A sound tore from behind the gag. Muffled. Broken. He laughed — low and wet and terrible — and his hand closed around the collar of my dress and tore.
Fabric screamed as it ripped from neck to navel, baring my skin to the cold air. I jerked against the bindings so violently something in my wrist popped, but the restraints held. His hand found my breast and he squeezed — not touched, not gripped — squeezed, his fingers digging into the flesh until I felt the bruise forming in real time, until the pain was white-hot and constant and I was bucking against the stone floor with everything I had, screaming behind the gag, screaming into the shadows that swallowed the sound and gave back nothing.
Be still. I've waited so long.
His mouth was on my neck. Biting. Not kissing — biting down with enough force to break skin, sucking hard enough to leave marks that would darken to black over the days to come. His other hand ran down my stomach, over my ribs. I could feel him savoring it, mapping my body with deliberate attention. Cataloging a possession. Then lower. His fingers shoved between my thighs, rough and probing and dry, and the pain was so sudden and so sharp that my back arched clear off thestone and a howl pressed against the shadow gag and came out as silence.
Don't fight it. Be prettier for me.
He yanked at my skirts. The fabric tore like paper. I felt the night air on my thighs, on the places no one had touched apart from Hakan, and tears streamed from my swollen eyes — one barely open, the other blurred with blood — and behind the gag I was begging. I was begging. The words couldn't form, couldn't escape, but my body was making them anyway — the frantic, jerking movements of a woman trying to communicateplease, please stop, please don't do thiswith nothing but her thrashing limbs and the muffled, choked sounds that the shadows ate and ate and ate.
He spread my legs wider. The shadow restraints pulled until my hips screamed. I felt him shifting between my thighs, felt his hands on my inner legs shoving them apart with a roughness that would leave finger-shaped bruises on the softest parts of me, and I understood with a clarity that was worse than any blow what was about to happen and I fought — gods, I fought — I threw every last shred of everything I had against the bindings, my light magic sparking and dying and sparking again, my body twisting so hard I felt the skin at my wrists tear open against the shadow restraints?—
He forced himself inside me.
The pain was so enormous, so complete, that it ate the world. I heard myself make a sound behind the gag — a sound that came from somewhere deeper than my throat, deeper than my lungs, a sound that came from the very foundation of who I was — and it was the sound of something shattering. Not breaking. Notcracking. Shattering. Into pieces so small they could never be reassembled.
He grunted. Pulled back. Slammed forward again — harder — and the stone scraped the raw skin of my back and blood slicked the floor beneath me and he set a rhythm that was not rhythm but punishment. Each thrust was a blow. Each withdrawal, a brief, gasping mercy before the next impact drove me further into the stone, further into the pain, further from anything that had ever been called human.
Exactly how I'd imagined.
Something inside me broke. Not my body — my body had broken minutes ago. This was something else. Something behind my eyes, behind the place where thoughts formed. A wall. A door. A threshold between the woman on the floor and the woman who could not survive being on the floor, and I crossed it — not by choice, not by decision — I simply left.
I went to the stars.
Above me, through the enchanted ceiling, through my one half-swollen eye, the silver and gold skies overlapped in their eternal dance. I found the Lover's Crown and I began to count.
One.
Two.
Three.
Below me — beneath me — in the place where my body still existed, there was pain. I felt it distantly, the way you feel thunder through walls. I knew what was happening. Some fractured, watchful part of my mind cataloged it with calmness.The weight. The grunting. The wet, rhythmic sound of what he was doing to the body that used to be mine.
Four. Five. Six.
He was inside me and I was inside the stars, and between those two truths there was a void so vast I could have fallen through it forever. My body was a house I had stepped out of. My body was a ruin on a cold stone floor in a tower where a boy had once made love to me beneath the stars, and now a monster was using it and I was somewhere very far away, counting stars that didn't care.
Seven.
The Lover's Crown. All seven stars. Beautiful and distant and completely beyond reach.
Below me, the monster moved faster. Harder. His fingers dug into my hips. Dark, ugly bruises bloomed where they pressed. He said things I tried not to hear. Crude, possessive things about my body, about how he'd pictured this, about how good I felt, and every word was a nail driven into a coffin I was building around myself.
His hand cracked across my face again — for the pleasure of it, because he enjoyed the impact, because something about hitting me while he was inside me excited him. I felt the blow land from very far away. Felt the fresh blood. Felt my consciousness waver, darken, the stars above me dimming as if someone were slowly turning down a lamp.
The darkness closed in. Not the shadows — something else. Something warm and black and merciful. The edges of the enchanted ceiling softened, blurred, the Lover's Crown dissolving into smears of silver light.
I felt him finish. Distantly. Like hearing someone call your name from the bottom of a well. The groan. The final brutal thrust that ground my shattered body into the stone.
Then his weight lifted. Cold air. The sound of fabric adjusting.
A voice from very far away — warped, monstrous, already fading:
You will remember this always. You will never know who I am. And that will destroy you.
The shadows dissolved. The gag melted from my mouth. I drew one ragged, broken breath that tasted of blood and bile, and the stars above me turned once, twice, silver pulling away from gold as the two skies separated?—
