The bed felt too large, too empty, too aware. The sheets brushed against my skin like whispers, each thread remembering where the wax had fallen. I turned onto my side, then onto my back. The silence pressed close, thick as smoke. My eyes burned, but sleep never came—it only stalked me from a distance, waiting for my will to collapse first.
When it did, I fell—not into rest, but into him.
The corridor stretched before me again, endless and wrong. The candles were alive this time, their flames bending toward me as though hungry, tasting the air as if tasting my name. My footsteps made no sound; even the floor refused to acknowledge I existed. The walls were breathing—slow, tidal breaths that swelled the velvet and bone-white plaster, exhaling a damp chill that smelled of snuffed wicks and old flowers. From somewhere behind, the echo of his shoes followed: steady, deliberate, patient, a metronome set to the rhythm of fear. The sconces bowed toward that cadence; the portraits turned their varnished faces to listen.
Shadows unhooked themselves from corners and slid along the baseboards, keeping pace. A draft stroked the back of my neck like a gloved hand preparing to close. The farther I walked, the narrower the corridor became, ceiling lowering, floor softening, the distance ahead never shrinking—only the space around me. Somewhere out of sight, a door clicked, a lock turned of its own accord, and a single thread of hot wax landed on the runner with the sound of a heartbeat. I did not look back. Looking back would make him nearer. Looking back would teach the dark how to speak.
"Evangelina." The voice crawled along the floor, low and intimate, wrapping around my ankles before I could move. It slid up my legs like smoke, patient, knowing, the sound of something that had never needed to chase because it always found. I ran, though I knew there was nowhere to go. The hallway twisted like a serpent under my feet, folding in on itself until every turn fed back into the same place.
The crimson door waited at the end—the conservatory—breathing faintly as though it had lungs of its own. The light beyond its glass panels flickered with an orange pulse, steady, unhurried. Wax dripped from the ceiling like blood that refused to cool, each drop striking the marble with a hiss that sounded almost like laughter. My dress was already marked, the white stained gold where his punishment had touched me, where the pain had written his name into the fabric and the flesh beneath. The air smelled of scorched lavender and candle smoke—his scent—thick enough to breathe in and choke on.
"Do you think pain makes you clean?" he asked. His voice did not echo. It needed no walls to carry it. It came from everywhere and nowhere at once, the same tone he used when speaking softly against my ear, when explaining cruelty as though it were a kindness. "It does," he continued, and the air around me quivered, as if believing him. "It burns away the parts that lie." A soft sound followed—one that might have been a step or the settling of a sigh. I turned.
He stood beneath the chandelier, and the light above him trembled, not from draft, but from obedience. It seemed afraid to fall too heavily on his face. The shadows loved him more. His hands were gloved this time—black, immaculate—but even through the leather I could see the memory of heat waiting beneath. The candles rose behind him in a slow wave, each one flaring as though taking command. They lined up in perfect order, like soldiers awaiting his signal. The glass above us dripped with condensation, and every bead of moisture caught his reflection a hundred times over—his smile repeated endlessly, his eyes an army of gold.
"You ran from me again." The words struck the air like the crack of a whip, and though he did not move, the space between us shortened. I wanted to scream—to tell him I hadn't run, that I couldn't, that there was nowhere to run to—but my throat refused to open. The wax had sealed it shut in a dream just as it had in life. I felt the invisible ribbon around my neck tighten with every unspoken word. My lips moved, soundless, shaping pleas the air denied.
He smiled. It wasn't kindness. It was satisfaction. "Ah. Silence suits you." The chandelier above him shivered, spilling dust like ash. The room began to close in. The walls curved inward like a throat preparing to swallow. The pattern on the floor writhed, marble veins shifting as if alive. I turned toward the window—the only fragment of pale light left—but my feet sank into the floor. It was soft, wet, almost pulsing, as though I was standing on the skin of something dreaming beneath me. The warmth that rose through the soles of my feet felt disturbingly like breath.
Beneath the surface, something moved. Slow, deliberate, vast. Something that remembered my name. I tried to lift my foot, but the floor clung to me, a slow, viscous pull, as though the house itself had decided to hold me in place, to deliver me back to him. The sound of my heartbeat filled the space, but when I listened closer, it wasn't mine—it was the house's, the steady pulse of obedience answering his call.
"Do you miss him?" he whispered. The question slithered into the space between heartbeats. Every candle answered at once. Their flames shivered, then died, swallowed by an instant of perfect dark. The silence that followed was not emptiness but pressure—heavy, deliberate. The darkness had weight. It leaned close, aware. Floor. Ceiling. Breath. All vanished in a single pulse. Only the sound of wax dripping remained, slow and steady, like a metronome for terror. Then—behind me—a breath. His breath. Warm, deliberate, intimate, brushing the back of my neck like the beginning of a word.
"Tell me," he said, his voice soft as an open wound. "Did you think he could save you?" The air thickened until it clung to my skin, humid and alive. I tried to breathe, but each inhale tasted of smoke and iron. My body refused command; it belonged to gravity, to fear, to him. His hands emerged from the dark. Pale and sure. The gloves were gone now; he had no need for pretense. The fingertips were cool at first, almost gentle, tracing the bruises he'd left as though revisiting a masterpiece. Reverent as a priest, cruel as confession.
Wherever he touched, the wax returned. It bled from the air itself—slow, molten, obedient—painting my skin anew in ribbons of fire. The scent of lavender twisted with the burn, a sweetness that mocked mercy. "Every mark," he murmured, the words dragging heat across my throat, "belongs to me." The darkness moved with him, kneeling when he knelt, breathing when he breathed. The house itself seemed to lean closer, listening.
I tried to strike him. My arm rose halfway, trembling, defiant—and froze. The limb cracked mid-motion, porcelain splintering under unseen frost. A thin line of pain traced my wrist. My own voice broke free at last—small, hoarse, unfamiliar. "Please."
