CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Verena
IF THE ENDLESS PAIN DIDN’T KILL ME, the damn dripping would.
That ceaseless flow was like a knife point tapping directly against my forehead.
Time no longer belonged to me. It warped, turning on itself until each breath felt eternal, or like my last.
Reve came often, his words slipping past me now, dissolving before they could even land. They had lost their shape, their edges, even their sting.
Most days I drifted out of my body and let him talk to the stone. Other days, I searched for the curse through the basement of my mind, waiting for its hiss to rise and strike.
Whatever magic was laced through the shackles smothered it completely.
I had once imagined that might feel like freedom. It didn’t.
Sometimes, when the soundless dark crowded too tight, I built a meadow in my head—tall grass waving against an endless deep blue sky, hills blooming with colors no mortal eye could hold.
She was always there, the woman I’d dream of, stroking my hair with phantom fingers, humming the same low tune.
I knew she wasn’t real. But gods, I needed her.
Because no one else was coming.
Now, all I had was stone.
I traced its grooves with cracked nails and split fingers, memorizing each rough line until it felt like a map of my survival.
Proof that I was still here. Not free, but alive.
There was no sunlight to warm me, no sky to breathe. Only the stagnant stench of blood and rot. And the dark. My only witness, my only embrace, since the lantern outside my cell had long since gone cold.
If Callum shared the same pit of swallowed light, I didn’t know. I tried not to think of him. Or his screams. That path only led to Gemma. And my heart couldn’t survive that truth.
Not yet. Not ever.
My fingers went slack, sliding to the floor at my sides. Should I pray? Would it even matter? After everything I’d done, after the damage I’d left behind, would any God still listen?
My skull tipped back against the wall, too lightheaded to hold upright. I was tired. Bone-deep tired. My chin dipped again, falling forward as my mind slid into a dreamless drift.
The sound that tore me out of it was the click of metal as the lock to the door turned. Pain arced up my spine in waves under my skin, a groan breaking inside me but never reaching the air.
Reve had already come today. I hadn’t slept since.
Why was he back?
Maybe this was it, the final visit. He’d pried everything he could from me and now he’d finish the work, scatter me into pieces until there was nothing left to save.
Elva.
Her name rose in me like a wound. Her soft hands, her quiet heart, she wouldn’t last a day in this pit. Panic flooded my chest, choking out breath, a tide of black water closing over my head. They would kill me and throw her down here instead.
No. No. No.
The chains rattled as I pulled with everything I had left, a useless surge against iron that had taunted me since the first hour. Dread rose higher, filling every inch of me. I wasn’t ready to die, not while she still needed me.
Where are you, Viper? My mind scraped against where it had lived, reaching, pleading.
Ironic, really. When I had spent years praying to be free of it.
Nothing answered.
The curse was meant to be permanent, impossible to cure, impossible to silence, and yet it had just vanished. I couldn’t make sense of it.
Iron shrieked as the door opened, letting silhouettes crawl through the space. I shrank back before I could think. A new instinct.
Maybe Reve had succeeded after all.
A voice came, smooth and settling warm against my skin. “Verena?” It was Elva’s, except unbroken.
A trick, of course.
Reve couldn’t splinter me with pain, so now he’d try hope. Feed me the hope of comfort, make me reach for it, then crush my fingers in the trap. That was his next game.
And gods, my shields—
They hadn’t been up this entire time. My mind had been an open gash. And he'd seen it all—the meadow where I hid, the chestnut-haired woman. Elva’s face when I dreamed of saving her. All of it laid bare while I focused on the ache of my spine.
No barricade. No venom. Just me.
“Verena?” Killian. That was his voice this time, deceptively gentle and too smooth to trust.
They’d brought the Angel back to finish the job, to scour my thoughts clean until nothing was left. Their last resort. Their perfect weapon. He would destroy me from the inside—
A low chuckle rose from the dark. “I would wager it’s the other way around, Viper.”
I stiffened. My heart kicked against bone, a frantic bird in a cage.
“Verena…” There it was again, the voice of melted gold.
Elva’s.
They were going to throw her in here, make her lie in my blood while they spilled hers.
I gagged, bile thick and sour rising into my mouth.
“I’m going to ignite a small light,” she said. “So, we can see. I don’t know how long you’ve been in the dark, so shield your eyes if you need to.”
No, that wasn’t Elva. It was Nezra. Her Liraern voice unraveled through the cell, enthralling and dangerous all at once. My palms pressed against the stone at my sides.
Nezra and Killian together—
If this was another game, I would not play it.
How had they turned her? What had they promised in exchange?
Nezra lit a flare between her fingers. It trembled once, then steadied, a sliver of gold in the cavernous pitch. I tried to lift a hand to shield my face, but the chains snapped taut before I even twitched.
“Gods…” Her breath caught, horrified. “What have they done to you?”
Killian lowered himself beside her, the gravity of his presence making the space seem smaller. His eyes were fused to some distant place, like he was staring straight through mine, toward a thought he’d rather remember instead. “You don’t want to know,” he said.
“Stay out of my head.” My words rasped up, barely there, my gaze shrinking from the flame.
It forced me to look down, toward myself. I closed my eyes. Refused.
I dared myself to look up at them instead, to really see.
Nezra stood in front of me, rows of braids tumbling down her back, each one strung with small hoops that sparked like tiny suns and moons. Her fingers cradled the light, its glare ghosting over her mist-veiled eyes as she studied me.
