Chapter 5

Cynthia

The old Crescent Sister's voice reached me from very far away.

"May the moonlight guide you home. May the Goddess gather you in silver and in peace."

The words moved through the red that had swallowed my vision and drew it apart. The heat behind my eyes receded.

I took a breath. My hands were wet and shaking, but the prayer held me steady, and together we finished the rite.

When I walked out of the chapel, the monastery grounds had gone quiet.

Two novices pressed against the wall when they saw me. A cook turned so fast her ladle clattered down. They did not look at my face. They looked at the blood on my robe, at the armed men still posted in the square, and they knew what I was.

Trouble. The kind you do not stand near.

I stopped at the gate. The old Crescent Sister was behind me.

"I brought this upon you," I said. My voice sounded foreign to my own ears. "The Abbott is dead because of me. I am a sinful person."

She looked at me with eyes that had seen a hundred deaths and found each one deserving of pity.

"The Moon Goddess sees all things," she said. "What happens follows Her law. It is not your fault."

"But I am about to fall into darkness." The words came out as a whisper. "I can feel it."

The old woman placed her hand on my arm. Dry and warm. The opposite of his.

"As long as your heart stays true to Her," she said, "She will not let you go."

*

The next morning, they came for me.

Three men in dark suits stood at our door. They were polite the way expensive knives are polished: smooth surface, hard underneath. One addressed my father by name. Another held open the back door of a black car.

"Miss Halloway. We are here to escort you to the Valenti estate."

The town was silent. Every door shut, every window curtained. The people who had stared at me yesterday were gone. Even the dogs had been pulled inside.

I had not slept. My robe was clean, scrubbed free of the blood in the dark, but my back still ached from the Abbott's whip, and the strange red pulse behind my eyes had not fully faded.

I turned to look at my father one last time.

He stood in the doorway, his hands gripping the frame. His face was drawn and old. He did not step forward. He said nothing.

He shut the door.

I got into the car.

*

The Valenti estate was not a house. It was a fortress, built of dark stone older than anything in my town, ringed by iron gates and grounds so vast the trees dissolved into fog. Inside, the halls were wide and cold, hung with oil paintings of pale men and women whose eyes followed me as I passed.

I searched for a crescent, a prayer alcove, any sign of Her.

Nothing. Not a single mark of the Moon Goddess, anywhere in these walls.

They mean to live without Her entirely.

"Miss Halloway." The butler's voice was clipped and precise. He walked ahead without turning. He was old, silver-haired. "I would advise you not to stare. The master values discretion."

He led me to a bath chamber of white marble and steam, the water already drawn.

"You will wash," he said. "Your garments will be provided." He closed the door behind him.

I undressed carefully. The fabric peeled from the lash wounds on my back, and I lowered myself into the water with a hiss. It was the warmest water I had ever felt. My body relaxed before I could stop it. For one breath I closed my eyes and thought of nothing at all.

When I climbed out, my plain dress was gone.

In its place, draped over the vanity chair, was something I could barely bring myself to look at. Sheer fabric, cut to bare the shoulders and expose the legs nearly to the hip.

My face went hot.

"Miss Halloway." The butler's voice came through the door. "The master is waiting."

"I cannot wear this." I heard my own voice, thin and too high.

A pause. Then, colder: "You would do well not to test his patience."

Dorian's words from yesterday returned to me all at once: after tonight, the only one you will pray to is me. My chest tightened until I could not breathe. Whatever waited for me on the other side of that door, I understood now.

Goddess. Tell me what to do.

My eyes caught the curtain beside the bath. It was heavy dark green velvet, long enough to reach the floor.

*

The butler looked at me and closed his eyes for a moment, as if requesting patience from a higher power.

I stood before him wrapped from collarbone to ankle in bath-chamber curtain, the sheer dress buried somewhere underneath, the green velvet bunched and trailing behind me.

I looked absurd. I did not care.

He led me through the halls without a word and stopped before a pair of double doors. He knocked once, opened them, and stepped aside.

The bedroom was enormous, a fire already lit in the hearth. The bed was the size of my entire room at the monastery.

Dorian stood by the window with a glass of something dark. He wore only a white shirt, open at the throat, and dark trousers. Without the coat, he was harder to look at, not easier — the white fabric pulled across his chest and shoulders, and the firelight traced every line beneath it.

I forced my gaze to the floor.

"Well." His voice carried across the room. I heard the glass set down. Then footsteps. "What is this?"

I did not look up. Something in his voice had changed. Not anger, not the polished cruelty from the chapel.

He was laughing.

Quiet. Contained. Something he did not seem to do often. It changed his voice: lower, warmer. Made him sound, for one awful moment, not frightening at all.

Then his hands closed on the curtain, and he pulled me out of it.

I gasped. One second I was wrapped, and the next the velvet was at my feet and I was on his lap in the armchair by the fire, his arm locked around my waist.

"My fiancée came gift-wrapped." He said it against my hair. "How thoughtful."

The sheer dress was all that was left between us. My arms flew to my chest, but his arm around my waist was iron, and when I twisted to escape, his cold skin pressed through the thin cloth and raised every hair on my body.

I stopped moving.

My heart hammered so hard I was certain he could hear it. His body was cold everywhere: his arm, his chest through the shirt, his thigh beneath me. The fabric of his clothes caught and dragged against my bare skin with every breath I took.

Moon Goddess. Moon Goddess. Moon Goddess.

I squeezed my eyes shut and let the prayer flood my head, the way I had every night of my life when the dark came too close.

Please. Tell me what to do. Tell me what to do. Tell me what to do.

His fingers traced the side of my neck. Slow. Deliberate.

"Are you praying?"

My eyes flew open. He was watching me from inches away, his gaze fixed on me in a way that pinned me where I sat. No warmth, only an interest that made my skin crawl and my pulse jump at the same time.

"In situations like this," he said, "praying to me would be far more useful."