Page 106 of The Vespertine Treaty

I moved my hand, testing the reality. My wrist was bandaged, the skin beneath raw from the rope and iron manacles. I flinched at the sting, and the memory assaulted me.

Malathor’s hand on my thigh. The sound of tearing silk. The way he smelled of alcohol and entitlement.

I squeezed my eyes shut, my breath hitching in a panic that felt like a fist closing around my throat.

One, two, three.

"He is not here,"a voice whispered in my mind. Not mine. Poppy’s. Faint, sleepy, but fierce.

I buried my face in her fur, inhaling the scent of wild grass and sunlight that she somehow always carried. "I know," I whispered back.

I looked toward the window.

Cain was there.

He was sitting in a high-backed armchair, his profile cut from granite against the grey morning light. He hadn't moved since he laid me down last night. He was still wearing the same shirt, now dry but wrinkled, the sleeves rolled up to reveal the lethal corded muscle of his tattooed forearms.

He wasn't looking at me. He was staring out at the rain, a glass of amber liquid resting on the arm of the chair. He looked... eroded. Like a cliff face that had taken the brunt of a hurricane and was waiting to crumble into the sea.

He smelled of petrichor, pomegranate, and a lot of brandy. A storm bottled and drowned.

I wanted to call his name. I wanted to ask him to come closer, to prove that he was real and not a fever dream conjured by the darkness of the cell. But the air around him was jagged with tension. The Void inside him—that dark, hungry thing I had sensed since the day we met—was louder. It wasn't screaming; it was vibrating, a low-frequency hum of violence that made the shadows in the room stretch toward him.

So I stayed silent. I watched him watch the world, and I let the silence build a wall between us that I was too weak to climb.

The third day since Cain brought me back to the estate and one since going back to my chambers.

Silas brought me soup.

It was a rich, creamy broth with chunks of root vegetables, served on a silver tray with a single Lumina Blossom flower in a crystal vase.

"You must eat, My Lady," Silas said, his voice unusually soft. He stood by the bed, his hands clasped behind his back, looking at me with an expression that sat uncomfortably between pity and reverence. "Lord Cain will... be displeased if you wither."

"Where is he?" I asked, my voice scraping against a throat that still felt bruised from screaming in my nightmares.

"In the dungeons," Silas said. He didn't elaborate. He didn't have to.

I knew what Cain was doing. I could feel it. The estate felt different—there was a heaviness in the floorboards, adistant, muffled echo of agony that vibrated through the stone foundations. Malathor.

I should have been horrified. I should have told Silas to stop him.

But as I lifted the spoon to my lips, my hand trembling, a dark, vicious part of me—the part that had snapped in the cell—felt a cold flush of satisfaction.Let him rot,I thought, the venom of the thought shocking me.Let Cain peel him apart like he tried to do me.

Later that afternoon, I used the stone.

The velvet pouch Cain had given me sat on the nightstand like an oferring. I opened it with shaking fingers, pulling out the small, smooth obsidian disc.

"Aemelia?" I whispered, channeling a sliver of my intent into the rock.

The response was immediate. The stone flared with a soft blue light, and her voice filled the room, tinny but unmistakable.

"Ophelia! Oh, thank the gods. Oh, you stupid, reckless, beautiful idiot!"

I broke. The sound of her voice—my sister, my tether—shattered the numbness I had been wrapping myself in.

"I'm okay," I sobbed, curling around the stone, rocking back and forth. "I'm okay, Em. He came for me."

"I know he did,"Aemelia sniffled."I watched him leave, Ophelia. I've never seen anything like it. He looked like he was going to murder the sun for daring to set on you. Are you... are you whole?"