I’d begged, too, when the shadowy servants came with their meager offerings of food. Pleaded for news of my beasts, of the princes dragged into hell before my eyes. They never spoke, never acknowledged my questions with anything more than blank stares before disappearing back up the winding stair.
When the food stopped coming, I’d scraped mold from the walls, chewed on pieces of straw from the pathetic excuse for a bed they’d provided. Licked moisture from the stones after it rained. Anything to survive, to maintain the connection I could still feel thrumming beneath my breastbone. The connection to three princes I’d thought were one.
“Marcel,” I whispered now, the name a prayer on my lips. “Laurent. Bastien.”
My hands drifted to the mark on my shoulder, the claiming bite that had bonded me to them. It remained sensitive to the touch, somehow never healing fully despite the passage of time. Through it, I could feel them. Distant as stars but still present. Still fighting.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on that tenuous connection, trying to separate the threads that linked me to each prince. It had become my obsession in the endless hours of confinement.Learning to distinguish between them, to recognize each unique signature across the barrier between worlds.
Bastien, the morning beast. His energy was fierce, protective, almost overwhelming in its intensity. He’d brought me fresh kills and watched from a distance with those amber eyes, approaching only when primal need overtook his caution. I’d mistaken his restraint for animal simplicity. Now I understood he’d been giving me space, letting me adjust to my strange new life one sunrise at a time.
Laurent, the night beast who’d responded to his name in the darkness. Gentle, intellectual, seeking connection through shared understanding rather than just physical touch. He’d pressed his forehead to mine in that gesture of profound intimacy. He’d listened to my stories, my fears, my dreams when I thought I was speaking to the same creature who’d hunted for me at dawn.
And Marcel, the evening beast I’d known least of all. Thoughtful, watchful, the bridge between his brothers’ extremes. He’d been the one to guide me through the castle’s secrets, nudging me toward discoveries with purposeful intent, communicating without words in a language I’d only begun to understand.
Three princes. Three distinct souls I’d loved without fully knowing who they were. The revelation had come too late, in that final moment before the earth opened beneath the castle courtyard and swallowed them whole.
A sob caught in my throat, emerging as a dry, rattling cough that echoed off the stone walls. What I wouldn’t give for a drop of water now. Not for survival because I apparently couldn’t die, but for the simple comfort of moistened lips, a soothed throat.
The cold intensified as true night fell, erasing the meager light from my cell. My limbs grew stiff, fingers and toes losing feeling despite my efforts to keep blood flowing. I’d learned early onthat curling into a tight ball preserved what little body heat I generated. The hay that had once formed my bed had long since been consumed in desperate hunger, leaving only stone to cushion my protruding bones.
I should have been dead ten times over. From starvation. From exposure. From the simple despair of isolation. Yet my heart continued its steady rhythm, the curse of immortality sustaining me through torments that would have mercifully killed any normal human.
“Not human, though, am I?” I mumbled to the darkness. “Goddess-daughter, he called me.”
The Dark Lord’s words echoed in my memory. The last true daughter of the forest goddess. That explained so much, like my amber eyes that matched the princes’, the way my blood had healed rather than weakened me, and the roses’ thirst for my essence, for my understanding. I’d carried magic in my veins my entire life without knowing it.
Magic that now fueled an abomination. My life force stretched across dimensions to keep three princes immortal for eternal torture. I was their anchor, their battery, their unwilling jailer.
I should have hated them for it. For binding me to this existence where I couldn’t even escape through death. But hatred required energy I no longer possessed. And it would have been misplaced anyway. They hadn’t known what binding me would mean. They’d been trying to protect me, each in his own way.
A particularly violent shiver wracked my body, my teeth chattering so hard I feared they might crack. Outside, snow must have been falling. I could feel the change in the air, the deepening of winter’s grip on the castle and surrounding forest.
“Please,” I whispered, though I didn’t know who I was begging. Not the Dark Lord, who reveled in my suffering. Not Gaspard, who was likely licking his wounds somewhere,prevented from touching me by the terms of his own cursed deal. “Please, just let me sleep without waking. Just once.”
But even as I begged for oblivion, I fought against it. Because unconsciousness weakened the bond. I’d learned that through trial and error, through the way the princes’ presence dimmed when my awareness faded. And I couldn’t risk losing them completely. Couldn’t bear the thought of their suffering without even the small comfort of knowing I still lived, still remembered, still loved them.
So I bit my tongue until I tasted blood, used the sharp pain to keep myself present. Dug my fingers into the claiming mark until it throbbed in protest. Anything to stay conscious a little longer, to maintain that fragile connection across the boundary between worlds.
I hadn’t understood, at first, why the Dark Lord had imprisoned me in the castle rather than killing me outright. Now I did. Distance would have weakened the bond. My death might have broken it entirely, releasing the princes from their eternal torment. He needed me here, as close to the breach between worlds as possible, my essence pumping continuously into the ether to sustain their immortality.
But his cruelty had a flaw. In keeping me so close to the site of the original curse, he’d maintained my connection not just to the princes, but to the castle itself. To the magic that had once thrived here before corruption took hold.
I pressed my palm flat against the stone floor, closing my eyes to better sense what lay beneath. There, faint but unmistakable, the pulse of old power. Not the Dark Lord’s corruption, but something older. Something that recognized me, responded to my touch with the barest flicker of acknowledgment.
Queen Charlotte’s journal had hinted at it. The castle had been built at a nexus point, where the human world and magical realm bled into each other. That’s why it had been coveted,why the forest witch Enid had cursed it in the first place. The princes hadn’t just been royal by human standards—they’d been guardians of the boundary between worlds.
“Find me in the roses,”my mother’s ghost had said.“Just ask, and nature will provide.”
Her appearance during those final moments hadn’t been a hallucination born of terror. She’d been real, or as real as a spirit could be. Not just my mother Celine, but something more.Arty,Enid had called her. A name that tickled at my memory, something from Papa’s old tales of forest deities and natural magic.
Artio? The bear goddess whose worship had been forbidden when Christianity swept through these lands. Mama had told me stories when I was small, before the village priest caught wind of it and threatened to have her removed from the church. Papa had defended her, claimed they were just old wives’ tales to entertain a child, nothing more.
But they weren’t just stories, were they? They were heritage. My heritage. The magic in my blood didn’t come from nowhere.
I forced myself to my knees, ignoring the protest of stiff joints and wasted muscles, and the chafing of my bindings. If I was going to die here—and I would eventually, immortal or not, when the castle finally crumbled to dust around me—I wouldn’t do it lying down. I would find a way to reach the princes. To break the curse that bound us all. To fulfill whatever destiny had been written in my blood long before I was born.
The cell blurred around me, darkness encroaching on the edges of my vision. My body was shutting down again, forcing me into unconsciousness to preserve what little remained of my strength. I fought it, digging fingernails into palms hard enough to draw blood, but it was no use. The darkness came anyway, swallowing me whole.