He laughed softly, almost tenderly. That laugh—the kind that sounds like pity but smells like smoke. "Please, what, my sweet Evangelina? Please stop?" His tone curved upward, curious, indulgent. Then lower—dangerous. "Or please more?" The floor answered before I could. It burst open beneath us, not with force but with surrender, as if it had only been pretending to hold us all along.
I fell through blackness. Through echoes of the house, its walls whispering his name like a prayer gone rotten.
Elias. Elias. Elias.
My reflection flashed by in fragments—shards of mirror, pieces of light catching my descent. Each one showed a different face: one pale, one bloodless, one screaming. The last piece caught my eyes wide open, mouth frozen in a soundless plea. Then there was nothing but the echo of that silence, chasing me downward, waiting to become real again.
When I landed, it was in my own chamber. The impact made no sound, only the sensation of falling into breathless stillness. The curtains stirred, though no wind moved; they rose and fell like lungs drawing air they no longer needed. The bed stood waiting for me—its linens white and perfect once more, smoothed of every crease, as though someone had already prepared it for my surrender. The air smelled of extinguished candles and cooled wax, that faint sweetness that clings after pain.
I thought I'd woken—until I saw the door. It was open. A thin ribbon of darkness spilled across the floor, a shadow that did not belong to the room. It stopped just short of my feet, patient, certain. He stood in the doorway, watching.
I could not see his eyes, only the glow where eyes should have been—pale gold, the color of heat seen through glass. The kind of light that remembers what it destroyed. His face was half in shadow, half in reverence, as though he'd stepped out of some old portrait that had been waiting for its subject to come alive again.
He lifted a candle between us. The flame bent forward, straining toward me, trembling with recognition. "You see," he said softly, almost tenderly, "even light cannot help but obey." The words touched the air and stayed there, humming. Then he began to walk toward me. Each step was measured, inevitable. The floor did not creak—it yielded, like flesh learning submission. With every pace, the room seemed to shrink around him, folding inward until the walls pressed close, until the ceiling stooped low in reverence.
The windows darkened. Frost spread outward from their frames, crawling across the glass like veins of white fire. My reflection flickered within it, pale and trapped. My heart slammed against my ribs—frantic, animal, desperate for an escape it no longer believed in. The sound filled the chamber, quick and uneven, like the flutter of something small caught behind glass.
The walls began to whisper. Quiet at first, almost indistinct. Then louder. Louder still, until the whispers braided into a single, frantic chant. "Elias. Elias. Elias—"
The name became the room's pulse. It moved through the plaster, through the floorboards, through me. The syllables pressed against my skin, crawling beneath it, beating in rhythm with my heart until I could no longer tell which sound belonged to whom. He smiled faintly, and the candlelight wavered, spilling his shadow across the ceiling like an unfurling wing. Every inch of air between us felt alive—taut, electric, waiting for his command. And I knew then that in this dream—or whatever this was—I could never truly wake, because the moment I did, he would follow. He always did.
He reached the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped beneath his weight, slow, deliberate, like the drawing of a breath before a confession. I tried to crawl back, but my wrists were bound—thin ribbons of wax winding from the bedpost to my skin, translucent and trembling, pulsing faintly with their own heat. I pulled once, twice, but they only tightened, sighing as they sealed. The scent of lavender rose from the basin across the room, soft and pleading, but it was useless against the smoke that filled the air—the sharp, sweet reek of extinguished candles and scorched devotion.
He tilted his head, studying me as though deciding where to begin, as though the decision itself was an act of mercy. The light from his candle wavered across his face, carving the same familiar cruelty into new shapes. His eyes were steady, unblinking, their gold dimmed to a feverish glow.
"This time," he said, voice low enough to make the air tremble, "you will understand what devotion feels like." The words were not spoken—they were given, like a vow or a sentence. He brought the candle closer. The flame moved with purpose, the way a predator moves—slow enough to savor the distance it erases. It reached my throat, hovering there, not yet burning, just threatening. The heat brushed my skin like the mouth of something patient, something certain of its claim.
My breath hitched. The sound came out fractured, breaking on the edge of a sob. The tears that followed blurred his face until it no longer looked human—only the suggestion of a man built from light and ruin. For a heartbeat, I thought I saw sorrow in him, the ghost of hesitation flickering behind his eyes. It might have been pity. It might have been pride. But then he smiled. The candle tilted. The wax spilled again.
Each drop landed like a heartbeat—soft, hot, deliberate. It ran down my collarbone, tracing the constellation of older burns, finding their ghosts and rekindling them. The pain was bright, too bright, until it crossed into silence. My scream clawed its way up my throat but came out half-born, ripped apart by the heat before sound could form. Then the rest followed. A single cry that fractured the dream. The walls split open with the sound. I screamed. And the dream tore apart around it.
I woke choking on my own breath, the cry still trembling between my teeth. The air was cold and sharp, tasting of metal and ash. For a moment, I couldn't tell if I was still dreaming—if the silence that filled the room was real or simply waiting to reveal him again. The fire in the hearth had long died. The moon had replaced it, slipping through the parted curtains and painting the floor in thin ribbons of silver. My skin glistened with sweat, but when I touched my neck, it was dry. No wax. No flame. Only the faint ache remained—ghost heat, lingering just beneath the surface, proof of something that had happened in a place no one could see.
Only the faint ache remained, the ghost of heat that refused to fade. It lived just beneath the skin—an invisible burn that pulsed in rhythm with my heartbeat, as if the fire had only buried itself deeper rather than dying. I could almost smell it still: the ghost of wax, of smoke, of obedience. I sat up, trembling. The sheets slid off my body with a sigh that sounded too human, too knowing. My hair clung to my face, damp with tears I hadn't known I'd shed. They had dried in thin, shining trails, marking the path grief takes when it has nowhere left to go. The wind pressed against the windowpane, slow and deliberate, as though testing the strength of the glass.
