The bone box had rolled free from the scattered bag. It lay between me and the window, lid cracked open.
Two petals left. Two more performances. Two more chances to pretend I was something I wasn’t.
I reached for it. My fingers brushed the carved lid.
And I stopped.
What was the point?
He knew what I was.
Using a petal wouldn’t change that. It wouldn’t erase what he’d witnessed or transform me back into the warm, trembling bride he’d pulled onto the dance floor, the woman who’d kissed him like she meant it, the creature he might have been able to love if she’d been real.
She wasn’t real.
She had never been real.
Iwas real. The woman who clawed her way through six feet of dirt to breathe again. This was real. This was what death had made me.
And if I was going to stop existing, I wanted to do it as myself. Not as a performance. Not as a lie.
I pulled my hand back from the bone box.
Closed my eyes.
And waited.
I was done hiding, finished being something that existed in the spaces between categories and belonged nowhere.
Something was leaving me. Unmooring. And down the hall, through stone and distance, the death-speaker must have felt it, a soul beginning to slip its moorings. His domain. His to sense.
The door didn’t open.
It exploded.
Wood splintered inward, crashing against the wall, the lock tearing free from the frame in a shriek of tortured metal.
Cold air rushed in from the corridor, colder than my chambers, colder than my skin, cold enough that I registered it even through the numbness spreading through my limbs.
Cador stood in the doorway.
Not his raven form. Just a man, tall and dark and furious, his eyes taking in the scene with a single sweeping glance.
The scattered bag. The spilled contents. The bone box lying inches from my outstretched hand.
Me, sprawled on the floor halfway to the window.
The note on the pillow.
He crossed the room in three strides. Snatched up the parchment. Read it.
His expression shifted. The anger didn’t fade, but something else bled through beneath it. Rawer, more ragged, the kind of emotion that looked like it hurt.
“You were going to run.” His voice was quiet. The kind of quiet that preceded avalanches.
“You were going to crawl out that window and disappear into the night, and you thought…what? That I wouldn’t follow? That I wouldn’t find you?”
I couldn’t answer. My throat had frozen along with everything else, the muscles refusing to cooperate, my voice locked somewhere deep in my chest.
