“I am... trying,” he growled, the words labored, as if he were biting them off one by one. “To be... civilized. But you are... hiding. Why are you... hiding?”
“I’m not hiding. I’m reading.” I looked down at the crumpled ball of paper in my hand, at the wordsa chore I endure. “It’s educational. Did you know you have terrible penmanship when you’re being manipulative?”
A heavy silence fell on the other side of the door. Then, a long, rough exhale, like a steam valve releasing pressure.
“I do not know what you are talking about,” he rumbled. “But if you do not open this door... I will tear the wall down.”
“And ruin the structural integrity of the west wing?” I let out a jagged, humorless laugh. “Very irresponsible for a landlord.”
“Lysa.” A pause. A scratch of claws on stone. “Please.”
The ‘please’ was almost human.
The stone lintel above the door cracked with a sound like a pistol shot. Amber light splintered in the air, the House’s protective wards screaming under the assault of its own master.
If he hit it one more time, he wouldn’t just break the door; he’d bring the entire west wing down on our heads.
“Fine!” I shouted, more at the ceiling than at him. “Fine, you stubborn idiot!”
I threw the bolt and yanked the handle.
The wards snapped with apopthat stung my ears, and the heavy oak door swung inward. Fenrik stumbled into the room, carried by his own momentum.
I stepped back, clutching the papers to my chest, my breath hitching in a throat choked with dust. His shirt was gone, shredded or discarded, leaving his torso bare. Silver veins writhed beneath his pallid flesh, pulsing with a frantic rhythm. Shadows pooled in the hollows of his collarbones, and his fingers ended in translucent, lethal claws.
He straightened, looming over me, his chest heaving with the sound of a bellows. His eyes were the worst part, no longer grey, but silver, glowing with a feral luminescence.
“You,” he snarled.
Then he looked past me. His gaze snagged on the cracked ley-window in the center of the scorched circle. It darted to the half-burned journals on the shelves. Finally, it landed on the crumpled ball of paper in my fist, the letter that said I was a chore, a tool, a battery to be drained and discarded. For a heartbeat, the monster dropped away, and he looked like a man waking up in a burning building.
He took a step back, his claws scraping shrilly on the stone.
“You found it, the House let you in.”
“It insisted, actually,” I said, my voice shaking despite my best efforts to sound imperious. I brandished the letter, though my knuckles were white. “It seemed to think I deserved to know that the man that is officially called my husband considers me an appliance.”
Fenrik flinched. The shadows at his neck flared, trying to crawl up his jaw. “That isn’t—Lysa, put that down. This room is poison.”
“Is it?” I laughed. “Funny. It feels like the only honest room in this entire cursed mausoleum.”
“You don’t understand what you’re holding.” He stepped toward me, his silver eyes narrowing. “Give them to me.”
“So you can burn them?” I retreated until my back hit the edge of the heavy desk. “So you can forget again? Or makemeforget?”
“I am trying,” he roared, “to keep you safe!”
“Safe?” I thrust the letter toward him, ignoring the way Kirion cowered against my ankles. “Is this safe? Lying to me? Using me to fix your mistakes?”
“It is not a mistake!” He lunged, closing the distance between us in a second.
I didn’t flinch. I let my own magic rise, a golden heat under my skin, ready to Quiet him if I had to. He stopped inches from me, his hand raised to snatch the evidence.
“I won’t watch you die the way my parents did.”
He was reaching for the sketchbook I held tight against my heart, his eyes wide.
“Give it to me, Lysa,” he pleaded. “Before the memory takes root.”