And for a moment—I could almost hear him breathing behind it. That measured breath. That calm cadence that turned even silence into command. I turned sharply, heart hammering against my ribs, but there was nothing there. Only the frost's reflection staring back—my face splintered by the veins of ice, pale and uncertain. The faint light of the moon clung to the window like a warning.
"Just a dream," I whispered. My voice broke around the words, fraying like old lace. But the room disagreed. The candle on my nightstand flickered, though no wind reached it. Its flame bowed slightly, the way a subject does before its king. A single drop of wax gathered at the wick's edge and fell, slow and deliberate, tracing a path down the brass holder. It hardened on the table with a faint hiss, forming a pale scar that gleamed in the moonlight—precise, deliberate, final. A signature. I couldn't look away. The mark was small, but it held the same authority as a spoken word. Proof that he had been here—or that he never left. Sleep would not come again that night.
You are mine to command. The words returned like echoes from the inside of my skull, striking again and again until sound and meaning dissolved. They became rhythm, heartbeat, pulse. Each throb carried them down my neck, across my collarbone, through the small, cruel constellations where the wax had fallen. The ache beneath each scar answered, though I did not give permission.
I stayed by the window because the window looked outward—and outward still meant possibility. If I stared long enough, I could pretend the world beyond the glass existed, untouched by his voice. The frost on the pane had thickened during the night. Its patterns crawled upward in delicate spirals, veins under pale skin, blooming into shapes that looked almost alive. I traced one with my fingertip, and the cold bit back, sharp and immediate.
The light that slipped through it had no warmth, no mercy. It carried the clarity of a blade—a light that cut rather than comforted. Morning did not arrive; it refused the house. It hovered beyond the frost, afraid to enter, sending only a thin imitation of itself through the glass. The pale illumination felt borrowed, like light stolen from a corpse. In that fragile glow, the room looked suspended between worlds—half dream, half confession. And I understood, as I watched the candle's dying flame tremble, that the night had not ended. It had simply changed shape.
Below, the gardens were a colorless expanse, stretched wide and silent beneath the paling sky. The hedges stood stiff with rime, their branches brittle and gloved in white. Every leaf was caught mid-breath, every blade of grass frozen in a gesture of surrender. The paths that wound through them were scored by footprints—my footprints—each one filled with ice, preserved like signatures on a confession I hadn't meant to write.
If I had been braver—or perhaps more foolish—I might have searched for a second set. Something lighter, more deliberate. Traces of a man who moved like winter's shadow, the one whispered about in the village firesides, the one mothers warned their children not to name after dark. The one Elias pretended not to believe in.Deliverer. Executioner. Ghost. Vladimir.
Even thinking the name made the air shift, as though the frost itself leaned closer to listen. But the paths below held only one record: mine. I pressed my palm against the window, half-hoping the cold glass might answer. The frost bit back, drawing the heat from my skin until it stung. My reflection blurred against the pale light, and for an instant, it seemed I was already part of that landscape—still, colorless, unseen.
I thought of his eyes at the forest's edge—the night when snow swallowed every sound except the hush of our breathing. The trees had stood like witnesses carved from bone. We had spoken little. We had said too much. I remember the way the air trembled between us, how the wind seemed to pause as if to listen. His silence had not been absent; it had been a language older than mercy. I had carried that silence home with me like contraband—a smoldering coal hidden in wool. I had starved it of air, afraid to let it live, and still it glowed.
It glowed here, now, in the hollow beneath my ribs. How does he know? The thought cut clean through me, sharp as the cold. Elias had no letter, no whisper, no witness to damn me. No ribbon out of place, no tremor to betray. The manor itself had been my prison and my alibi. I had moved like a ghost through its halls, touching nothing, speaking to no one, leaving no proof of life behind.
And still, his gaze found me. It always did. The way a hound finds a trail invisible to the eye. The way a curse finds the soul it's sworn to follow. Instinct, he would call it. Devotion, he would say. Love—when he wished to make the word a weapon. He wielded affection the way other men wielded knives: cleanly, precisely, with pleasure.
I turned from the window, heart echoing in my chest like steps on marble. Every sound in the house belonged to him—the creak of the beams, the whisper of the drapes, the slow exhale of the fire dying in the next room. His presence was a scent, a rhythm, a law.
And still, I found myself whispering into the empty air, as though it might carry farther than these walls: Vladimir…
Just a breath, a name, a risk. The frost on the glass shivered, and for one impossible instant, I thought the air on the other side answered. I could see it in his eyes when he said, Did you meet someone? Not curiosity—certainty. It was not a question seeking truth. It was the kind that arrived already answered, spoken only to watch you flinch. He didn't ask to know. He asked to confirm. The memory of that moment has lived beneath my skin ever since, a splinter I cannot extract. Every time I breathe, I feel it shift. Every time I move, it reminds me that he knows.
Has the house betrayed me? Sometimes I think the walls whisper when I'm not listening, that they have learned to speak his language. The manor remembers footsteps—it always has. Perhaps it remembers mine too clearly, tracing the rhythm of my hesitation, the pulse of my defiance when I walk alone. Maybe it hears the quickening in my breath when I think of another name, the way the air seems to thicken when memory becomes longing.
Do the windows repeat what they've seen—the shape of my mouth when I whisper to no one? Do the floorboards hum with the weight of what I hide? Or perhaps it isn't the house at all. Perhaps the wind carries it. Perhaps guilt is a soundless thing that travels, an invisible pulse that drifts through locked doors and finds the ears that are waiting. Elias doesn't need evidence; he breathes in my unease the way others inhale the cold. Or does he simply feel it—
that something in me no longer bows entirely to him?
The thought was both a terror and a truth. My fingers tightened on the windowsill until the frost bit into them. The sting almost steadied me. The pain was clean, uncomplicated—something the mind could understand. The glass beneath my palms was colder than bone, so cold it seemed to breathe against my skin. I could feel its pulse in reverse, the living cold pushing back against my warmth, as if the window itself resisted my touch.
