جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 40

I sat in the vanity chair, my hands gripping the armrests so hard my knuckles looked like polished bone. The room was swarming with people hairdressers, makeup artists, the severe woman named Greta but the silence inside my head was deafening.I was a doll being packaged for sale.My reflection was a stranger. She was buried under layers of powder and paint. Her lips were stained a deep, blood red. Her hair was twisted into an intricate cage of curls, held in place by a thousand pins.And crowning it all was the pearl comb.My mother’s death shroud, gleaming in the artificial light.Volkov stood by the door.He was the only still thing in the room. He wasn’t wearing his usual suit. He was wearing a tuxedo. Black, sharp, and tailored to hide the violence of his body. He looked like a groomsman.He looked like the Reaper.He wasn’t checking the perimeter. He wasn’t talking on his radio. He was watching me.His gaze was heavy, darker than I had ever seen it. There was a tension in his sh

Time died in the dark.I didn’t know if hours had passed, or days. The darkness in the cellar was absolute—a thick, suffocating weight that pressed against my eyes, filling my nose with the scent of wet earth and ancient mold.I was still in my wedding dress.The fifty pounds of satin and lace that had been a cage in the cathedral was now a torture device. The corset, tightened by the severe hands of Greta hours—days?—ago, dug into my bruised ribs with every shallow breath. The wire boning felt like claws raking against my skin.I tried to shift.Clank.The chains rattled. They were short, anchoring my wrists to the wall above my head. I couldn’t sit. I couldn’t lie down. I was forced to kneel on the cold, uneven flagstones, my arms stretched up in a position of eternal surrender.My knees were screaming. The skin had rubbed raw against the stone, sticky and wet with blood.But it was the thirst that frightened me the most.My throat felt like it was filled with glass shards. My tongu

The new cage had no bars. It didn’t need them.The servant’s quarters were a windowless box in the bowels of the Alatorre estate. The walls were painted a suffocating, institutional gray. There was no bed, only a thin, stained mattress on the floor. There was no clock. There was no mirror.There was only the smell of bleach clinging to my skin and the throbbing ache in my back where Carmina’s cane had struck.I lay on the mattress, my knees pulled to my chest. My wedding dress was gone, stripped from me by rough hands and replaced with a coarse, gray shift dress that scratched my skin like burlap. It hung loosely on my frame, smelling of mothballs and shame.My hand—the one burned by the chemicals in the cellar was wrapped in a dirty rag. It pulsed with a hot, wet pain.I stared at the ceiling.I didn’t know if it was day or night. I didn’t know if my father was looking for me. I didn’t know if Moretti was alive or dead.

The sun came up, but the nightmare didn’t end. I was still kneeling in the hallway. My legs were no longer part of my body. They were pillars of fire and ice, screaming with a pain so intense it had transcended into a dull, thrumming numbness. The guards had changed shifts. The cruel one—the one who had kicked my foot—was gone. The new ones were silent, standing like statues by the doors, watching me with indifferent eyes. I swayed. My vision blurred. The hallway tilted to the left. Don’t fall. If you fall, the clock resets. I locked my spine. I dug my fingernails into my thighs. Footsteps. Sharp. Clicking. Carmina. She walked down the hall, looking fresh and sharp in a high-collared black dress. She stopped in front of me. She checked

The water turned off.The silence that rushed back into the bathroom was deafening, broken only by the harsh, wet gasps tearing from my throat.I sat on the tiled floor of the shower, my back pressed against the cold wall, my legs drawn up to my chest. My wet hair hung in heavy, sodden ropes around my face, dripping pink water—blood from my hand—onto my knees.Killian stood outside the glass.He watched me shiver. He didn’t offer a towel. He didn’t offer a robe.He looked at me with the cold, heavy gaze of a man who owned the air I was breathing.“Get out,” he ordered.I tried. I placed my good hand on the wall and pushed. My legs, still trembling from the shock, struggled to find purchase on the slick tiles.I slipped. My knee cracked against the floor.I stayed down, panting, staring at the drain. I couldn’t do it. My battery was empty.Killian didn’t sigh. He didn’t show irritation.