Chapter 36: Village

Sylvania's POV

"No," Vesper whispered.

He lunged across the bed, grabbing his mother’s shoulders, shaking her limp body with terrifying desperation. "Mom! Mom, wake up! You can't—doctors! Do something! Fix her!"

The medical team swarmed, pushing Vesper back, their voices a chaotic symphony of words that I knew were useless. She was gone. I had felt her leave. I had felt the unnatural strength drain from her grip right before her hand fell away from my wrist.

You're the lock. And my son is the key that's going to break you open to the world.

The words echoed in my skull, drowning out the chaos. They made no sense. The prophecy book talked about vessels. What was a lock? And what does opening me mean?

"Time of death, 10:42 AM," a doctor announced, his voice flat.

The sound stopped. The silence that rushed in to fill the void was heavy.

Vesper stopped fighting the doctors. He went completely still, standing over the bed, staring down at the face that was already losing its resemblance to the woman he loved.

The bedroom door slammed open, hitting the wall with a crack.

Senator Bianchi stood there. He was in his usual tuxedo, but his perfect facade had finally cracked. His face was a rictus of cold, murderous fury. He didn't look at his dead wife. He looked at Vesper.

And then he looked at me.

"You," he said. "You brought this filth into her room in her final moments? After everything you destroyed, you denied her peace?"

"She asked for her," Vesper said, his voice hollow. He didn't turn around.

"Asked for the same person who worsened her condition?!" the Senator roared, advancing into the room. The doctors scattered like mice. "Your weakness, your pathetic obsession with this—this tool of Seratti’s—it killed her. You might as well have stopped her heart yourself."

Vesper flinched as if struck. He didn't argue. He believed it. I could see the guilt settling onto his shoulders, a yoke that would crush him.

The Senator stopped inches from me. The menace radiating from him was suffocating.

"Get out of my house," he hissed, spittle landing on my cheek. "Get out before I decide to send your dad your head in a box."

“Leave her out of this. None of this is her fault. Mum has been sick and we both know this,” Vesper defended, making me feel oddly relieved. He was sticking up for me against his father.

His father turned to looked at him, his face incredulous. “You still defend her after all this? What spell did she put on you?”

Vesper stood upright and walked to stand beside me.

“The only spell between us is our mate bond. She’s my mate, I’m not marrying Elara, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” His tone was still laced with grief, but anger seemed to have the upper hand.

His father looked beyond shocked, like he never expected Vesper to speak to him this way. And honestly, neither did I.

Both their eyes locked onto each other’s, neither saying a word. They looked like they were about to break out into a fight.

I grabbed Vesper’s hand. "Vesper. We have to go."

He didn't move. He just kept staring at his father.

"Vesper, please," I begged, tugging harder. "Julian is waiting. We can't stay here."

I didn’t want them to fight, especially not because of me.

Something seemed to have loosed inside of him. He turned to face me and nodded, a jerky, mechanical motion, and let me pull him away from the room, away from the body, and past his father, who watched us go wordlessly with eyes that promised revenge .

“Take me out of here. Far away from here,” he ordered Julian the moment we all got into the car.

“What—“

“Drive, Julian,” he snapped, his voice sharp and edgy.

Julian didn’t argue further. He silently switched on the ignition and hit the road.

I turned to face him, unsure of what to say to him in a moment like this. Under the space of a few hours, we had both become motherless.

Thankfully, he spoke first.

“What’s the name of Aleera’s grandmother?” He asked, his question throwing me off balance a bit.

“I… don’t know.”

“Call her. Ask her what her grandmother’s name is and where she lives,” he requested, and even though I was still very confused, I did, placing the phone on a speaker so Veaper could also hear her response.

She picked up in two rings.

“Hey. Please, I need to know your grandma’s name and where she lives,” I said, going straight to the point.

She kept quiet for a while before slowly saying, “Estava… and she lives in a secluded village somewhere in the Mediterranean. It’s not on the map.”

Vesper snatched the phone from my hands.

“Pack up, and pack Sylvania’s stuff too. We’re traveling to see her tomorrow.”