Beyond it, the world waited—snow-heavy, unjudging, endless. An expanse too still to be merciful. Too silent to offer comfort. The frost crawled higher along the edges of the pane, thin veins forming a pattern that looked almost like writing. I wanted to read it, to believe the ice was trying to tell me something—that there were meanings in its silence that he could not hear. But the frost said nothing. It only grew. And the longer I stared, the more I thought I saw my reflection blink.
"Vladimir," I whispered before I could stop myself. The name escaped like a sigh stolen from a prayer—fragile, forbidden, and trembling with something dangerously close to hope. It hung in the air for a heartbeat, suspended between defiance and devotion, before the cold claimed it. I could almost see it—the ghost of my breath blooming against the window, shaping the letters of his name in frost before fading. It reached toward the glass, reaching for the outside world that still remembered mercy.
But mercy has no home here. The sound vanished before it ever reached the pane. The house devoured it, as it devours everything I dare to feel. The silence that followed was not empty—it was sated. I should not say his name here. Not within these walls. The house keeps secrets, but never mine. Its shadows have tongues; its silence has allegiance. The walls remember the pitch of my breath when I lie, the tremor in my voice when I break. If I whispered his name a thousand times, they would carry it straight to him.
Still, my heart betrayed me. It said it again, silently this time, like a secret rehearsed too often to forget. Vladimir. Even in thought, it trembled. The syllables pressed against my ribs, pleading for air. I held them back. I could feel their weight inside me—the way longing becomes physical when denied too long. Would he hear me if I called? He always did.
The night he found me by the riverbank, I had not spoken his name aloud. The world had been frozen still, wrapped in fog so thick even the stars refused to look down. Yet he came—emerging from the mist as though summoned by ache alone. I remember the sound of the water beneath the ice, the faintest shift of air before he appeared, tall and quiet, the shape of him bleeding into the gray.
He moves through silence like it belongs to him, like the air itself waits for his permission to speak. He hears things that never make a sound. That night, I had not cried for help. I had not moved. I had only thought of him—terrified and desperate, the thought so sharp it might have been prayer. And still, he came. Even now, in this suffocating room, I could feel that same pull—a tension in the air, invisible but deliberate, a stillness too deep to be empty.
The candle flame near my bed wavered, then straightened. I stared at it, heart stumbling once, twice. If I called again, would he come? Or would Elias hear first? The thought alone was enough to freeze the rest of the word in my throat.
I remember the way he looked at me then—not with pity, not even with rescue, but recognition. There had been no demand in his gaze, no hunger for ownership, only the quiet acknowledgment of something already understood. As though the shadows inside me were familiar to him, not strange or shameful, but known—shared. It was as if he had carried them once, long ago, and knew what it meant to bear their weight in silence. The darkness between us was not a threat then; it was a mirror.
He did not reach for me. He simply stood there, and the world bent around his stillness. Even the mist seemed to hesitate before touching him. There was something sacred in that restraint—something terrible. I had never known that peace could feel like danger until that moment. It was not safety he offered, but understanding, and that is a far more dangerous mercy.
A shiver slid through me now, breaking the memory apart like glass under frost—but it was not the cold that caused it. The air inside the manor had grown thick again, listening, pressing close against the skin as if it wanted to memorize my pulse. The silence shifted slightly, like a breath being held too long.
The candles along the walls flickered in unison. Not the way a draft would move them—but in rhythm, deliberate, synchronized, as if obeying something unseen. And in the reflection of the window, I thought I saw it—just for an instant. A movement. Something tall, patient, watchful. The shape was wrong for Elias—too still, too quiet, the sort of stillness that belongs to the forest, to the edge of snow. The kind that waits without the need to threaten.
I blinked—and it was gone. Only my reflection stared back, wide-eyed and pale, framed by the frost that webbed across the glass like veins. Then came his voice again—not from the window, but from my memory, from that deep, echoing part of the mind that never truly forgets the sound of command. Did you meet someone? The words resounded inside me like the toll of a bell that no one else could hear. Elias's suspicion wasn't a question—it had never been one. It was a verdict. A sentence that only waited for its confession.
He knows. He knows something has changed. Maybe not who, maybe not how—but he feels it—the absence of his dominion, the shift in the air where his control used to live. He senses it the way a body senses the loss of a limb, phantom and aching. To him, I am that missing pulse. The part that dared to move beyond his reach. And though he cannot yet see it, he feels its absence—like the echo of a heartbeat that refuses to belong to him.
My breath clouded the window once more, a pale bloom against the glass that trembled and dissolved too quickly. This time, I lifted my hand and drew my finger through it—just a single line, a thin break in the frost. A passage. A promise. The mark lingered for a moment, delicate and imperfect, a doorway carved from breath alone. Through that narrow slit of clarity, the air beyond seemed to stir. It looked almost alive—shifting faintly, as though something unseen moved just out of reach, answering the touch that had dared to summon it.
"Find me," I whispered, though I wasn't sure which of them I meant. The words left me trembling, suspended between hope and terror. Deep within, in the quietest part of my heart—the part I still kept hidden even from myself—I wanted it to be him. I wanted to see Vladimir again. To feel the kind of stillness that didn't cage but steadied. To believe that somewhere beyond these walls there was a gaze that saw me not as possession, not as sin, but as something that could still be saved.
I wanted his presence the way drowning things want air—not to escape, but to remember what living feels like. But I hope—maybe, just maybe—I can see him, or feel him, even for a moment. Even the smallest glimpse of him would be enough to remind me that not all light burns, that not every silence belongs to Elias.
