Veya remained alone in the firelit chamber, listening to the muted grief of the stronghold through senses too sharp to escape it.
Her hand rose once more to her silent chest.
Nothing beat beneath it.
Only the tether remained.
Chapter 14
The door clicked shut, and the sound landed like a lock turning inside Veya’s spine.
For a long moment, she remained on the edge of the bed with her hands clenched tightly in her lap, her nails biting into her palms as though pain might tether her to something familiar. The room was too quiet, though there was nothing peaceful about it. It held the same oppressive stillness as a church after a funeral, the kind that made every unnecessary breath feel like an act of trespass.
The fire hissed softly, indifferent to her panic, while shadows moved lazily across the stone walls and dark wooden furniture, undisturbed by the fury building beneath her skin. Everything in the room seemed to belong to the same ancient, brutal world that had made Rhen what he was.
Even his name felt like a bruise in her mouth.
Veya stared at the door as though she might burn through it with will alone. She was not crying now, and she refused to cry for him, especially not in this room, inside this compound, trapped in a nightmare where he spoke to her as though she were a weapon he had found and could not be bothered to put down properly.
Containment.
My responsibility.
Your mess lands on my hands.
That had been the worst of it, not because it was cruel, but because cruelty was something she understood. She had learned it young and learned it the hard way, discovering how easily someone could look at her as though she were an inconvenience while still calling their control care.
What tore at her was the casual certainty in Rhen’s voice.
He spoke as though her life had been signed over without her permission and as though consent were a childish luxury that had no place in the world she had been dragged into.
Perhaps it did not.
The thought twisted her stomach.
Veya lifted one hand to her chest again, still searching and still unable to believe what she could not find. Beneath her palm were skin, bone, and a rib cage that should have contained a frantic, hammering pulse, yet nothing answered her touch. There was no rhythm, no reassuring thud, and no proof that the body she remembered still existed.
There was only a silence so complete it felt obscene.
Her throat tightened, and she swallowed before realizing, with another sick jolt, that even the movement was unnecessary. It was nothing more than habit, reflex, and muscle memory pretending she still belonged to her former body.
Anger returned in a rush of heat.
You do not get to decide what I am.
You do not get to cage me and call it protection.
She pushed herself to her feet and immediately hated the ease with which her body obeyed. The dizziness had receded, the fever was gone, and even the pain from the crash had disappeared. She should have been bruised, broken, and barely capable of standing after a collision violent enough to kill her.
Instead, her body felt wrong in an entirely different way. It was too capable and unnaturally quiet, like a machine rebuilt without anyone pausing to ask whether she wanted the improvement.
Veya paced two steps before stopping herself because even pacing felt like giving Rhen what he expected. It made her appear to be exactly what he had called her: a predator without training and a problem requiring containment.
She crossed to the window instead and pressed her forehead against the cold glass.
Darkness stretched beyond it, broken by scattered lights she could not place. Somewhere past the compound walls was a world she understood, filled with roads, streetlights, cheap coffee, and late-night television playing in empty rooms. It was a life where monsters belonged inside books and grief happened to people she did not know.
Here, grief lived in the air.
