Val - Tomb of Silk and Marble

At some point in the last five minutes, he picked me up.

One minute I'm slumped in a puddle of my own adrenaline, sweat, and possibly a few pieces of dead person. The next, I'm weightless. Pressed against hard warmth that is entirely unasked for. His heartbeat is steady under my cheek, not matching the fact that the world has just upended itself and shown me its underbelly.

Whatever happened just now, will need to be unpicked at another time. This second, I'm deep in self-preservation, happily locking all that shit away.

My eyes are pinned wide open, because I don't trust what's behind them anymore. They're full of light, twitching bodies, heat and power and that scream that came from me, but not me.

I'm not looking at his face. Just the stretch of black fabric over his chest and the line of his throat that shouldn't be that smooth. The world tilts, not metaphorically, actually. I feel the shift in air, the change in pressure, the second reality holds its breath around him. One blink and the trees are gone, another, and we're somewhere else.

Gravel crunches under his feet and looming ahead of us, is the biggest mansion I've ever seen.

Calling it that feels wrong, that's calling a coffin a pillowcase. It's too big, cold walls rise into the mist, trimmed in wrought iron and ancient carvings. Everything is symmetrical in the most disturbing way possible. Not elegant, but somewhere grown from a blueprint designed by someone who's never actually experienced a human emotion.

We cross the threshold, and it's actually worse inside. Victorian bones wrapped in silent opulence. Chandeliers, dozens of them, dangling from vast expanses of ceiling. This is a mausoleum someone tried to disguise with velvet. Inside, the air smells like old stone and lavender. The doors swing open with a whisper, and suddenly, we're moving past portraits that don't have faces. Up a staircase wide enough to land a plane on.

My brain's taken a step back and pulled the emergency lever on conscious thought. Everything is happening in frames with parts missing, I blink, we've moved, I blink, we're up the stairs.

I'm floating. He cradles me like I weigh nothing, a precious and fragile thing he owns. I try to twist, to remind him I have teeth. But my limbs won't obey, so I just lay there, burning behind my eyes, trying not to feel how warm he is or how the walls breathe.

The fact we've stopped doesn't register until I feel heat curling against my skin. Something soft presses against my back, silk, I think. The thick arms that have been holding me together vanish, the spaces where they pressed cooling too quickly.

I don't like it.

Blinking up, I'm staring at a ceiling carved with gods I don't believe in. The chandelier above me is glittering gold and crystal, big enough to crush a car, and swaying gently despite the air being still.

"Don't move," he coos. "You'll faint again."

Fainting is not what I did, I collapsed with tactical inconvenience. But I don't argue, my mouth wouldn't work if I tried. My knees are still somewhere back in that forest, or whatever the hell that was, and my ribs ache like I grew new bones mid-fall.

Tinkling, running water drifts through the room. Not a hissing rusted pipe to be heard, the waters probably drawn from a sacred spring and filtered through the skin of virgins.

Slowly, I push up on my elbows, watch him move around the bathroom, a practiced rhythm as he's done this a thousand times. The tub is enormous, roll top, claw-footed, gleaming white porcelain with gold fixtures shaped like demons. A colored glass bottle drips a dark liquid into the water, instantly perfuming the air with bruised petals and honey.

Steam curls in lazy swirls, fogging the mirror. The salt he sprinkles in glitters like crushed crystal. All I do is stare as he wipes his hands on a cloth and turns back to me.

"This should help," he says. Walking towards me, full of that predator grace, bending to scoop me up again, carefully handling fine china.

I want to spit in his face. Instead, I let him carry me to the bed and set me down on top of it.

"There are clothes in the wardrobe," he points to the far wall, straightening his cuffs. "Clean yourself up. You stink of fear."

He turns and leaves, just like that. My eyes flick between the wardrobe and the bathroom, then the bed beneath me, then the door and back to the bathroom.

He really does think I'm fucking stupid.

One deep breath to find the edges of myself again. One blink to remember I'm not some porcelain doll in a storybook cage, I'm me. A walking scrape of bone and survival instincts, stitched together by fury and duct tape.

And this bitch is not staying here.

The mattress protests when I lurch off it, groaning under movement. My legs hold, barely, but enough to carry me as I storm toward the door. I don't bother with stealth, this isn't sneaking, it's escaping. The handle turns, but nothing moves. I yank again, the lock doesn't even rattle. Totally sealed.

My heart rate spikes, fury crashing into panic and fusing them together into unstable chemicals. I slam my shoulder into the door. Once. Twice. A third time for good measure and because it feels good to hit something. Nothing.

Fine, I'll go for the windows.

There are three, tall and narrow, framed in blood-red velvet drapes. I rip them open. The view outside is objectively beautiful, sprawling green doused in hazy light. Who gives a fuck right now. I grab a chair and hurl it, hitting the pane dead center. It doesn't even crack. But the chair splinters like it hit a steel wall, one leg bouncing off and knocking over a vase I didn't even notice.

Fine. Everything's fair game now.

I rip a lamp from its socket and hurl it. Smash a mirror. Tip a table. I scream as I go, throat raw, hair sticking to my face. My blood's pumping too fast, pounding war drums in my ears. Pet, I am not his pet to be kept. I am not something that gets taken and locked away and handed fucking bath salts and smelly oils.

When the last thing shatters, a porcelain thing, hopefully priceless. I slump to my knees in the wreckage, chest heaving, taking stock of the fact I've destroyed everything, but achieved absolutely diddly piss.

The laugh bubbles out of me. None of this is even remotely funny. But it comes anyway, high and cracked and wet at the edges. I press a hand to my face, feel the heat of it, the salt of tears I didn't mean to let fall. Great. Now I'm crying. Again.

A tremble rolls through me and I turn my head. The bathroom door's still open. The tub still steaming, the scent of violet and heat a curling temptation. My limbs ache. My spine's folding in on itself. My throat is dry enough to cut glass.

So I crawl.

Because there's nothing else left to do. Dragging myself into the bathroom, peeling off layers stiff with sweat and old blood, and I sink into the water. Unfortunately, it doesn't give me any answers.

But it holds me.

And for now, that's enough.