As I climb the stairs back to my chambers, I can feel her through the bond. Confusion. Anger. But underneath it all, the first stirrings of something that might become wisdom.
She'll figure out the fire eventually. Will discover the blankets and pillows hidden in the wardrobe. Will learn to navigate the strange magic of this place that responds to respect rather than demands.
But more importantly, she'll learn that everything she receives from now on must be earned. That comfort comes through cooperation, not coercion. That I'm not interested in owning a broken doll—I want something with enough spirit to choose submission freely.
The palace whispers to me as I settle back into my chair. She's moving now, exploring the wardrobe with careful fingers. Finding the blankets she needs, the pillows that will make sleeping on the floor more bearable. Learning her first lesson about working with the magic instead of fighting it.
Good. Let her discover what cooperation can accomplish. Let her understand that I'm not her enemy—I'm her teacher.
And the lesson has only just begun.
CHAPTER 5
ELISE POV
DAYS 6-10
The kitchen mocksme with abundance.
I stand in the doorway on day six, stomach cramping with hunger, staring at impossible plenty. Fresh bread sits in cloth-lined baskets, the crusts golden-brown and perfect. Fruit that shouldn't exist in this eternal winter overflows from crystal bowls—apples red as blood, pears that gleam like jade, grapes that cluster in impossible perfection. Eggs rest in neat rows, their shells pristine white. Dried meat hangs from hooks like some macabre decoration. Everything I could possibly need to feed myself.
If I knew how to cook a damn thing.
I've never prepared food in my life. Never needed to. The closest I've come to cooking is telling servants what I wanted for dinner and watching them scurry to fulfill my wishes. Now I'm surrounded by ingredients that might as well be decorative objects for all the good they do me.
My stomach twists painfully, a constant reminder of my incompetence. I haven't eaten properly since we arrived—four days of surviving on chunks of bread torn from the loaves,choked down dry because I don't even know how to make it palatable. The bread is safe, requires no skill, no knowledge I don't possess. But everything else mocks me with its potential.
The eggs sit there like accusations. I know they're food—have eaten them a thousand times prepared by expert hands. But the gap between knowing and doing stretches like an impossible chasm. The meat hangs tough and impossible to bite through raw, and I don't know how to make it edible. Even the fruit needs washing and peeling in ways I've never bothered to learn.
I grab more bread and retreat to my chambers like a thief stealing scraps from her own kitchen.
Day seven brings weakness that frightens me. My hands shake as I force down another chunk of increasingly stale bread, the taste like sawdust in my mouth. I'm light-headed when I stand, dizzy when I move too quickly. My body is eating itself while abundance sits just down the hall, useless to me because of my own ignorance.
But worse than the hunger is the torment of scent.
I can smell Aratus's meals from three floors away—rich aromas that drift through the palace like deliberate torture. Roasted meat that makes my mouth water. Fresh bread that puts my dry crusts to shame. Something sweet and complex that makes my empty stomach clench with longing so intense it borders on pain.
The bastard is eating like a king while I survive on scraps. The message is crystal clear: comfort is earned, not given. And I haven't earned anything.
The awareness of him has grown stronger too. Even when I can't see him, I feel his presence like a cold current in the air. It makes my skin prickle with unwanted awareness, makes me hyperconscious of my own heartbeat, my breathing, the way my body seems to lean toward whatever room he's occupying.
I hate it. Hate the way my body responds to his proximity with little shivers that have nothing to do with temperature. Hate the way I catch myself listening for his footsteps in the corridors. Hate the traitorous part of me that wonders what would happen if I simply asked for help.
I try cooking on day eight.
It goes about as spectacularly as expected.
I approach the stove like it's a wild animal that might bite me. The eggs seem simple enough—I've watched servants prepare them countless times. Crack them into a pan, apply heat, wait for them to become food instead of raw potential.
The first egg splatters across the counter when I misjudge the force needed to crack the shell. The second creates a mess of shell fragments mixed with yolk that I can't separate. By the third, I'm fighting tears of frustration as I try to fish pieces of shell out of the gooey mess.
When I finally get relatively clean eggs into the pan, I have no idea how much heat to use. The flames leap high, and within minutes the eggs are burning—blackening around the edges while the centers remain stubbornly liquid. The smell of char fills the air, acrid and bitter.
I try to salvage them, poking at the mess with a spoon, but only succeed in creating scrambled charcoal. My eyes stream from the smoke. My hands shake from hunger and frustration.
"Damn it!" I throw the spoon across the room, where it clatters against stone. "Damn everything!"
That's when I feel him.
