He shook his head, jaw tightening. “It’s not time.”
“I don’t care about time…”
“You will.” His rough voice cut through mine. “There are truths that don’t free you, Celestine. They bury you like they buried me. And I will not hand you a shovel and watch you dig your own grave.”
Celestine.
My sob caught in my throat, half-anger, half-grief. “You don’t get to decide…”
“I do.” He leaned closer, pulling me closer on his lap, pressing against mine. His breath was warm, steady, and deliberately heavy as if he was fighting something far darker than my darkness. “Because I promised someone I would keep you breathing. Even if you hate me for it.”
I wanted to fight and scream. But my body betrayed me again, collapsing into the solid wall of him, letting his warmth bleed into my cold skin. His hand was in my hair, untangling the mess, stroking slow and sure as if he could smooth the nightmare out of me.
“I hate this,” I whispered into his chest. “I hate not knowing.”
“I know.”
He didn’t let go of me until my breath slowed and my sobs dulled to tremors. Even then, he kept one arm around me, his thumb tracing slow circles against my spine.
In the quiet, the words came back. Her words.
Sleep, Stina. Sleep forever.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Purple Morning
I had started wearing silence. It was comforting, and something I could control.
It had been three days since Zagreus refused me the truth, and three days since I left my voice to rot quietly in my throat. It felt better that way. My words had curled up like dead petals of a dead flower. Littering the floor of a mind I no longer wanted to clean.
The morning unfolded with the same rituals. I awoke. Elena arrived without knocking; she never did, and swept into the room with a dress draped over her arms, a deep, rich purple today. Colours of mourning veils and royal coffins. I sat there obediently and vacantly, while she fused with zippers and fabrics, humming something light as though my life was not a mausoleum she visited daily.
I did not speak to Zagreus. Zagreus did not speak to me. He was less at home now, a phantom with a name only, spending his hours elsewhere, in a room I would never see. In a world I was not a part of with people who would never know my face.
I thought my silence did not touch him. It had all the weight of a moth’s wing against his armour. I had stopped trying to measure my worth against his attention. I knew the answer already. I was a shadow painted on a wall he had long since stopped looking at.
He did care for me in his own twisted way. But it was not enough for me.
But the nightmares remained. They came and went. Clung to my damp clothes, dripping into my mornings, choking the air I breathed. I still woke screaming, still feeling the phantom cold of my mother’s hand in my dreams. I no longer asked him for comfort, for answers, for anything.
I also tried to paint. Every day. Every hour and every second, I was alone. I desperately gripped the brushes, but all I birthed were corpses on canvases. Lifeless shade. Lines that trembled with my unsteady hands. Paint spilling like blood onto the floor. The sound of my sobbing mingling with the wet slap of ruined art. My heart tore a little more with each failed attempt.
I wanted salvation. I reached for it, clawed at it, prayed to it in the language of colours, but my hands came back empty every time. Eventually, I stopped reaching.
I was dead, both inside and out.
When the rage finally came, it was not volcanic. I slammed the edge of a canvas against the floor. Wanting to hurt the worldin the way it had hurt me. The sharp thud rattled into the air. My fists followed, punching the marble until the sting burned my arms. I slammed my hand again, and a muted creak filled the air.
I froze, tears streaking my face in salty rivers, my breath shuddering. I pressed my palm flat to the spot. What was that sound? Marble did not creak.
That small, almost shy groan of movement beneath the surface. I tested the other tiles around it; they were cold and hard. But this one… this one creaked.
My pulse began to pound with a rhythm that did not feel my own.
I staggered to my feet, wiping the mess from my cheeks with the back of my paint-stained hand. My gaze darted to the door. Elena could return any moment.
I found my painting spatula and wedged the metal bit into the hairline seam of the tile. My hands shook so violently that I almost dropped it. Ten minutes bled away in grunts and gasps, in fingernails scraping stone, until finally, the tile lifted.
