chapter 6

Seraphine's POV

I froze.

My hand was still wrapped around the door's edge, the locket open in my palm, the symbol staring back at me like it knew exactly how much trouble I was in.

I turned around slowly.

Caelum stood a few feet away, dressed down from earlier, no jacket, sleeves pushed up to his forearms. His expression wasn't angry. It wasn't anything I could easily name, which somehow made it worse.

"Lady Seraphine," he said. "It's late."

"I couldn't sleep," I said. "I went for a walk."

"Toward a locked door in the oldest part of the east wing." He tilted his head slightly. "That's a very specific walk."

I closed my fist around the locket, hiding it against my palm.

"I got lost," I said. "You know this is a new house and there are lots of corridors."

He stepped closer and I stepped back a bit avoiding his gaze. His eyes dropped to my closed hand for half a second before they came back up to my face.

"You're a terrible liar," he said.

"No I wasn't lying”I muttered.

Something flickered at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile. He stopped a few feet from me and looked past my shoulder at the door.

"That room hasn't been opened in years," he said.

"Then it's about time someone did, I want to see what's inside there”

"Seraphine."

It was the first time he'd said my name without the title in front of it. It landed strangely, low in my chest, somewhere I didn't have time to examine right now.

"What's in there?" I asked.

He was quiet for a long moment. The floor beneath us gave another small shudder, the same low groan I'd felt earlier, like the whole house was breathing through something it didn't want to.

"Records," he said finally. "Old ones. From before the war."

"About the curse?"

His eyes sharpened slightly. "How do you know about that?"

I opened my hand and held the locket out where he could see it, the small folded paper still tucked inside, the symbol catching the hallway's low light.

He went very still.

"Where did you get that?" His voice had changed. It sounded a little rough now.

"A friend," I said. "He gave it to me before I left home. It was a gift"

Caelum reached out, slow enough that I could have pulled back if I wanted to, and turned my palm gently so the symbol faced him fully. His jaw tightened.

"This is a Hollow Court mark," he said.

I blinked. "A what?"

"You don't know what that is." It wasn't a question, more like he was confirming something to himself.

"Should I?"

He looked at me for a long moment, and I watched him decide something behind his eyes, probably something I shouldn't know.

"Not tonight," he said, closing my fingers back over the locket with both hands wrapped around mine, careful of the glove.

"It's not safe to talk about it here."

"Here meaning this hallway, or here meaning this house?"

"Both," he said simply.

I studied him. The careful way he held himself, the way his eyes kept flicking toward the locked door like it might open on its own if he looked away too long.

"You're scared of something," I said.

"I'm not scared, I'm just being careful," he corrected. "There's a difference."

"Is there?"

He almost smiled again. This time it actually reached his eyes.

"Come on," he said, releasing my hand and stepping back. "It's freezing in this corridor and you're not wearing shoes."

I looked down. He was right. I hadn't even noticed.

"I run cold feet," I said. "Among other things."

"I'm aware," he said, and there was something in the way he said it, low and amused, that made the warmth crawl up the back of my neck again. I hated how easily he did that.

He started walking back the way I'd come, and after a second I followed, falling into step beside him instead of behind him.

"That man today," I said. "Edward."

"What about him?."

"Is he going to die?"

Caelum glanced sideways at me. "Would that bother you?"

"I asked first."

"No," he said. "He'll recover. It takes longer than you'd think, but the effect isn't permanent unless it's prolonged contact." He paused. "You knew that already."

"I did."

"Then why ask?"

I considered lying. It would have been easy, would have kept things simple, kept the careful distance I'd built around myself since I was fifteen years old fully intact.

"I don't actually enjoy hurting people," I said instead. "Despite what everyone in this house seems to believe about me."

He didn't answer right away. We turned the corner into the main corridor, the warmer part of the wing, torchlight instead of the cold stone shadows from before.

"I know," he said eventually.

"You don't know anything about me."

"I know you ate a turkey leg with your bare hands at dinner like it was the best thing that had ever happened to you," he said. "I know you apologized to a guard you accidentally injured this afternoon, quietly, when you thought no one was paying attention. I know you've been counting exits since the moment you walked through my front door, which tells me you've spent your whole life expecting to need one." He looked at me. "I know more than you think."

I didn't have anything to say to that, which was an unfamiliar and uncomfortable feeling.

We reached my door before I managed to find my voice again.

"Get some sleep," he said. "We'll talk about the locket. Tomorrow. Somewhere safer."

"Is anywhere in this house safe?"

"No," he said, with a faint, humorless smile. "But some places are safer than others."

He turned to go, then stopped, glancing back at me over his shoulder.

"Seraphine."

"Yes?"

"Whoever your friend is," he said, "the one who gave you that locket. Be careful who you trust right now. Even people who love you can be standing on the wrong side of something without knowing it."

He didn't wait for a response. He walked off down the corridor, and I stood there in my doorway, holding a locket with a symbol that apparently meant something terrible, watching the man I'd come here to destroy disappear around the corner, and feeling, for the first time since I'd arrived at Ashford Manor, genuinely uncertain about which version of this story I was actually living in.