And yet, even as the wish took shape, hesitation closed around it like ice. If he came, Elias would know. He would feel the shift, the tremor in the balance he so carefully keeps. He would sense my heart answering a name that isn't his. So I stood there, silent, the line I had drawn already fading beneath the new frost, as if the window itself regretted letting me hope. Outside, the wind rose—a soft, hollow sound—and the snow began to fall again, erasing the world one flake at a time.
The thought hollowed me.
I turned from the window, unable to bear the reflection that no longer felt like my own. The frost had left pale ghosts where my fingers had rested, thin veins fading across the glass like the traces of something that once tried to live there. I let the curtain fall back into place. The fabric whispered against my wrist—soft, but accusing.
The hours that followed moved like ghosts through the corridors—present, but untouchable. I lost count of how many times the light shifted on the walls. The servants came only once, their steps muted, their presence brief. A tray appeared near the threshold, silver dull beneath the dimness, steam curling faintly from a bowl that smelled faintly of broth and fear. No knock. No voice. Only retreating footsteps that died halfway down the hall. As if even their sound might invite him.
I did not touch the food. Hunger had become a foreign language to my body—one I no longer remembered how to answer. The ache in my stomach had folded into the deeper ache behind my ribs, the one that whispered his name and mine together until I could not tell which belonged to whom.
By afternoon, the light faded again, though the day had not yet ended. Shadows drew themselves longer and darker, creeping from the corners until they met beneath my chair like the hem of a mourning veil. The manor sighed from its bones, a long, weary exhalation—as though even the walls had grown tired of pretending they did not listen.
I tried to lie down, but the bed rejected me. The sheets were cold and stiff, their weave unfamiliar against my skin. The places where the wax had fallen throbbed when the fabric touched them—small, pulsing reminders of obedience branded in pain. Pain dulls, but shame remembers. Every movement pulled a thread of memory tight, replaying the moment I had not moved fast enough, not spoken loud enough, not fought hard enough to prove I was still alive beneath his hand.
I turned on my side, then on my back, but the air itself seemed to recoil. The scent of lavender clung to the pillow, once gentle, now mocking. I felt the house breathe around me—slow, patient, omniscient—and I pressed my palm against my mouth to keep the sound in when a sob broke loose without permission. Even that small noise felt treacherous. Sound could travel. Sound could tell him.
The room dimmed until all color drowned. I rose finally to light the lamp, if only to prove I could still command something, even a flame. The first match refused to catch; the second hissed like a secret told too close to a confession. When at last the wick surrendered and flared, the flame trembled, uncertain, as though the air itself despised its defiance. Its glow fell over the room in thin trembling threads—touching the mirror's shroud, the empty tray, the floor where my shadow knelt instead of standing.
The light did not comfort. It only showed how much of the dark remained. The mirror across the room caught the light and returned a dim reflection—a ghost of brightness trying to remember itself. I looked at her, the figure behind the glass, and realized it had been hours since I'd last dared to see what he had made of me. Pale. Eyes rimmed red. Lips drained of color. The faintest trace of ash shadowed my neck where the cloak had brushed against the wax as it cooled. I touched the mark and the memory stung beneath my fingertips.
I hardly recognized her—the woman in the mirror. She looked like someone who used to be alive, someone I might have once pitied. The eyes staring back held no defiance now, only the calm of surrender misread as grace. I turned away before she could blink. Outside, the snow had begun again—fine, relentless, almost deliberate. It moved sideways in the wind, weaving itself into shifting symbols that dissolved before they could be read. The sky pressed low, heavy with unspoken things.
And yet, beneath the window, color bloomed. The roses were still there—impossible, bright, and patient. Scarlet against silver. Their petals bowed but did not break beneath the frost. I couldn't stop staring at them. They did not belong here. No footprints disturbed the drifts around them, no sign of a gardener's hand or mercy. Just the flowers, blooming through the cold, as though some unseen will had commanded them to live. For a moment, I thought I saw movement among them—the faintest flicker of shadow that might have been wind, or might have been him. Not Elias. The other.
Then it was gone, leaving only the impossible red, burning quietly against the snow. He had seen them too, last night. I remembered his expression—the fleeting crack in his perfect composure when his gaze had fallen to the courtyard. For a heartbeat, the certainty that governed him faltered, and something raw crossed his face. Recognition. Fear.
He thought it was that man—the one they whisper about in the village, the shadow that walks with death at its heels. The stories drift in with the traders who pass through the snow: a figure who moves unseen, whose arrival is marked not by footsteps but by silence itself. Elias had dismissed them before, yet last night, when he saw the roses, he had looked as though the stories had reached out and touched him. But what if… he was right?
The thought flickered through me like lightning behind closed eyes. What if Vladimir had been here? No—impossible. He would never risk being seen, not by Elias, not by anyone. He moved like absence, not presence. And yet, the roses—those impossible, living things—were his kind of silence. A message written without words, a kindness disguised as an omen. My heart fluttered painfully at the thought, the rhythm irregular, fragile. I pressed my palm against my chest as though I could command it back into stillness. The skin there burned faintly, remembering both fire and touch. If he were near, I would know. Wouldn't I?
The question hollowed me. The stillness around me seemed to listen for an answer, but none came. I wanted to believe it—to imagine that somewhere beyond the glass, just out of reach, he stood watching, waiting. Not out of pity, not as a savior, but because something in him refused to leave me to this house and its ghosts. The thought hurt and comforted in equal measure. Hope and dread often wear the same face.
The chair under me was hard and narrow, as if punishing posture were a virtue. My cloak smelled faintly of the candles from the conservatory—a sweetness that clung to the seam where the fabric had brushed the altar of glass. My skin held a memory of heat so precise I could point to its borders with my finger. My throat held silence like a swallowed shard.
I tried not to think of the conservatory. But the mind is a traitor. It led me back there, to the room of gray light and glass bones, to the way his hand hovered calmly above the taper before tipping it—one measured drop, then another—teaching me the lesson only he believed existed. Pain as punctuation. Obedience as grammar. He wrote his name on me in molten gold.
