Chapter One - Evie
CHAPTER ONE
Evie
I STEPPED OVER the threshold, and the floor betrayed me again.
It wasn’t like a shove, just a subtle tilt, like an undertow you don’t notice until you’re already being pulled backward. The sole of my boot slid an inch across the marble, my stomach dropped, and I ended up exactly where I’d started, breathless and furious.
My leathers creaked when I caught myself, and my stomach rolled unpleasantly. Maybe it wasn’t just from the tilt because it felt deeper, slower, like something inside me hadn’t settled right since I’d been here.
But I wasn’t giving up, so I tried again. This time, I got to the hallway, but it was still the same result. I was nudged back with polite insistence, like I was a child misunderstanding the rules, and it was correcting me without comment.
I was trapped in the alcove He’d left me in. A bedroom dressed up like kindness. Don’t get me wrong, it was beautiful. But… there were no doors.
At first glance, it was beautiful, like a dorm room designed for a magazine spread.
A plush bed made with fresh, tight linens that always smelled faintly clean, like I should be so grateful.
A tray of food they brought to my room regularly, ice-cold water that appeared like mercy, a small bathroom tucked behind a sliding screen, as if dignity could be had in a place like this.
There were books stacked neatly. Art supplies arranged with quiet care. Paper that waited, pristine, for my hands to make something beautiful and harmless.
This was a gilded cage. A fucking cage with amenities. It looked open, with sheer curtains that obscured little, and I was never told I couldn’t leave it. But He didn’t need to say it.
The boundaries were always there, invisible and absolute, stitched into the glow that framed the doorway, into the way the air seemed to thicken when I got too close, into the subtle tilt of the floor that corrected me every time I tried to walk out.
I’d been at it for hours, maybe days. Every time I tried, my boots would slide an inch, then two, then suddenly I’d be right back where I’d started at the bed, breathless and furious.
“Fuck this place,” I huffed.
I didn’t know how long I’d been here. Time didn’t seem to move here the way it should. I wasn’t even sure where “here” even was. Was this Heaven?
Everything was the same, all the time. The light never changed. The air never cooled or warmed. It was all kept at a perfect constant. And my body… felt suspended, like it had been paused mid-breath and forgotten.
I wanted to escape, needed to escape. I needed to get back to Luc. What if he was really hurt? What if he was… I shut the thought off.
This… place made something in me want to break.
But not just that, I wanted to ruin it, to rip the softness apart until the truth showed through.
To fling the books, crack the gold fixtures, and smear the clean walls with proof that this was no sanctuary or haven.
This was worse than any hell I could imagine because even though it was dressed up to be perfect and beautiful, let’s call it what it really was. I was trapped in a goddamn trophy case.
A sound came without warning. A moan, low and breathless, sliding down the hall from somewhere to my left. It wasn’t pain. That was what was so unsettling. It was pleasure, soft and yielding and wrong, like someone surrendering in slow motion.
I froze. Another sound followed, murmurs and a broken laugh this time, cut short as if the air itself had tightened around it. Then silence slammed down so abruptly it made my ears ring.
I didn’t need to see or hear Him to know. He was nearby.
My pulse skidded. I moved on instinct, stepping back into the hidden shadows of my room, my fingers shaking as I reached for the silken veil. I drew it closed just as the light in the hall warmed, turning richer, heavier, like poured honey.
Footsteps didn’t approach. He didn’t walk. He arrived.
The voice in my head was screaming, “Don’t look this way. Please. Let me be nothing. Let me be air. Let me be a shadow…”
I couldn’t help myself as I held my breath and peeked through the sheer veil just enough to see.
He stepped out of a neighboring archway as if the glow itself had released him.
No rush. No shame. Only that calm certainty he wore like a second skin, light clinging to his shoulders as if it belonged there.
“Guardians,” he said quietly, not turning his head.
The word rippled through the hall, a command pressed into stone. They appeared almost immediately. One man. One woman.
They were draped in pale, Grecian folds that caught the gold light and made them look carved rather than clothed, fabric pinned and layered in soft columns around their bodies.
