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Chapter 32: Masked Intruders

Autor: Mary Sampson
last update Fecha de publicación: 2026-10-10 09:34:24

For about the length of a held breath, nothing happened.

Hundreds of people stood in the dark with their glasses halfway to their mouths. Somebody laughed, a thin, nervous sound, and somebody else hushed them. I could hear the wine trembling in my own glass.

"It's a performance," a woman near us whispered. "Part of the evening. Surely."

"It is not," Adrian said.

He'd moved before he finished the sentence. His hand left mine, closed on my arm, and drew me back a step so that his shoulder was bet
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  • The Vampire Prince's Human Bride Has No Heartbeat    Chapter 80: One Saved Page and Escape

    I didn't read it. I didn't think about it. I put out my hand and took it.The flame had eaten the corner by then, and it bit my fingers as I pulled the sheet clear. I slapped the page against my nightdress to smother it and felt the heat go through the cloth to my skin. When I looked, the burned edge was a black crescent no wider than my thumbnail. The rest was whole.A single sheet, cream and heavy, folded once. I crushed it inside the front of my nightdress, against my ribs, and the scar under my collarbone gave a hot little pulse, like a nod.*Now go.*---The aisle to the door was still burning on both sides. I'd looked at it long enough to know there was no waiting for it to improve.I pulled the neck of my nightdress up over my nose. I ran.It wasn't brave. It was only that standing still had stopped being possible. The flames roared up on either side, close enough that I felt the hair on my arms curl, and the smoke came down on me like a wet blanket and took the whole room away

  • The Vampire Prince's Human Bride Has No Heartbeat    Chapter 79: Fire

    I'd thought a fire would start small. This one didn't.The oil ran along the spines and the flame ran after it, low and quick, and by the time I'd drawn a breath the whole first rank of red leather was alight. Orange light jumped across the vault. My hiding place, black a moment ago, filled with it.I pulled my knees in and kept still. The figure hadn't gone.It stood in the middle of the floor with the glow on its cloak, watching the shelves take. It didn't flinch from the heat. After a while it bent, picked up the empty satchel, and folded the oilcloth into a small neat square, the way you'd fold a napkin after a meal. Then it walked to the door.At the threshold it stopped and looked back. At the tree, I think. I couldn't see a face to be sure. Then it went through, and I heard a step on the stair, and another, climbing, as unhurried as when it came down.I counted ten before I moved. I'm not proud of that. They were the longest ten I've known, and the room was already roaring.The

  • The Vampire Prince's Human Bride Has No Heartbeat    Chapter 78: Hiding in the Dark

    I moved before I knew where I was going.My feet found the flagstones. My hands found the shelves. I went along them in the blackness with my fingers brushing the spines, one step at a time, counting to keep from thinking. Behind me the footsteps came down, down, down, soft and even, and the silver ring of runes round the door glimmered on the far side of the room like a coin at the bottom of a well.*Not the door. Not the table. Somewhere they won't look.*At the far end, where the last shelf met the wall, I found a gap.It was barely wider than my shoulders. A narrow slot between the end of the shelving and the curve of the stone, where someone had stacked flat wooden boxes, six or seven high, tied with silk, like a pile of folded linen. I slid in sideways. The boxes scraped my arm. I got down on my knees on the cold flags and pulled my skirts in after me, and put my back to the wall, and made myself small.I couldn't see anything.I could hear. That was all I had. My own breath, mu

  • The Vampire Prince's Human Bride Has No Heartbeat    Chapter 77: The Decree

    The sheet had been folded and refolded so often that the creases had worn to a soft, furred white, and it opened in my hands as readily as a flower.A single page. Heavy cream paper, written edge to edge in a clerk's formal hand. The lines were ruled, the letters even, the ink still black. It had none of the sorrow of the scribe's last pages. It was cold and plain and precise. Every word had been chosen to be obeyed.I held it under the lamp.*By the will of the throne of Eldoria, and in the sight of the Court assembled,**It is decreed that the House of the Hearth, having been found a danger to the peace of the realm and to the free will of its peoples, is condemned.**Let its wards be broken. Let its halls be put to the flame. Let its records be sealed or burned. Let its line be ended in every branch, and let no heir be spared, nor hidden, nor carried out of the realm.**Let this be done swiftly, and without mercy, and let it never be spoken of again.**Sealed this day, in the prese

  • The Vampire Prince's Human Bride Has No Heartbeat    Chapter 76: The Truth of Their Fall

    I didn't know how long I'd been standing in front of the tree.My legs had gone stiff. The lamp hung from my fingers, and the gold on the linen had blurred a little at the edges, and I understood, with a faint surprise, that I'd been crying. Not loudly. Only a slow wet trickle down my face, the kind you don't notice until it reaches your chin.*The last daughter.*I wiped my cheek with the back of my wrist. I turned away from the tree. If I looked at that scraped leaf any longer I wouldn't be able to do anything else.There was a table at the near end of the room, a long plain thing of dark wood, with a slanted top for reading and a ring of brass candle-brackets screwed to the rim. I set the lamp down in the middle of it. The light spread out across the wood in a warm pool. Then I went back to the shelves, and walked slowly along them with my hand on the spines, reading the little bronze plates.I wasn't looking for anything in particular. I think I was looking for the one that would

  • The Vampire Prince's Human Bride Has No Heartbeat    Chapter 75: The Sealed Room

    I stood in the doorway and didn't breathe.The lamplight fell across a long, low, vaulted room, no wider than my own sitting room and perhaps four times as deep. The ceiling arched overhead in ribs of pale stone. The floor was flagged, and swept clean, which struck me even then as odd. Nothing in a place like this should have been so clean.And everywhere, from the floor to the curve of the vault, there were books.They stood on shelves of dark wood, row on row, so close together that the spines made a single wall. Ledgers bound in red leather. Slim volumes in grey cloth. Scrolls in cases of beaten bronze, stacked in the pigeonholes like loaves in a baker's rack. Flat boxes of wood, tied with silk. A smell rose off them, dry and sweet and faintly spiced, the smell of paper that had been kept in the dark and looked after.*Someone has kept this,* I thought. *Someone has been caring for it, all this time.*I stepped inside.The door swung shut behind me with a soft click, and the silver

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