He didn’t even wait for her to respond before cutting the call.

“Isn’t that too soon?” I asked as he handed me back the phone.

“No. We’ll lodge in a hotel today and go pick her tomorrow before heading to the airstrip.”

I didn’t contest, I only nodded slowly. Even though I was still quite confused, I could understand his eagerness to fulfill his mother’s dying wish.

But I still had one question.

“How did you know it was—“

“I didn’t. Just a guess.”

My head bobbed up and down in understanding.

A few moments later, we were at the hotel we were to spend the night at.

The next day, Julian picked up Aleera and brought her to the airfield where Vesper and I had been waiting. The jet engines were already spooling up, whining impatiently.

We boarded. The door sealed shut, locking us into the claustrophobic tube. Vesper went straight to the back row and sat down, leaning his head against the window, closing his eyes. He looked broken beyond repair.

We had barely said a thing to each other all morning.

As the plane took off, lifting us away from the city that held my dead mother, my captured sister, and Vesper’s shattered life, I sat across from Aleera, clutching my knees. I had brought Aleera up to date regarding all that had happened.

"Did she say anything?" Aleera asked softly, leaning across the aisle, the prophecy book still clutched in her lap. "At the end?"

I nodded, my throat tight. "She said... she said the Veil was thin."

"What else did she tell you?"

I looked at Vesper’s unmoving form in the back of the plane, then turned back to Aleera, whispering the words that terrified me more than any threat from Seratti.

"She said I'm not the vessel. She said I'm the lock." I swallowed hard. "And she said Vesper is the key that will break the world to open me."

Aleera went pale. Her grip on the book tightened until her knuckles popped.

"A lock," she breathed, her mind racing, connecting dots I couldn't see. "Oh, gods. That’s... that makes so much more sense than a vessel. And it’s so much worse."

"Why? What does it mean?"

She didn't answer. She just opened the book to a page she must have bookmarked a dozen times, staring at an illustration I couldn't see from my angle.

We flew in silence for hours, heading north and east, toward mountains that clawed at the sky. We landed on a private strip carved into a valley so deep the sun hadn't reached the bottom yet.

A battered old Land Rover was waiting for us. The driver was a silent, weathered man who didn't ask for names. We piled in. The drive was another hour of skimming through unpaved roads, deep into a wilderness that felt ancient and forbidden.

The trees here were massive, so much so that blocked out the sky. The air smelled of pine resin, damp earth, and something else—something electric that made the hair on my arms stand up.

The fact that the village wasn't on any map befuddled me, and I could now see why. It was a cluster of stone and timber cottages nestled in a high alpine meadow, surrounded by peaks shrouded in mist. It looked like something out of a fairy tale, the kind where the woods eat children.

Smoke curled from chimneys. As the Rover crunched to a halt in the muddy center square, the door of the largest cottage opened.

An old woman stepped out. She was tiny, bent with age, wrapped in thick woolen shawls. Her hair was pure white braided down her back, but her eyes, peering out from a face patterned with a thousand wrinkles, were sharp, clear, and terrifyingly young.

Aleera’s grandmother. Estava.

We climbed out of the car, bones stuff and exhausted. Vesper stood beside me, sniffing the air like a dog that had perceived good.

Estava didn't smile. She walked straight up to me, ignoring her granddaughter, ignoring Vesper. She stopped inches away, leaning on a gnarled staff, and peered up into my face.

She sniffed the air around me, then frowned deeply.

"Cassandra spoke true before she crossed over," the old woman rasped, her voice like grinding stones. "I smell the tumblers turning inside you, girl."

She slammed her staff onto the packed earth, the sound echoing unnaturally loud in the quiet valley.

"You brought the bomb right to my doorstep," she spat, looking past me to Vesper, her eyes hard. "And you brought the detonator with it. You fools. The Onyx Moon isn't when Hera returns."

She pointed a bony finger at my chest, right over my heart.

"It’s when the cage opens. Hera isn't trying to get in, child. She’s already inside you. She’s been trying to get out."