Chapter Seventeen - Evie
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Evie
THE SEAM OPENED brighter the closer I got. Thankfully, it didn’t flood the room with light, but it was enough to make the marble wall look like something that wasn’t quite solid. Gold ran through the line in slow pulses, as though it had a heartbeat.
Mara stood from the bed so fast the mattress bounced. “Evie,” she whispered, urgent now, “be careful.”
I almost laughed. Because at this point, being careful felt a little beside the point.
I lifted my hand toward the wall. The gold beneath my skin brightened in answer, threading through my fingers, delicate and alive. It didn’t come violently this time like lightning. It came like something turning toward me after a long time in the dark.
The moment my palm touched the seam, the wall sighed. That was the only word for it. A soft, hidden exhale moved through the stone, and the glowing line widened to a thin slit. Cool dark air brushed across my face.
Mara made a strangled sound behind me. “Oh, my God. Should you be doing this?”
The slit widened another inch. It wasn’t wide enough to walk through yet, but just enough to reveal the narrow darkness beyond.
“It’s stronger,” I said softly, and my voice sounded strange to my own ears.
The gold spilled farther over the wall, branching out in fine threads like roots. I could feel the pull of it now, the passage responding not just to my hand, but to me, to whatever that bread had fed, whatever had woken up hotter and steadier inside me.
Mara came up beside me, close enough that her sleeve brushed mine.
“Was it like this before?” she asked in a hushed voice.
“Yeah,” I said, watching the gold spread. “But before, it felt like begging. This…”
I pressed harder, and the seam widened at once. “This feels like it knows me now.”
“You don’t have to come,” I said as I flicked my eyes toward her.
That offended her instantly. “I know that.”
A laugh escaped me before I could stop it, real enough to surprise us both.
The passage waited. I should have been afraid. But my fear sat beneath something almost electric, like hope. Then, I stepped through first.
The darkness closed around me at once, cool with a slight breeze as the walls narrowed enough that my shoulders nearly brushed them. Gold still flickered under my skin, enough to paint the stone in dull pulses of light. Behind me, I heard Mara inhale and follow with the soft whisper of her steps.
The seam in the room folded shut behind us, and we both instantly froze.
It had stayed open last time, thin and trembling, a thread back to the world, but now there was only a sealed wall.
My stomach dropped and for a heartbeat, I thought about running back to it, and try to pry it open again.
But the hallway ahead waited, so I swallowed hard, forced my feet to move, and chose forward.
“This is insane,” Mara whispered.
“Yeah.”
“Are we really doing this?”
I looked ahead into the narrow dark. “Apparently.”
This time the passage stretched in two directions, not straight but subtly curving, disappearing into black.
I frowned. “It wasn’t like this before.”
“What?”
“The first time I came through here, it led only one way. To His private chamber.” I touched the wall lightly with my fingertips. Gold skittered over the stone. “Now it’s a fork…” I paused, trying to find the shape of it. “Wider. Different.”
Maybe the hidden architecture of this place had more to say than it had before.
Mara wrapped her arms around herself. “That doesn’t make me feel better.”
“Me either.”
I took a few slow steps forward. The power in my hands brightened with each one, as though the corridor itself were drinking it in.
Or answering it. The walls here weren’t smooth marble under the glamor.
They were older, rougher. Stone veined with hairline cracks that caught the gold and gave it back in tiny glimmers.
Something about that made my stomach tighten. “Mara,” I said quietly.
“What?”
“I think this place is full of seams.”
The whisper of her breath caught. “To where? Other alcoves?”
“Maybe.” I kept moving, following the faint tug I felt low in my chest, not the bond, something stranger. “Maybe to more than that. Maybe… a way out.”
We reached the first branching point after only a few yards. A split in the corridor, one path curving left, one right, another narrow opening directly ahead.
I stopped, and Mara nearly bumped into me.
“Oh,” she said.
The gold beneath my skin pulsed harder, reacting to all three directions at once. I closed my eyes and listened, because that was what it felt like now, listening. Not thinking, not choosing logically, listening for the way the magic leaned.
One path hummed faintly with a familiar, awful warmth. His chamber. Another carried nothing but silence. But the third…
I frowned. The third felt soft. It didn’t feel safe, exactly, but it felt… human or something closer to it than the others.
Mara saw my face change. “What?”