Their sandals made no sound against the marble.
They didn’t really step so much as glide, movements too smooth, too synchronized, as if friction had been edited out of them entirely.
Then the woman shifted slightly, and my stomach dropped.
She had two faces. It wasn’t a trick of shadow or a reflection.
She had a second face set at the back of her head, watching the opposite direction with the same serene, unreadable calm.
It didn’t even blink as it stared back down the corridor.
The man was the same. Two profiles, back-to-back, one turned toward the alcove they’d just exited, the other already fixed forward, guarding what was coming next. Their expressions didn’t soften into anything human. It was like watching statues that had learned how to move.
They flowed behind Him, smoothing the hall as they passed, straightening curtains, restoring stillness, erasing… evidence.
I meant to stay still. I meant to be invisible and let the veil hang untouched, to give Him no proof I was watching. But His presence did that thing it always did.
The air thickened with Him, warm and syrupy, and something in me leaned before my mind could stop it, like the tide pulled by the moon. My hand lifted without permission, drawn toward the curtain as if the fabric could anchor me, as if touching anything could keep me from being pulled toward Him.
My fingertips brushed the silken veil, and the curtain shifted, a soft whisper of movement in a hall built for perfect stillness.
His gaze snapped sideways toward my alcove, just for a heartbeat.
I couldn’t swear I saw it, but I felt it, the faint curve of His mouth, sharp and knowing, like I’d just given Him exactly what He wanted, proof that everyone, eventually, surrendered.
He didn’t stop. He just walked on. The Guardians glided after him. Soon after, the light cooled. The heaviness of the air loosened, and the hall settled back into its perfect, terrible quiet, like nothing had happened at all.
I just stood there, peering through the veil.
Across the hall, there was a woman also standing at the entrance to her alcove, looking through the curtain, like she’d been drawn towards Him as well.
I watched her as her hollow-eyed lashes fell and lifted again, slow, methodical, like the second hand of a clock.
I found myself counting the blinks because numbers were the only thing in this place that still felt like something I could control.
Thirty-six. Thirty-seven.
At thirty-eight, the light hiccupped again, a tiny stutter in the gold glow as if the hall had blinked with her. My stomach tightened. It was probably time to eat or bathe or… something. The routines here didn’t seem to run on clocks. They ran on Him. And I hated it.
I exhaled through my nose, trying to keep my hands from shaking, and focused on what I could control. Observation. Patterns. It was the one thing I was sure helped me survive the most when I ran away as a teenager.
I was going to learn the order of this place the way animals learned cages, by testing the edges until something hurt.
Those… people he called Guardians who walked at His back never spoke and glided behind Him like shadows. Their attention was fixed so completely on Him it bent their spines. When He slowed, they slowed. When He turned, they turned, perfect and obedient.
There were others who moved through the halls in quiet currents. They didn’t seem to be servants or guards, but something worse, something more devout.
I learned their names listening to the Guardians when He wasn’t around. They seemed to run this place. I’d heard something once, in passing, when He paused outside a neighboring room, and the Guardians glided close behind Him, heads bowed.
The woman’s front face didn’t move, but the mouth at the back of her head murmured, soft as a confidence meant only for Him. “The Votaries are ready, my Lord.”
The word stuck in me like a burr. Votaries.
They must be the ones who carried bowls of oil that smelled sweet and spoiled at once, folded shimmering robes, and combs with delicate golden teeth.
Their heads stayed bowed as they passed, horns sweeping back from their temples in elegant arcs, hooves clicking quietly against the floor.
From a distance, their faces almost passed for human.
Up close, they were not the same, like devotion sanded away every edge.
They tended to hover near the rooms, though they’d never come to my alcove during this time. But if I caught their eyes through the veil, it felt like staring into a faithful acolyte who’d had their soul scooped out.
I’d figured out a few things watching through the veil because it always happened the same.
The air thickened, warm and cloying, pressing into my chest until breathing felt like kneeling, and soon the Votaries would arrive with ritual precision to a room, turning and washing skin with reverent hands, smoothing and combing hair, dressing bodies.
They worked like a bridal party for a prison.