Chapter 70 Ashes in the chest
I don’t know how many days pass after the trial.
Time stops behaving the way it’s supposed to. It stretches and folds in on itself, thick and suffocating, like I’m breathing through water. Morning and night blur together until the only way I can tell them apart is the sound of footsteps changing in the hallway,guards switching shifts, the soft scrape of boots on stone, the low murmur of voices that stop when they realize I’m awake.
Or pretending to be.
I shut down.
Not in some dramatic way. I don’t scream or break things or shift and tear the walls apart, though the beast inside me would probably like that. Instead, I go quiet. Too quiet. Words pile up in my throat and rot there, sour and useless. When someone asks me how I’m feeling, I stare at them until they look away, uncomfortable, guilty, afraid.
I eat because my body forces me to. Because if I don’t, the dizziness gets worse and the room tilts like it wants to spill me out onto the floor. Soup. Bread. Water. Always the same. I chew mechanically, not tasting anything, not caring. I leave half of it untouched most of the time. No one comments on it.
They’re afraid to push.
Mirrors become my enemy.
There’s one in the room,tall, framed in dark wood, angled so it catches the light from the narrow window. I drape a blanket over it the first night. The second night, I turn it to face the wall. I can’t stand the idea of seeing my own eyes looking back at me, wondering what they’ll show me now.
A monster.
A miracle.
A lie.
The beast inside me is quiet,but not calm.
I can feel it, curled beneath my skin like a massive creature pretending to sleep. Not dormant. Not pacified. Waiting. Every so often it shifts, a subtle roll of awareness that makes my muscles tense and my heartbeat stumble. It doesn’t rage. It doesn’t beg. It just exists, heavy and patient, as if it knows something I don’t.
As if it’s counting on me to break. So it can take over.
I don’t know which memories are real anymore.
I don’t know which ones were planted, altered, observed through glass while someone took notes and decided what I would become.
No one enters my room without permission.
That part is deliberate. I know it is.
The guards outside change, but the rules don’t. They knock. They announce themselves. If I don’t answer, they leave. Food appears and disappears like magic. Clean clothes replace the ones I leave folded at the foot of the bed.
And Darius—
I know he’s there.
I can feel him.
The bond hums low and constant, like a wire pulled too tight between us. Not comforting. Not warm. Just present. Painfully so. I don’t have to see him to know when he’s close. My chest tightens when he shifts position. My skin prickles when he stands. Sometimes, when I wake from shallow, dreamless sleep, I swear I can feel his breathing through the door.
He never comes in.
Never knocks.
Never asks to talk.
Every night, when the world quiets down and the guards’ voices drop to murmurs, I hear him settle outside my door.
I don’t need to open the door to confirm it. I don’t need to hear his footsteps or the shift of his weight against the stone wall. I feel him, like a pressure in the air, like the low hum of something too close to ignore. The bond tells me before my ears ever could. Darius is outside my door again.
He never knocks.
At first, that unsettled me. I would lie awake, staring at the ceiling, my body tense, my breath shallow, wondering why he didn’t come in. Wondering if he was waiting for permission, or punishment, or forgiveness. Wondering if he was afraid I’d tell him to leave.
Now I understand.
He isn’t there to watch me. He isn’t there to guard me like a prisoner.
He’s there to make sure I don’t disappear.
I hear the house settle around us, the distant creak of wood, the soft patrol steps of guards changing shifts, the muffled sounds of life going on without me. Inside this room, time feels wrong. Heavy. Stagnant. I sit on the edge of the bed for hours, sometimes with my notebook in my hands, sometimes with nothing at all. Some nights I don’t move. Others, I pace until my legs ache, until my beast presses against my skin like it’s testing the walls of my body.
Through it all, he stays.
I imagine him sitting there, back against the wall, long legs stretched out, hands resting uselessly in his lap. I imagine the way his jaw tightens when he thinks I’m not breathing evenly. The way his shoulders tense when my heartbeat spikes,because he feels that too, damn him. I imagine how tired he must be, how his eyes must burn, how sleep probably never fully comes.
He doesn’t come in to comfort me.
He doesn’t come in to explain himself again.
He doesn’t come in to ask for forgiveness he knows I can’t give.
That’s the cruelest part.
If he begged, I could hate him more easily. If he defended himself, I could scream. If he touched me without permission, I could push him away and feel justified.
But he does none of that.
He just stays.
Some nights, I press my palm flat against the door, my fingers trembling inches from the wood. I don’t open it. I don’t speak. I just stand there, feeling the echo of his presence on the other side. The bond hums painfully, like a wound that refuses to close.
I tell myself I don’t care.
I tell myself I don’t need him.
But every morning, when the light creeps in through the curtains and I realize I made it through another night without breaking, I know the truth.
Part of the reason I’m still here…
is because he was.