I opened my eyes and pointed to the right-hand passage. “That way.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t. I just…” I pressed a hand to my sternum. “It doesn’t feel like Him.”
That was apparently enough for both of us, because we didn’t argue. Instead, we turned right.
The passage narrowed again, forcing us into a single file.
Mara stayed close behind me, and every so often I could hear the shallow rush of her breathing when the corridor bent too sharply or dipped unexpectedly beneath our feet.
The air changed as we walked, losing some of its chill and picking up something else, fabric, skin, humidity of a shower.
My pulse quickened. What was I even doing?
Then, from somewhere ahead, very faintly, there was a voice. I stopped so abruptly Mara collided with my back.
“What is it?” she hissed.
I lifted a hand. There it was again. I couldn’t make out the words clearly. It was more like muffled crying or mumbling through the wall.
Mara froze behind me. “Oh, God,” she whispered.
I moved forward more carefully now, one palm trailing along the rough stone, the gold under my skin dimming and flaring with every step. The corridor ended at another seam, but this one was smaller than the one in my room, barely a glowing thread in the dark.
I touched it, and the wall opened an inch. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to look through. And inside was another alcove, just like mine, all silk and gold and marble. And on the bed, curled on her side beneath the blankets, was a girl I’d never seen before.
She looked young, maybe a teenager. Dark hair spilled across the pillow.
In that same fucking gold robe. Her face was turned toward the wall, and even from here I could see the rigid set of her shoulders, the way she held herself too tightly even in sleep, like whatever this place had done to her had taught her not to unclench.
I stared through the slit.
Mara’s breath feathered against the back of my shoulder. “Who is that?”
“I don’t know.”
The girl moved suddenly. She flinched, and a small, broken sound left her, so quiet I barely heard it.
Something hot and vicious rose in me. I knew there were others. I’d seen the woman across from me, heard moans down the hall. But she was practically a child. What the fuck was He doing?
It shouldn’t have surprised me, not after everything, not after every perfectly carved cruelty this place had already shown me. But seeing her there, seeing the shape of someone so young trapped in another polished cage, made it real in a new and unbearable way.
Mara pressed a fist to her mouth. “Oh God,” she said again, weaker this time.
I let the slit close. The wall sealed itself with a hush.
When I turned to face Mara, my hands were shaking. And it wasn’t from fear. From fury.
“How many? I asked
Her face had gone white. “I—”
I thought of the branching passage. The pulse of hidden corridors moving through the walls like veins.
“I don’t know.”
The gold beneath my skin flickered hotter.
Mara looked at my hands, then back at my face. “Evie…”
I knew that tone. The one people used when they could see the shape of your next bad idea before you’d said it out loud.
“No,” she said softly.
“Yes.”
“Evie, please.”
I exhaled sharply.
“If you keep opening things like this, He might feel it. He might find us.”
That stopped me. Because she was right.
I looked down the corridor, the darkness ahead still waiting, still branching somewhere beyond sight. My pulse beat hard against the inside of my throat. The power was steady in me now. Stronger than before. It was listening now.
And this was the first real advantage I’d had since He brought me here. Every instinct in me wanted to spend it all at once.
Mara stepped closer. “We have to be smart.”
I laughed sharply. “I’m a little past smart.”
“No.” Her voice hardened. “You’re not. That’s why you’re still alive.”
When I looked at her, the fear in her face was there, but so was the determination under it. The fact that she’d followed me into the walls of Heaven with trust in me, without a plan, just because I’d said let’s find out.
Something in my anger steadied. I took one slow breath. Then another.
“You’re right,” I said.
Mara blinked. “I am?”
“Don’t get used to it.”
That got the faintest, strangest ghost of a smile out of her. I turned back to the corridor. My fingers flexed. The gold flashed between them.
“Let’s go back,” I said. “For now.”
Mara let out a breath so shaky I realized she’d genuinely thought I might ignore her and go deeper anyway.
“But,” I added, already reaching for the seam behind us, “tomorrow we start mapping.”
Her eyes widened. “Mapping?”
“If this place has veins, I want to figure out every single one of them.”
The seam of my room glowed at my touch. The wall began to part. And just before it opened wide enough to let us through, something moved in the darkness farther down the corridor.
It didn’t look human. It was a tall shape, too still, outlined for one pulse of gold before the passage swallowed it again. I was pretty sure it’s hair was moving on its own.