When we step through the mirror back into the House of Gold, I nearly collapse again. The binding pulls at me, welcoming me home, and the house feels alive around me in a way it didn't before.
"Easy," Croesus says, steadying me. "Your room or mine?"
"Mine. I need..." I need space. Need to process. Need to figure out what I just agreed to.
He walks me to my room and helps me inside. I sink onto my bed, still feeling the gold in my veins, the tether pulling at my chest.
"Get some rest," he says from the doorway. "The binding will settle overnight. By morning, it won't feel so intense."
"Croesus?"
He pauses. "Yes?"
"Can you feel me? The way I can feel you?"
A long silence. "Yes."
"What does it feel like?"
"Like having something precious just out of reach. Like wanting and having simultaneously. Like..." He stops. "Get some rest, Raven."
He closes the door before I can respond.
I lie back on my bed, close my eyes, and focus on the binding. On the thread of gold connecting me to the house. To him.
Through it, I feel his presence moving through corridors. Sense his emotions, worry, possessiveness, something that might be longing.
And underneath all of it, the hunger. Always the hunger. The greed that defines him.
But now I'm part of it. Woven into it. Bound to it.
I should feel trapped. Should regret this choice.
Instead, I just feel tired.
And strangely, impossibly, safe.
23
The dress arrives three hours before we're supposed to leave.
For fuck’s sake.When is he going to stop dressing me up like his own personal Barbie?
I'm in the library, buried in research about the spaces between, trying to understand how Wren's cottage can exist in that gray nothingness, when Auric appears with a garment bag draped over his arm.
"From Croesus," he says, laying it across the back of a chair. "For tonight."
I don't look up from my book. "Tell him I have my own clothes."
"I'm sure you do. He wants you to wear this anyway." There's something almost sympathetic in Auric's voice. "He's very particular about presentation."
"He's very particular about control," I mutter, but I close the book. "What's tonight?"
"He'll brief you. Whatever he's asking you to do...be careful. Idris isn't like the others. He's..." He stops, shakes his head. "Just be careful."
He's gone before I can ask what he means and why he’s warning me about Idris.
I stare at the garment bag with suspicion. Part of me wants to leave it there, show up to whatever this is in jeans and a t-shirt just to prove a point. But I already know how that would go. Croesus would look at me with that patient, amused expression and explain, very reasonably, why I need to wear what he chose.
