He is worse in flesh than projection. The elegance remains, but now it is stretched over ruin, beauty thinned until it becomes starvation wearing manners. His limbs are too long beneath his dark robes, his fingers skeletal and jointed like carved ivory, and the hollow at the center of his chest is visible through the parted fabric. It is not a wound. It is an emptiness with edges, a cavity full of dim violet light and whispering shadows that coil inward as if everything near him is being slowly invited to vanish.
I turn my head enough to look at him properly. “You look terrible in person.”
His mouth curves. “And you look remarkably composed for a woman tied to a table.”
“I’ve had a difficult week. Standards have shifted.”
He laughs, soft and dry. “Rhazek’s anchor has a tongue.”
“Most women do. Men simply confuse silence with absence.”
His eyes brighten with interest. “There it is again. That ridiculous mortal insistence on personality in the face of disassembly.”
“I’m not being disassembled.”
“No,” he says, moving closer. “You are being separated from usefulness.”
The carved grooves beneath me ignite.
Pain lances up through the slab, not from heat but from suction. The sigils pull at me through my skin, through my breath, through the bruised place above my sternum where his mark touched me earlier. It feels as if invisible hooks sink into the rhythm of my heart and tug each beat toward the hollow in his chest.
I refuse to gasp.
My jaw locks so hard my teeth ache, but I keep the breath count. Inhale for four. Hold for six. Exhale for eight. The siphon catches the rhythm and tries to ride it, matching the pull to the predictable shape of my pulse.
So I alter it.
I shorten the next inhale by half a count, hold too long, then exhale in three uneven streams instead of one smooth line. The siphon stutters beneath me. One of the violet sigils above my shoulder flickers and fades before flaring back.
Maltherion stops smiling.
I bare my teeth. “Was that supposed to happen?”
He places one skeletal hand on the edge of the slab. “Clever girls are often tiresome before they become quiet.”
“I have been called worse by people I liked better.”
“Rhazek’s phrasing has infected you.”
“Gods spare me, that might be the cruelest thing you’ve said.”
His fingers trace a line through the air, and the pressure doubles.
The siphon slams into my chest.
Black veins spread across my collarbone, branching beneath the skin in jagged threads. They burn cold, each line carving a path toward my heart. The first skipped beat hits like a missing stair in the dark. My body jerks against the bindings before I can stop it, and the shadow bands tighten around my wrists until my fingers go numb.
Maltherion leans close, his hollow chest glowing brighter. “There. That is the rhythm I need.”
My heart skips again.
Then again.
Terror rises, huge and animal, demanding air, demanding movement, demanding that I scream until something answers. I taste copper at the back of my throat. My vision swims at the edges, shadows pulsing in time with the broken beat inside me.
No.
I make the word silent and absolute.
