Chapter 16: The Locked Door
The silence after the lock clicked was the loudest sound I’d ever heard. It pulsed in my ears, a thick, smothering thing. Stay here. Lock the door. His order was a cage. The fear from his father’s glacial stare still iced my veins, but beneath it, a hotter, sharper feeling ignited. Defiance. I wasn’t a child to be tucked away. I was the woman carrying his heir. The woman he’d worshipped in the dark.
Another shout echoed, muffled by stone and wood, but distinct in its fury. Not Eris’s voice. Deeper. Colder. Beron.
I threw the sheets back. The cool air raised goosebumps on my skin. I dressed quickly, hands fumbling on the simple fastenings of a woolen dress I found draped over a chair. My movements were silent, fueled by a breathless panic. I had to hear. I had to know.
As I turned towards the door, my heart a frantic bird against my ribs, a sliver of metal caught the candlelight.
There, in the ancient iron lock, on my side, was the key.
He’d turned it, ordered me to lock it… but he’d left it for me. A test? A choice? An oversight born of sheer rage at his father’s intrusion? I didn’t know. I stared at it, the intricately wrought bit of iron that was either a gift or a trap.
Another crash, the sound of something heavy and wooden splintering.
I took the key. It was cold in my palm. I didn’t insert it. Instead, I pressed my ear to the thick oak of the door. The voices were clearer now, distorted but intelligible, bleeding down the stone corridor from the study.
“—a human whore in your bed, Eris? Have you lost all sense? All dignity?” Beron’s voice was a lash.
“My bed is my concern.” Eris’s reply was flat, but a tremor of something ran beneath it. Not fear. Something older.
“It is the concern of this Court! Your seed is for alliance, for potency, not for wasting on some fleeting mortal fancy. Does she even understand what she is? A vessel? A warm hole for your distraction?”
I flinched, my cheek against the rough wood. The venom in his words was physical.
“You will not speak of her.” Eris’s voice dropped, a low warning that made the hairs on my arms stand up.
“Or what?” A wet, cruel sound—spitting. “You’ll challenge me? Again? Have the centuries not taught you the cost of defiance in this house?”
A pause. My blood turned to sludge.
“You look at her and see a weakness.” Eris’s words were slow, deliberate, each one mined from a deep, dark place. “I look at her and see the only thing in five centuries that hasn’t been a chain.”
Beron laughed. It was a hollow, terrible sound. “Sentiment. The ultimate chain. I thought I’d beaten it out of you. I suppose some lessons need repeating.”
The air in the hallway seemed to freeze. I could picture Beron’s face, the casual malice.
“You locked me in that room for a year.” Eris’s voice was different now. Stripped. It wasn’t the heir speaking. It was the boy who had survived. “For showing compassion to a kitchen maid you starved. A year in the dark, with only the lessons you would bring. And you call that beating it out of me?”
My hand flew to my mouth, stifling a gasp. The lock. The control. The way he measured every gesture, every word. The unbearable gentleness in the dark, so at odds with the rest of him. It wasn’t just strategy. It was survival. Carved into his bones by the male who now stood shouting at him.
“It made you strong!” Beron roared.
“It made me empty!” The roar that came from Eris was not loud. It was a shattered, raw thing that carried more pain than any shout. “For centuries. Empty. You want to know what she is? She is the first thing that has ever filled that space. And if you so much as look in her direction with anything but deference, I will burn this Court to the ground around you and watch you choke on the ashes. Heir or no heir. Father or no father.”
Silence. A terrible, profound silence.
Then Beron’s voice, quieter, dripping with a new kind of poison. “So the puppet has a heart after all. How quaint. And how predictable. She will be your undoing. And I will be there to remind you that I told you so, as you watch her wither and die in the blink of our existence.”
I heard footsteps, heavy and final, moving away. A distant door slammed.
I was shaking, my whole body trembling with the aftershock of what I’d heard. A year. In the dark. I stumbled back from the door, the key biting into my clenched fist. I had to get back. I had to be there before he returned.
My hands were clumsy, slick with cold sweat. I fumbled the key into the lock, turned it with a click that sounded like thunder, and slipped back into the bedchamber. I relocked it from the inside, then shoved the key under the edge of the heavy velvet rug. I threw myself onto the bed, pulling the covers up, trying to slow my ragged breathing.
It felt like only seconds later when I heard his footsteps in the hall. They were slow. Dragging. The key turned in the lock—he had another, of course—and the door opened.
Eris stood in the doorway. He looked like he’d been fighting a war. Not a physical one—his clothes were impeccable, his face was clean—but his eyes were shattered. The green was turbid, storm-wracked. He held himself so rigidly I thought he might fracture. He didn’t look at me. He stared at a point on the wall above the bed.
“We’re leaving,” he said, his voice scraped hollow. “We’re going back to the cabin. Now.”
He began moving around the room, gathering a few of his things with jarring efficiency. The finality in his tone, the broken stillness of him, was worse than any rage.
I sat up. The words I’d heard played on a loop in my head. A year in the dark.
I slid off the bed. My legs felt unsteady. I walked over to him. He was folding a tunic, his back to me, his shoulders a tense line.
I didn’t speak. I simply stepped into the space he’d created and wrapped my arms around his waist from behind, pressing my cheek against the stiff fabric of his jacket between his shoulder blades.
He froze. Utterly. The tunic fell from his hands.
I held on. I felt the hammering of his heart, a frantic, trapped rhythm against my palm splayed on his chest. He didn’t breathe. His entire body was a statue of endured agony.
“I’m proud of you,” I whispered into his back.
The words were simple. They were everything.
A shudder went through him, a great, seismic tremor that he could no longer suppress. His head bowed. One of his hands came up and covered mine where it lay over his heart. His grip was desperate, crushing. He didn’t turn. He didn’t speak. He just stood there in the middle of the room, in the sanctuary he’d built and his father had violated, and let me hold him together.
After a long moment, he squeezed my hand once, then gently pried my arms loose. He turned. His eyes were dry, but red-rimmed, the devastation in them laid bare for a single, unguarded second before the shutters came down. He cupped my face, his thumb sweeping once, hard, over my cheekbone.
“Never do that again,” he murmured, his voice raw.
I knew he didn’t mean the hug. He meant listening. Defying. Walking into the line of fire.
I just looked up at him, showing him I wasn’t afraid. Not of him. Not of this.
He saw it. The ghost of something—not a smile, but an acknowledgment—flickered in his eyes. He let go and finished packing in silence. When he was done, he took my hand, his grasp firm and sure, and led me from the room without a backward glance. We left the velvet shadows behind, the key still hidden under the rug, and walked into the cold, pre-dawn hall.
He didn’t look back at the door to his father’s study. He just held my hand tighter and led me toward the exit, toward the forest, toward the cabin. Toward the only peace either of us had ever known.