"You ran from me again," he had said. "Every time you run, I will mark the distance in your body." I closed my eyes. The chair continued to hold me upright as if I were a pinned specimen. The house listened. I felt it—not fancy or madness, but a pressure, like the moment before a storm when static takes inventory of your hair. The manor had its own nervous system, and every corridor was a nerve that carried him. He traveled it without footsteps.
By midday, the light on the frosted glass turned a deeper gray, the kind that makes noon look like an exhausted evening. I had not moved; I feared that if I did, the house would notice and tell him where to find me. The servants had vanished into whatever crawlspaces fear affords. No clatter of dishes, no broom-tap, no torn snatches of song. Even the clock in the far parlor had ceased ticking. Time held its breath in this place. Only my own breathing insisted on existing.
In that stilled air, a different sound began—small, uncertain. I counted it before I named it: one, two…a hesitant rhythm, like the first drops struck from a thawing eave. Wax. Impossible. Yet I knew the sound. It stitched itself to yesterday until they were the same. I turned my head. A candle on the mantel quivered. The wick burned too low for the hour. As I watched, a rounded bead gathered at its lip and rolled, slow as a thought you are ashamed to have, then fell. It landed on the polished wood with a sound softer than a sigh. What terrified me was not the drop but the way the flame nodded—as if in recognition.
"You are mine to command," the room repeated, though no voice spoke. I stood because staying seated felt like submitting, and if I continued to submit, I would dissolve into him entirely—into that calm, that patience that wore cruelty like silk. When my feet found the floorboards, the cold came up through them and gripped my bones. I crossed the room as one might cross thin ice: slowly, listening for beneath-sounds. The candle's light trembled on the veiled mirror. I had covered it myself after the punishment, unable to bear the sight of my own face with his mark on it.
I reached for the cloth as if it were a bandage I might change. My fingers hesitated at the edge. What good would there be in seeing? And yet that was precisely the question my terror asked: what do you refuse to look at? The thing you refuse grows stronger. I stripped the cloth away.
A pale woman faced me—white where pride had bled out, white where fear had rooted. The bruises shaped themselves like the verdict of a court that only ever heard one witness. The beads of hardened wax lay on my collarbone like a string of misshapen pearls. I touched one reflexively, and the room tilted. The memory inside it was still hot. Behind my reflection, the room was quiet. And then it was not.
Somewhere below my chamber, a door closed. Not the loud slam of anger—something careful, reverent. Elias never broke the surface of the house when he was most dangerous. He went under it. I replaced the cloth and stepped back from the mirror as if it could betray me. The urge to bolt for the corridor made my legs tremble. But there was nowhere to run that did not wind back to him. I have learned the paths that pretend to lead outward. They bow, like the candle flames, toward their master.
How does he know? The question pressed for blood until it got it: a second thought, sharper, truer. Perhaps he does not know. Perhaps he smells the absence of my fear as a wolf smells the absence of smoke: a hint that something surprising has entered the field. The nights since the forest, even my terror had been altered—salted by a different taste. In the part of me where I keep the last unbroken thing, a name had nested, feathered with warmth. Vladimir. The syllables moved like medicine under the tongue.
I imagined his hands—steady, not gentle, not cruel—only exact. The way he watched without looking hungry. The danger he wore like a cloak, he could shrug off and lay at the feet of whoever needed its shadow. Rumors called him the man who delivered death. They did not say to whom. He had watched me that night as if I were not a problem to be solved or a prize to be stolen, but a question he had the patience to hear fully. The memory of that patience could undo a cage, if you believed in it too hard. Perhaps I had. Perhaps Elias smelled that crack in the lock and pressed a finger there. On the mantel, the drop of wax cooled. It looked like a tooth.
I couldn't bear the room any longer. I opened the chamber door and stepped into the corridor. The hallway held its breath. Candles burned at measured intervals, their flames small, chastened. I moved with the quiet of a thief and the conviction of a condemned woman reviewing her route. The air carried the faintest breath of tobacco—a particular blend—with which he complicated the scent of beeswax and dust. He was somewhere in the house. He was always somewhere.
I should have turned toward the chapel; its doors were ironwood, and its shadows belonged to someone else. Instead, my feet turned me toward the narrow servants' stair that coiled down behind the tapestries. The steps groaned like old teeth as I descended. Threads brushed my shoulder, raising the image woven into them—saints with eyes too alive, hands extended in gestures that failed to bless. The house pressed closer with each turn of the stairs, as if to say: where could you possibly go that I have not built?
The door at the bottom opened into a corridor no guest ever saw. The stones here sweated in winter. The air tasted of iron. As I passed the scullery, I glanced through the crack—no one. A pot still steamed faintly, forgotten, or abandoned. On the far counter, a knife lay under a towel like a thought someone tried to cover quickly when footsteps approached.
I took the knife. It was not bravery. It was arithmetic. With nothing, one is worth nothing. With a knife, one is worth the length of an arm and one sharp intention. The blade was nicked, the handle worn smooth with use. It felt like a hand that would not flinch. The corridor bent toward a door I had opened only once as a child—the one that led to the narrow strip of garden behind the kitchens, where frost lingered longest. My heart beat in that direction without consulting me. If I could stand outside, if I could breathe air that was not house-shaped, perhaps I could smother the echo of his voice.
I reached for the bolt. Before my fingers touched it, the other side of the door breathed. Not wind. Not the weather. A presence—close enough to hear its patience. I flattened myself against the wall, the knife a sliver of cold along my wrist. The breath came again, then a soft sound—the slightest adjustment of weight on frost. The handle turned a fraction under the bolt and stopped when it met the iron's refusal. Silence followed, but it had changed. Now it watched.
