Lyra stopped dead at the threshold.
Steam curled thick through the marble room beyond. Four women waited inside with basins of oils, soaps, cloths, and brushes. Towels lay in neat stacks. A silver rack held the navy gown already pressed and rehung, crystals glittering coldly like frost under moonlight.
The sight turned her stomach. “No,” she whispered.
A hand pressed between her shoulder blades.
She stumbled forward into the steam.
What followed was worse than violence because of how practiced it was.
They washed her—not as a person is washed when loved or tended, but as something to be prepared. Warm water poured over her hair while another pair of hands scrubbed dried blood from beneath her fingernails. One woman knelt to clean the mud from her calves and feet; another sponged Adrian’s blood from the insides of her wrists, the hollows of her elbows, the trembling line of her thighs. Hands lifted her chin, turned her face, spread scented oil along her collarbones, exfoliated her arms, polished her skin until it gleamed.
Lyra stood shaking in the center of it all, naked beneath the attention of four strangers, trying and failing to cover herself. Every time she crossed an arm over her breasts or pressed her thighs together, someone moved her. Efficient. Impersonal.
She had never felt more exposed. Never more reduced to flesh.
“Please,” she said once, voice breaking. “Please don’t do this.”
A woman behind her combed through her wet hair. “Lift your arms.”
Lyra did not move.
The woman repeated, “Lift. Your. Arms.”
When Lyra still resisted, two of them raised her arms for her.
Tears spilled hot and helplessly down her cheeks. She hated them for seeing. Hated herself for crying. Hated that somewhere beyond the steam, Caelum was already healed, already dressed,already becoming once more the impeccable monster the Collegium admired.
By the time they finished, her skin smelled of gardenia and cedar and something faintly metallic beneath it all.
The navy gown went on next.
They thrust her into it with brisk, coordinated hands—one forcing her arms through the understructure while another cinched the corseted bodice tight enough to make her ribs ache. The skirt settled around her in a heavy cascade of midnight silk. Crystals and diamonds caught the light in constellations, beautiful and merciless. Every time Lyra jerked away, another set of hands corrected her posture, turned her, lifted her chin.
“Not so tight,” Caelum said from somewhere behind her.
She closed her eyes.
That voice again—calm, refined, as though they were choosing flowers rather than dressing her for sale.
A stylist adjusted the neckline. Another fastened jeweled combs into her hair. Bit by bit her reflection transformed. Her dark red hair disappeared into an elegant arrangement at the nape of her neck, sleek and pinned with sapphires. The bruising at her throat was concealed by powder, then framed by the platinum choker as Caelum himself refastened it. The great sapphire rested cold against her pulse.
A collar disguised as inheritance.
A claim disguised as devotion.
By the end she no longer looked like a girl who had run through the forest with a knife hidden in her sleeve. She no longer looked like someone who had murdered a boy and begged for salvation.
She looked exquisite.
That was the horror of it.
The final stylist stepped away. “Done.”
Lyra lifted her eyes to the mirror.
A stranger stared back.
