Chapter 368

Chapter 368
Aurora

The room was almost completely swallowed by darkness, especially compared to the brightly lit corridor behind us, and for several seconds I could barely make out anything beyond the thin strip of light spilling through the open doorway. My eyes slowly adjusted to the change, the shapes inside the room gradually becoming clearer until the darkness stopped looking completely empty and I began to distinguish the outline of furniture, the pale sheets of a bed, and a figure lying motionlessly against them.

There was a woman on the bed.

She was alone, with no guards standing beside her and no doctor hovering over her, yet something about the way she had been left there made the room feel more unsettling than any of the other places we had passed through.

One of her wrists was secured in a thick metal cuff, the chain attached directly to the frame of the bed so that even if she had possessed the strength to move, she would have had very little room to do so.

Her other arm rested loosely against the sheets, and the contrast between the metal around her wrist and the almost delicate appearance of her body made something uncomfortable twist inside my stomach.

She was painfully thin.

The long white dress hanging from her body looked several sizes too large, falling loosely around her frame and gathering in wrinkles across the mattress, while her bare feet were partially covered by the sheets. Her skin looked almost unnaturally pale beneath the dim light, and the longer I looked at her, the more details I noticed that made it impossible to mistake her condition for simple exhaustion.

There were bruises everywhere.

Some had already begun fading into yellow and green around the edges, while others were still dark enough to look almost black beneath her skin, scattered across her arms, shoulders, and the exposed area around her collarbone.

A few disappeared beneath the neckline of her dress, leaving me to wonder how much worse the injuries were in places I couldn’t see. There were also red marks around her free wrist, faint but unmistakable, as though she had spent enough time struggling against something to leave the skin raw.

I took a cautious step forward, my eyes moving over her face as I tried to understand why something about her seemed strangely familiar even though I was certain I had never seen her before.

Her hair was long and brown, falling messily around her shoulders and spilling across the pillow in tangled strands, with several pieces stuck against her cheek as though nobody had bothered to move them.

She looked as though she had been left exactly where she was for far too long, with no one caring enough to make her comfortable.

Then I noticed her eyes.

She was awake.

She had been watching us.

Her gaze remained fixed on the doorway, wide and exhausted, but there was something else in it that I couldn’t quite place. She didn’t look surprised to see us, exactly, and she certainly didn’t look frightened in the way I would have expected from someone who had been chained to a bed in a room hidden inside a castle full of guards.

She looked as though she was waiting.

My attention shifted toward Zayn.

He hadn’t moved.

He was standing beside me, completely rigid, his entire body so still that for a second I wondered whether he had even heard me breathe. His face had gone pale, and his eyes were locked on the woman in the bed with an expression I had never seen on him before.

There was no anger in it.

No sarcasm.

No guardedness.

Just shock.

Pure, overwhelming shock.

His chest rose sharply, and I watched him swallow as though even breathing had suddenly become difficult.

I looked back at the woman.

Then at him.

Something about the way he was looking at her made a strange thought begin forming in my mind, although I was almost afraid to say it aloud.

He took one slow step forward.

“Mom?”

The word was so quiet that it almost disappeared into the room.

I turned toward him immediately.

Mom?

My eyes went back to the woman.

His mother?

His actual mother?

The realization didn’t come from anything she had said or from some resemblance I could immediately identify; it came entirely from him, from the way the single word had broken out of his mouth and changed his entire expression in an instant.

I had seen Zayn angry, amused, irritated, frightened, and exhausted, but I had never seen him look at anyone the way he was looking at her now, as though the woman lying on that bed had somehow reached straight through years of everything he had believed and torn it apart in a single moment.

The woman moved.

It was barely more than a small shift beneath the sheets, but Zayn reacted immediately, taking another step toward her.

Her free hand slowly lifted from the bed.

She seemed to struggle even with that simple movement, her arm trembling as she raised it toward him, but her eyes never left his face.

“Zayn…”

Her voice was barely audible.

It was weak, rough, and almost painfully soft, yet the moment he heard it, something in his expression broke.

“Mom…”

He said it again, this time with so much emotion behind the word that my chest tightened.

The woman smiled.

It wasn’t a big smile, and there was nothing particularly happy about it, yet there was an unmistakable warmth in the way her features softened when she looked at him, as though seeing him standing there was enough to make her forget the pain for a few seconds.

“My boy…”

Zayn’s breathing caught.

He moved closer.

I stayed where I was, watching him cross the small distance between them while the woman kept her hand extended toward him, her fingers trembling in the air.

He reached for her.

Their hands met.

His fingers closed around hers with a care that seemed completely at odds with the man I had watched fight his way through half the castle only minutes earlier, and when the woman squeezed his hand weakly, Zayn lowered his head for a second as though he couldn’t quite hold himself together while looking at her.

I felt something heavy settle inside my chest.

She was alive.

After everything we had seen in this place, after every locked door and every room designed to hide whatever was happening inside this castle, she was here, alive and breathing, chained to a bed like she was something that belonged to someone else.

My gaze drifted over her again.

The bruises.

The pale skin.

The tangled hair.

The metal cuff around her wrist.

The woman who had given birth to Zayn was lying in front of us looking like she had barely been allowed to remain human.

I looked at Zayn again.

He still hadn’t let go of her hand.

He was staring at her as though he was afraid that if he looked away for even a second, she might disappear again, and something about that expression made the reality of the situation sink in more deeply than any explanation could have.