Vladimir, I thought, a prayer I did not know I could utter without sound. Or a trap. Or a third thing, worse, that does not care what name you whisper. I did not open the door. The breath withdrew, just enough that I could doubt it. And in that doubt, something else uncoiled—something from the house itself. A low shiver went through the stones, so subtle I might have blamed my nerves if the candles along the corridor had not answered—each flame leaning, all at once, toward the kitchens, as if in obedience to a body entering the room above us. Not at the door behind which the breath had been. Within. Already within.
His voice did not speak. It did not need to. The house spoke for him: a minute shift of timber, a sigh in a long wall, the gossip of a chain brushing stone. The map of him appeared in those sounds, exact as a hunter's snare. I backed away from the garden door as though it were a cliff edge. The knife became heavier. I was no longer certain what it defended: my throat, my resolve, or the thought of a man who had never asked me to belong. I retreated into the scullery and slipped behind the large bread oven where the warmth from three days ago still clung. Kneeling there, I pressed my cheek to the brick and let the heat invent a future in which hands could be warm without causing harm.
Bootsteps, muted by distance, counted down the corridor. Not loud. Not hurried. A rhythm calculated to seem ordinary and therefore monstrous. He paused at intersections the way a man pauses to choose which book to pull from a shelf he owns. I felt him select the path toward the servants' stairs. I did not breathe. He ascended—one floor, then another. The house straightened under him like a dog under a master's hand. When his steps had dissolved into the ceiling, I dared exhale. The breath came out wrong, half sob, half salt. My knees had gone numb. Brick grit pressed patterns into my skin where it met the floor, a small pain with no purpose, and therefore merciful.
When I rose, the silence filled with afterimages—echoes of his presence moving outward, patrolling, searching for the instability he had sensed in me. The crack in the lock. He would test every seam in the day until night showed him where the weakness widened.
"Think," I whispered. "If you cannot be brave, be exact." Exactly what? The house owns the exits. He owns the house. But he does not own the sky. The thought lifted its head like a fox. There is a hatch in the western attic—an old thing the roofers used once and forgot. The corridor to it is disused, the door hidden behind a wardrobe that pretends to be heavier than it is. As a child, I had pressed my ear to the hatch and listened to the rain drum six inches from my face. I had imagined pushing it open and letting the storm baptize me. I had not thought of it in years. Elias, I told myself, had not thought of it at all.
I crept back to the stairs, tucked the knife into my sleeve so the steel lay against the skin of my forearm, and climbed. The servants' steps complained but did not betray me. On the second landing, voices drifted from the main hall—his, low; another, deferential and frightened, maybe the steward's. They spoke of inventories—cellars, keys, the dull litanies by which domination justifies its hours. I melted into a shadow until the voices moved away, then slipped into the narrow passage that led to the western wing.
This part of the house smelled of old fabric, cedar, and forgotten air. White sheets ghosted over furniture that remembered more generous winters. The wardrobe at the end of the passage leaned sleepily against the wall, its feet tunneling into the floorboards as if bored. I slid my shoulder against it. It grumbled, then consented to move. The hidden door behind it looked like a sketch someone had left unfinished. I pushed it open and entered a darkness felt more than seen. Dust kissed my lips. Somewhere ahead, a window had surrendered a wedge of light. I followed it to the ladder-to-nowhere that rose toward the black seam of the roof. The hatch waited overhead, edges rimed with old paint, cut lines straight as commandments.
I climbed. The ladder protested softly; each rung wrote a complaint against my weight. At the top, I tested the hatch with my palm. It stuck like a mouth pressed shut. I braced my shoulder and pushed. The wood creaked, the seal cracked, and winter slid in—pure, thin, unowned. It knifed across my bruises, and I almost wept with the honesty of it. The day outside was an iron plate, the sky hammered flat by cold. But it was a sky. A thing no man had taught to kneel. I eased the hatch back until a triangle of day stared down. The wind licked my cheeks. Roofslate met my hand, rough as truth. I did not push farther. Not yet. The house below me shifted, aware; a long, almost curious shudder moved through the beams. He was not here, not in this throat of the house. Good. Or terrible. Absence can be a trap if you greet it like mercy.
I rested my forehead against the wood and closed my eyes. The questions circled. How does he know? How long until night? How much of me is left that is not what he's written? And then—so faint it felt imagined—another breath found me, carried by the opening: air shaped by distance, pine, and something colder than either. A presence, patient as snowfall. Not close. Not at the door. Somewhere outside the fence of the world that Elias believes ends at his gates.
I breathed it in. My heartbeat slowed—not calmed, exactly, but focused. A clarity arrived that had no heat in it, the kind I had seen in Vladimir's eyes: a readiness to act or not act, to speak or stay silent, not because permission had been granted, but because choice existed. I lowered the hatch until only a thread of air could pass, then climbed down and set the knife carefully on the sill of the hidden door, where I could find it again if the house demanded a price to leave. I slid the wardrobe back into place. Dust settled, erasing the line my body had drawn through it.
The house exhaled. A floor beneath me, a door opened. Elias's footfall entered the western wing. The day drew itself tight, like skin over bone. My hands forgot their shaking. I stood in the narrow passage with the concealed hatch behind me and the long throat of the hall before me, and I thought, with a courage that felt borrowed from the cold: You may command this house. But you do not command the sky. And I have learned where it touches your roof. By the time night fell again, exhaustion had wrapped itself around me like a second skin. My body begged for rest, but my mind refused to obey. I lay down anyway, because resistance has its own kind of fatigue. The sheets felt colder than they should have, as though they remembered what had happened in them.
The ceiling above me was veined with cracks that the lamplight turned into thin rivers of shadow. I traced them with my eyes until they blurred, until they became maps of places that did not exist—places where the air did not smell of wax and smoke and him. The house had gone quiet again. That heavy, quiet listening—the kind that feels less like absence and more like attention. I could feel it settle over me, its breath aligning with mine. When I finally closed my eyes, I thought I might drift. But sleep does not come gently here. It arrives like a memory.
