was reaching for the sketchbook I held tight against my heart, his eyes wide.
“Give it to me, Lysa,” he pleaded. “Before the memory takes root.”
He lunged to grab the papers I was holding to for dear life and the impact knocked the wind out of me with a humiliating whoosh.
I braced for the crack of my skull against the flagstones, squeezing my eyes shut and mentally cataloging which potions I’d need for a concussion: arnica, willow bark, perhaps a stiff drink. But the crack never came.
A large, calloused hand slammed against the back of my head milliseconds before the stone did, cradling my skull even as the rest of his body pinned me to the floor.
Fenrik sprawled over me. His hips ground mine into the stone, locking me in place so effectively I couldn’t have squirmed even if I’d had enough air in my lungs to try. He was heavy. And Gods help me, he felt good.
I gasped, my eyes flying open. His face hovered inches above mine, sweat glistening on his skin where the silver veins pulsed. His claws had bypassed my head and dug into the stone floor on either side of my ears, screeching like nails on a chalkboard as the rock splintered under his grip.
“Well, this is certainly one way to win an argument.”
He didn’t laugh, nor blink. He lowered himself further until his nose brushed the tip of mine.
His body trembled against mine, a vibration that started in his chest and rattled straight through my bones, waking up nerves I hadn’t known I possessed.
My thighs were firmly pinned beneath his, and the friction was agonizingly, inappropriately electric.
I was being assaulted by a cursed lord in a secret room, pinned to the floor by a creature capable of tearing out my throat, and my traitorous body was wondering if he intended to bite.
“You shouldn’t be in here,” he said. His silver eyes were wild, the pupils blown wide. “You never should have come here.”
The air left my lungs for a second time, but not from the weight. He wasn’t talking about the room, he was talking about the manor. The whole marriage affair. Me.
The sketchbook was still trapped between our chests, a corner digging into my ribs, reminding me of the words I’d read in his own handwriting. A chore. Of course. I was a mistake he was trying to correct, an interloper in his curated misery.
“Because I’m inconvenient?” I choked out, staring up at him, fighting the insane urge to buck my hips against his just to see if his control would snap. “Or because you prefer your victims to stay in the dark?”
“Because—“ He cut himself off with a snarl, burying his face in the crook of my neck. His nose trailed a line of moist heat along my pulse, and I arched my back involuntarily. He froze, and I froze.
“Because,” he whispered against my skin, “it isn’t safe.”
“Then get off me,” I said, though my hands had somehow found their way to his shoulders, gripping the bare, fever-hot skin there. My fingers curled, risking the cut of his emerging scales.
“I can’t.” The words came out as a pained groan. His hips pressed harder against mine, a heavy drag of friction that made my vision spot with stars. “I can’t let you go.”
“You have strange definitions for your words, my lord,” I managed, staring up at the vaulted ceiling and trying to remember how to perform basic arithmetic to distract myself. “‘Mistake’ implies you want distance, not... whatever this is.”
He lifted his head, those storm-silver eyes burning into mine, and for a second, I thought he might kiss me or kill me. I wasn’t sure which one the House was rooting for, but the floor stones beneath us were definitely getting warmer.
“I am trying,” he grated out through clenched teeth, his claws scoring deeper grooves into the stone by my ears, “to save you from myself.”
“Well, you’re certainly devoted to the task,” I choked out. “If you put this much effort into your estate management, the roof wouldn’t leak.”