Chapter 77: Eudora’s Reborn

Beatris

I lay still beneath the coverlet, staring at the carved canopy overhead, trying to steady my breathing.

The vision had ended. It had not left me.

It clung to my skin, to my throat, to the backs of my teeth. I could still feel the sun tearing through flesh that had once been mine. I could still taste blood that had never belonged to Beatris and yet had lived on my tongue like memory.

Eudora had not died once. She had died again and again. And each time, Alexander had dragged her back into it.

I shut my eyes.

Dragged was too simple. He would call it saving her. He would call it love. He would say he could not bear to lose her.

But what was love that left a woman starving, hunted, burning in the sun and waking only to suffer it all again?

What was that, if not cruelty dressed in devotion?

My hand drifted to my throat.

If he had done that to Eudora, if he had bitten her, turned her, and watched her suffer through a life she had never chosen simply because he could not stand to be alone, then nothing would stop him from doing the same to me.

Not if he truly believed I was her. Not if he believed he was only reclaiming what had always belonged to him.

The thought turned my stomach.

I rolled onto my side and pressed my face into the pillow, but the memories came anyway. The warmth of his body in bed. The daughter they had wanted. The first bite. The first feeding. The first horror.

And worst of all, the way it had all felt real. Not like I had watched it. Like I had lived it. That was the part I could not stop circling.

If the visions had felt distant, I could have dismissed them. If I had only seen Eudora from the outside, the way one sees a stranger in a dream, it would have been easier.

But I had felt her. The grief. The hunger. The love.

I opened removed the coverlet.

Alexander sat in the chair near the hearth, one leg crossed over the other, a book resting open in his hand.

He had been watching me sleep. The knowledge should have frightened me. Instead, I felt only tired.

"How long have you been there?" I asked.

"Long enough."

His voice was quiet.

I pushed myself upright. The room tilted once, then settled. My limbs still felt heavy, as if the visions had scooped something out of me and left only the shell behind.

He closed the book and rose.

"You should rest a little longer."

Rest. I nearly laughed. As though sleep had become anything but another way for the past to tear me open.

He crossed the room, but not too closely. Since the coffin, he had grown careful with my distance, as if he understood he had broken something and did not yet know whether it could be mended. Or whether he cared to mend it at all.

I looked away. That was when it struck me.

He had not said a word about what I had seen. He stood there as though I had merely woken from an ordinary dream.

And yet I knew better. He knew exactly what the blood had done. He knew what it was meant to show me. He had watched me drink it.

The silence between us stretched until it began to press at me.

You turned her.

The words rose fast, sharp enough to cut. I swallowed them.

Saying them aloud would give him too much. It would let him guide the conversation, soothe it, shape it, tell me what he wanted me to understand and hide the rest.

So I said nothing. But the thought did not stop.

You turned her because you could not bear to lose her. You loved her enough to destroy her.

The knowledge sat in my chest like something hot and jagged. I could not look at him without seeing it now, not just grief, not just devotion, but selfishness. He had not saved Eudora.

He had made her endure a second life she had never chosen. And if I stayed here long enough, he would do the same to me.

Not now, perhaps. Not while he still believed kindness would bring me willingly to where he wanted me.

But one day, when he thought the moment was right, when he thought I had remembered enough or submitted enough or softened enough, he would choose for me too.

The thought hit so hard that I had to set one hand against the mattress to steady myself.

I was not ready to be turned. I was not ready to die over and over inside some endless version of love that had never asked my consent.

And that was what frightened me most of all, that some small, traitorous part of me understood how Eudora had once loved him. Understood it because I had felt it in the visions. The warmth, the safety, the belonging.

That frightened me almost as much as the coffin had. Because if I could understand her love, then one day I might also understand her surrender.

I could not allow that. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood carefully. My knees held.

Alexander looked up at once.

"I need to freshen up," I said.

The words sounded too ordinary in the room between us. He studied me.

There was the faintest pause before he answered, and in that pause I could feel him wondering what had changed. I had never asked for something like that before. Never framed a need so simply. So quietly.

"Freshen up?" he repeated.

"Yes."

I forced my voice to stay level. "I'd like someone to help me with it."

His eyes narrowed just enough to tell me he heard the strangeness in it. He did not question me immediately, but I could feel him searching my face the way he always did when he suspected there was something beneath the surface.

Then he nodded once.

"I'll send someone."

Relief moved through me so quickly I nearly gave it away. Instead, I lowered my gaze.

"Thank you."

He crossed toward the door, but before opening it, he looked back at me. Whatever he saw on my face seemed to satisfy him, because his expression softened just slightly.

That softness made my skin crawl now. When he left, the room felt larger.

I waited until his footsteps faded, then turned to the mirror above the washstand.

The woman staring back at me looked pale and thin and too old around the eyes. But she was still me.