Killian knelt still, his own braids knotted at the back of his head, battle-worn leathers streaked in soot and oil. His hands stayed on his knees, as if afraid to reach for me, as if touching would break what was left.
The flame grew, and in that moment, I knew there was no avoiding it any longer. I let my eyes roam over whatever parts of me were visible.
I was down to a rag so shredded it barely clung to my chest, the fabric hanging off my hips in strips. Bruises marbled my thighs, along with blood dried in finger sized streaks. My hair, once chestnut silk, was now a snarl of knots.
Nezra’s face crumbled, lips parting.
Killian’s stare finally lifted, his eyes finding and landing on the sorrel hue in mine. “We need to know what state you’re in to move you,” he spoke softly, rising, inching closer to my curled form. “Is anything broken?”
Oh, you mean besides my fucking spirit?
The bitter laugh was choked back as I forced myself deeper into the wall, a hiss curling up from my throat as Killian reached out with one hand.
The arrogance he’d worn in the throne room was gone. His mouth was a hard line now, his brows pinched with something dangerously close to guilt.
It made me almost afraid to ask, “Move me?”
You mean from this vile-soaked mattress barely big enough for Elva’s cat? Not a chance.
His stare shifted to Nezra. She nodded once, passing him the candle before turning back to me with both palms lifted, slow, like I was some wild, cornered thing.
“You’re safe now,” she murmured. “We have Callum. He’s safe too. But we need to leave.” The way her voice hardened on the last word let me know the word safe was only temporary. “Right now.”
None of it sounded real. Not here. Not in this pit.
Even when she lowered herself to the floor, face level with mine, and repeated it softly. “You’re safe, Verena.”
Safe. The word didn’t live down here.
The chain swung between us as she reached for my hand, catching her wrist when she got too close. She yelped, snatching it back as the burn sizzled across her skin.
Her eyes darted from the wound to the iron links, then finally up to me. “Let me see your wrists.”
I let her take my arm, let her feel the crusted blood, the dirt, the wreckage. Without the sliver of Fae healing the manacles let stick around, infection alone would have finished me quickly.
She blinked, then set my arm back on my thigh, noting how the chain didn’t burn me. Her stare cut to Killian, where he stood, arms folded, a musing look behind his eyes.
They didn’t have a plan. They had no idea how to get these chains off me.
“What do you think?” she asked him.
His focus stayed fixed just above my collarbone as he chewed the inside of his lip, as if looking lower might undo him.
“I think,” he cleared his throat, “you go help Duke with Callum. I’ll handle the shackles.”
Her head shook once. “But—”
“She will be safe. She will be free.” Eyes locked with hers, he promised, “You have my word, Nez.”
Unspoken words passed between them. Then Nezra’s voice dipped, the runes on her palms lighting like a violet fire. “Lay a finger on her, send one unwanted knock through her mind—” She closed in on him. “And I will know. And it won’t just be someone else’s memories you search for in the murk.”
With his mouth tipping in a crooked salute, he turned back, full attention on the chains at my wrists. Nezra moved toward the door, pausing at the threshold, glancing back with a small smile as she nodded once.
Safe. That’s what the look said.
Then she whispered, the word drifting through the cell, striking me square in the chest, “Aesira.”
A survivor. That’s what she called me, in a language as lost as I was.
She squinted back at Killian; eyes fastened to the back of his skull. I wondered if he was already inside her head. Judging by the shadow in her eyes, and the curl of his smirk, my guess was yes.
As she slipped back into the corridor, the air shimmered, as if she had passed through a veil not unlike the one Gemma would keep around her garden. Slow, her steps dissolved until it was quiet.
A scuff drew my attention, where Killian shifted closer, his concentration fixed on the chains that grew from the floor into my skin.
“Can you get me free from them?” My voice was dry, flat. Hope was an old word, one I hadn’t tasted in too long.
His eyes lifted, catching in the firelight. Not just blue anymore, but a touch of gold rimming the edges. “Yes,” he said, placing the candle steady between a break in the stone.
Slow, he unsheathed his blade, not letting the metal slice too loud. It was shaped like a feather, long and slender, polished in iridescent silver.
He didn’t bring it to the chains. Instead, he turned, glancing back at the empty corridor before bringing it to his own palm.
My breath stuttered. “What the fuck are you doing?”
The blade’s edge laid against his skin. “I want to make a deal with you.”
I blinked, dizzy. “What the hel does that mean?”
His eyes lifted to mine, unflinching. “A deal. An oath.”
Chains rattled as I tilted back against the wall. “Why would you want to do that?”
A thin cut bloomed as he dragged the blade across his palm, blood shimmered, suspended in threads as he extended the hand toward me.
“To guard you,” he said. “To follow where you lead. Whatever you are, Verena Vale, whatever you’ll become, my vow is already yours.”
Whatever I was? Whatever I’d become?
“I’m not what you think.”
He took another step, his palm extended, blood slipping between his fingers. “You’re exactly what you’ve always been.” My throat worked as I pushed myself further into the wall. “And you’re going to need someone who’s already walked through the end.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came. No sarcasm. No threat. Only the sound of my pulse hammering against the cuffs.
He bent to one knee before me, head bowed. “Let me swear it. Let me belong to you.”
The candle died and the aftermath of darkness surged once again. His next words were a promise carved into the dusk.
“Say yes,” he whispered, “and I will rise when you call me.”