“Gideon,” I called softly, my voice catching. “It’s Maeve.”
The breathing hitched.
Silence.
I reached the bottom of the steps and stepped into a chamber that looked like the mansion’s idea of a basement.
The floor was marble here, too, but not the polished, decorative kind from the entry hall. It was a slab—cold, unadorned, streaked with old stains. The walls were bare stone, wet in places, covered in faint, ghostly sigils, like someone had drawn them there and then scraped them off, over and over.
A few torches burned in sconces high on the walls, their flames guttering, casting more shadow than light.
And on the floor, near the center of the room, hunched over like he’d been folded and left to rust, was Gideon.
For a heartbeat, I couldn’t reconcile what I was seeing with the version of him in my head.
He’d always been… sharp.
Even when exhausted, he’d carried himself like a blade—straight spine, ironic tilt to his mouth, eyes scanning for the angle. Even in a cursed hotel room, even with shadows bleeding out of him, there’d been a feral grace in the way he moved.
This Gideon barely moved at all.
He sat, or rather, crumpled, on the cold marble, knees drawn up slightly, one arm wrapped around his midsection. Hisother hand lay flat on the floor, fingers splayed, as if he’d been trying to push himself up and given up halfway through.
Chains cuffed his wrists.
Not heavy iron links. Those would have been too mundane for my grandmother. But bands of shadow, solid-looking but flickering at the edges, attached to symbols etched into the floor. The bindings pulsed faintly with each of his shallow breaths.
His hair was a mess of dark curls gone lank with sweat and hung in front of his face, hiding his expression. His clothes, scorched and torn from our last encounter, were worse now: fabric burned through in places, dark with dried blood in others. Bare feet, pale against the marble, were raw and bruised-looking.
My throat closed.
“Gideon,” I said again, stepping forward, voice shaking. “Hey. Shadow-boy. You look terrible.”
His head jerked up.
For a second, his eyes didn’t focus. They were all pupil, blown wide with pain, the greenish-gray color around them muddied. Then they sharpened, landing on me.
A dozen emotions flashed across his face in that one split-second.
Shock. Disbelief. Anger. Fear.
And then, because he was who he was, the faintest, incredulous smirk.
“Of all the hallucinations,” he rasped, voice shredded, “I did not expect my brain to conjureyou.”
The sarcasm was thin, frayed at the edges, but it was there.
Relief hit me so hard my knees went weak.
He was alive.
Barely. Hurt. Bound.
But alive.
“Unfortunately for both of us,” I said, swallowing hard, “I’m real.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
