Lucien has always looked at me like I’m a miracle and sweet sacrilege in the same breath.
That hasn’t changed.
What has changed is the weight of what I carry now.
He thinks the danger ended when I walked out of the nunnery’s tomb.
He’s wrong.
Thepalazzo’scorridors breathe with old magic—the kind that recognizes him. The walls whisper as I pass, the chandeliers flickering as though in warning. Every step I take is borrowed peace.
My feet transport me along hallways and secret passages until I reach the small chapel at the far end of the ancientmansion The servants don’t come here; they think it’s haunted. They’re not wrong.
I light a candle anyway, the flame trembling in the draft. The wax runs down my fingers before I whisper the old words that used to comfort me in the dark. The language of my captivity.
Silencium, sanguis, lumen. Custodi quod ligatum est.
‘Silence, blood, light. Guard what is bound.’
The flame flares, answering.
And then, beneath the light, the shadows move.
It’s faint at first, a ripple and a tremor. The scent of lilies sharpens to something fouler, copper and smoke. My pulse quickens. I close my eyes, breathe through the panic clawing up my throat as a tremor rolls through my spine, deeper than the sigil, deeper than pain.
Something old shifts inside me, hungry and impatient. A thing I once heard whispered behind locked doors, a name I prayed I’d never speak again.
I cannot tell Lucien. Not when I barely understand how it still lives inside me.
But the sigil in my back won’t be ignored. It burns my skin, reminding that it followed me here, are an indelible part of me.
And even worse, something worse lingers. The residue of the darkest magic the coven sacrificed to feed the ward. The same thing that nested in my blood and kept me bound while I slept.
The Shackle-Soul.
When I agreed to drink the potion and bind myself, I thought I was buying Lucien’s life. The Mother Superior told me the seal would silence everything but my pulse. That I’d drift between life and death, untouched, uncorrupted.
She lied.
The spell was a feeding ground. For them. Forit.
The unknown horror lurking in the darkness learned me from the inside out—my heartbeat, my voice, my memories. Ittook what it needed to survive, and in return it let me live long enough to remember every whisper that reached the veil.
Lucien’s name was one of them.
He spoke it in anger, in longing, in despair.
Every curse he uttered kept me tethered to the waking world. I wanted to scream back through the centuries, to tell him it wasn’t betrayal, but every time I tried, the darkness sank deeper into my chest.
Now it’s part of me.
When the wards finally crumbled and the tomb opened, I didn’t emerge alone.
I brought it with me.
It wears no face. It moves when I breathe. Sometimes I hear it whisperhisname, as if tasting it for the first time. Sometimes, when the moon is full, I feel its hunger stir.
It wants what I wanted.