And suddenly, I was back in the conservatory. The air was too sweet, a cloying perfume of wilted petals and rot beneath glass. The candles had burned low, whispering to the frost on the windows. The roses on the trellis bled color that dripped into snow, staining it pink like a wound refusing to close. And behind me—his voice."Do you still think silence protects you?" The words curled around my throat like smoke. The wax fell again, slow as confession, each drop punctuating the question he didn't need me to answer. My skin flinched in the dream the way it had in life. I could smell him—lavender and iron, the fragrance of both sanctuary and violence.
I turned. He wasn't there. Only the suggestion of him—the shadow of a man's outline against the frost-glazed glass. Indistinct. Watching. Waiting. For a moment, I thought it was Elias, but the shape was too still, too patient, too quiet. The flame nearest to it guttered and stretched, bending toward the darkness as if drawn by recognition. And in that blurred reflection, for one trembling heartbeat, I thought I saw his eyes. Not golden like candlelight, but pale, distant, like the sky just before snow.
Then the shadow was gone, and I was left with the sound of dripping wax, steady as a heartbeat. I woke—or thought I did—to find the room unchanged, the window a dull silver mirror. A single candle had burned itself down to the socket. Its wax trailed along the floor in thin veins that almost formed a word before vanishing into shadow.
"Vladimir?" I called. The name slipped out before thought, soft and trembling, as though spoken by someone else wearing my voice. No answer. Only the sound of wax cracking—sharp, deliberate, like the spine of something breaking in the dark. Then came laughter, low and close. Elias's laughter. The kind that didn't need a mouth to exist. It rippled through the air as if he had been standing beside me all along, waiting for me to speak the wrong name.
I woke with my hand pressed hard over my mouth to keep the scream from escaping. The lamp had died sometime in the night, leaving the room bathed in the brittle light of the moon. Frost veiled the windowpane in white lace; the air was so cold that each breath felt like swallowing glass. My body trembled uncontrollably. The ache returned—raw, recent, and utterly familiar. But the truth was, it had never left. It lingered beneath the surface of everything, pulsing faintly like a hidden ember. The marks along my collarbone burned in phantom rhythm, and I realized I had been clutching the sheets too tightly; the fabric tore where my nails had caught.
I rose on unsteady legs and crossed the room. The silence followed me like a shadow. The boards creaked beneath my weight, long sighs rising from the house's spine. When I reached the window, I stopped breathing. The roses were still there. Closer now—or perhaps the snow had risen around them, swallowing the earth until the blossoms seemed to float above the white. Their petals glowed under the moonlight, red as breath, alive as defiance. Each one shimmered faintly, as though lit from within.
I pressed my fingertips to the glass. The cold was a bit deep, but I didn't pull away. Frost bloomed beneath my touch, delicate silver veins spreading outward until my reflection was overgrown with ice. My face fractured in it—splintered into a dozen pale ghosts that stared back. "Are you there?" I whispered, the question barely forming before the air stole it away. The world on the other side of the glass did not move. Only the roses swayed, subtle as breathing, as if some invisible presence stirred them.
For a heartbeat, I thought I saw something—something tall, distant, and dark standing beyond the drift, motionless beneath the weight of the night. The outline was faint, almost imagined, but the feeling it carried was unmistakable: that measured stillness, that patience that could wait a lifetime. The wind rose suddenly, weaving through the eaves and over the chimney stacks, and in its voice I heard my name—not shouted, not spoken, but exhaled, the way ghosts might whisper to the living. "Evangelina…"
My breath caught. I closed my eyes, pressing my palm harder against the glass as if I could reach through it, as if the frost might open like a door. When I opened them again, the shadow was gone. Only the wind remained, carrying the last threads of my name across the frozen courtyard. I stood there for a long time, watching the roses tremble but never bow, the snow gathering around their roots like folded hands. Somewhere deep inside me, something ached toward them—a pull both terrified and grateful.
The house behind me groaned softly, as though shifting in its sleep. A floorboard settled. A hinge sighed. And beneath it all, I could almost hear another sound—footsteps, faint but certain, climbing through the silence. I wanted to call him again. To whisper Vladimir into the dark and trust the night to deliver it faithfully, the way a prayer finds its god. But what if Elias heard instead? What if he was already listening—his ear pressed to every wall, his shadow folded into every breath I took? So I stayed silent.
I leaned my forehead against the glass and let my eyes close. The cold there was clean, almost kind. The frost hummed softly beneath my breath, as if it understood restraint. The roses outside did not fade. Their red glowed stubbornly through the blur of ice, like small hearts refusing to die. And for the first time all day, I let my tears fall—not from pain, but from the unbearable weight of wanting something gentle in a world that knows only restraint. They slid down my cheeks, fragile and slow, until the air claimed them; they froze before they reached the sill, tiny glass relics of a wish too soft to live here.
I turned from the window and lay back on the bed. My body still hurt, but it was a familiar kind of ache now—a rhythm I could live beside. The pillow accepted me without question.
The house groaned once, settling—a sound between a sigh and a secret. Somewhere below, a door shut softly, as though someone had just left.
"Stay," I whispered to the empty room. "Please… stay near." The silence didn't promise, but it didn't deny. And so I let the night have me. His steps came on, measured, inevitable. The light through the frost-shocked glass sharpened to a blade. My body hurt in all its mapped places, the pearls of wax hard against my skin. The corridor tasted of iron and old saints. I did not pray. I listened to the approach, to the draft from the hatch, to the single word still ringing itself into meaning again: Mine. Not his.
The day would end; night would come; the dream would return and build new rooms in my head. But there was a seam in the house now, however narrow, where winter breathed. And somewhere beyond the hedges, beyond the frost-preserved signatures, a man moved like a rumor the snow had decided to keep. Whether he knew my name or only the shape of my fear did not matter yet.
What mattered was that the sky existed, and between the sky and the roof there was a hinge. Elias turned the corner.
And I finally stood.