The air in the residential wing was thick—a suffocating blend of lemon floor wax, heavy velvet drapes, and secrets that had been buried so deep they had begun to rot. Runa moved through the shadows like a ghost, her bare feet silent on the cold marble, a stark contrast to the thunderous echo of the day's violence still looping in her mind.
She couldn't sleep. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Eli—not the lethal marksman who had dismantled men in an alley, but the version of Eli emerging from Roman's study. Bloodied. Hollowed out. Stripped of dignity to pay for a mistake she hadn't made. The image branded itself into Runa's mind, a warning.
She reached Eli's door. It wasn't locked. In the Vales' twisted, pragmatic logic, Eli was currently too broken to be a flight risk—a weapon temporarily decommissioned, waiting for the next time someone dared to pull a trigger.
Runa slipped inside. The room was dark, smelling of antiseptic and iron. Eli sat on the edge of her bed, still in her tattered, blood-stained shirt, staring at the far wall with a thousand-yard stare that seemed to reach into a void Runa couldn't see. The bowl of warm water and medicine Aurora had left sat untouched, steam long gone, the room chilling around her.
"Eli?" Runa whispered.
Eli didn't flinch. She didn't even turn her head; only her voice moved, like dry leaves skittering over concrete. "Go back to your room, Runa. You're breaking protocol."
"To hell with protocol," Runa said, her voice trembling but resolute.
She sat beside her, the mattress barely dipping under her weight. Runa took the cloth from the bowl, wringing it out with hands that had finally stopped shaking. She had spent her life baking bread and balancing ledgers—simple, honest work—but this, tending a wound in the dark, felt sacred.
"What can I do? How can I help you?"
At first, Eli didn't answer. She sat so still she seemed carved from granite, her body a monument to discipline and restraint. Then a violent, jagged shudder ran through her—a tectonic quake in someone never supposed to break. Her jaw tightened, knuckles white, one hand clenching the edge of the mattress.
"We don't have choices," she rasped. "Not really. We just think we do. We fight for an hour, or a dream, or a person... but the house always wins. The choices we think we make... they're just what the cage allows us to see."
"I'm sorry," Runa whispered. "I called you a bird in a cage once. I didn't realize you were holding the bars so the rest of us wouldn't be crushed."
Eli opened her one good eye, scanning Runa with a weariness that seemed to stretch decades. For a moment, the lethal soldier vanished; all that remained was a girl exhausted from carrying the weight of the world.
"Don't be sorry. Just., I guess Survive. That's the only way anyone wins in this house. You stay alive until the game changes."
Runa finished cleaning her wounds in silence. The intimacy of the act—no orders, no surveillance—felt heavier than any contract her father had ever signed. When she finally returned to her room, the echo of Eli's words trailed her like smoke.
She looked at the wedding dress draped over the velvet chair—a mountain of white silk, hand-stitched lace. It no longer looked like a gown. It was a silken spiderweb, trapping her in its threads. Her fate was stitched into the Vale tapestry, tied irrevocably to Althea—a woman who examined her like a specimen, never a person.
Althea didn't love her; she barely liked her. Runa was a duty, a symbol of a debt settled. Was she destined to be a hollow shell like Aurora or a frozen statue like Althea?
And Eli had been right: power wasn't just getting what you want—it was endurance. If Runa couldn't run from the cage, she had to become the girl who picked the locks from inside.
Runa lingered in the dark, moonlight dancing across the white silk. For the first time, she wasn't waiting to be rescued. She was waiting for a crack, a flaw, an opening.
Later
Eli leaned against the wall, knees drawn up, staring at the empty space in front of her. Pain throbbed in her jaw, her temple, her ribs—a constellation of hurt mapping her body. Her hands shook, not from weakness, but from the tension of years of suppressed rage and discipline finally unspooling. She could feel every moment of control that had been stripped from her, every second she had endured for the sake of family, every beat she had sacrificed for duty.
Anger surged, raw and molten, but it was a controlled flame. She didn't scream. She didn't lash out. She folded it, layer by layer, into a cold, sharp edge, the kind that could cut through enemies—or kin—if needed. Guilt followed it, a silent shadow whispering that this, too, was her failure. She had protected Toni, kept her from harm—but at what cost? Every act of defiance came with a tally in blood.
Eli closed her eyes, grinding her teeth against the mix of pain, rage, and guilt. She felt human again for a moment—not the cold, perfect weapon Runa saw—but vulnerable. And that vulnerability was both poison and fuel.
Her chest heaved. The taste of iron lingered on her tongue. She could almost forgive herself for weakness—but the house would never forgive her. And if she did not forgive herself, no one would.
The gravity of the previous night's violence settled over the estate like a thick, suffocating fog. Althea's instructions had been brief and final: Do not ask.
Runa was now tethered to Althea's side with a short, invisible leash. She sat beside her during breakfast, accompanied her to high-level strategy meetings in soundproofed rooms, and was forced to linger in the background of phone calls that dealt in numbers and Runa couldn't fathom.
"Safety," Althea called it, her voice as smooth and cold as a marble countertop.
Control, Runa felt. It was a collar tightening around her throat—one made of silk and diamonds, but a collar nonetheless.
The sanctuary Runa had found in Toni had been systematically dismantled. Althea made sure of it. Their time together, once filled with whispered dreams and shared rebellion, was now reduced to mere fragments. Conversations were interrupted by "errands" or sudden security checks. The shared laughter that had once briefly lit up the hallways was replaced by a stiff, polite distance. Even a stolen glance felt observed, weighed, and judged by the ever-present guards. The Vales were isolating her, cutting off the only heart she had found in the morgue.
And though Toni had forgiven her—at least in the quiet way Runa could see in her eyes during fleeting moments—there was no chance to speak. No hallway long enough, no library shadow deep enough, no room private enough to bridge the distance. The silence stretched between them like a canyon. Forgiveness existed only in glances, in the brief softening of Toni's lips, in a hand that almost reached for hers before a guard or an errand pulled her away. The connection was real—but impossibly fragile, tethered to moments too short to matter
Eli, however, was the one who truly carried the physical weight of the new regime.
She was still healing. Her arm was locked in a reinforced cast, and the bruises on her face were transitionary—shifting from deep, violent purples to sickly, fading yellows. One eye remained shadowed by persistent swelling, and her movements were labored, betrayed by a pain she refused to acknowledge. Yet, her presence never faltered. She remained the silent sentinel, her gaze even sharper and more lethal since the "discipline" she had endured.
The tension finally snapped two nights later.
Roman had announced that the Vasquez family would be arriving shortly. "Everyone is to be present," he had boomed. "And everyone is to be perfect."
Shortly after the announcement, Jason cornered Eli in a dimly lit corridor near the armory. It was the kind of silence that carried a physical threat, the air thick with the scent of floor wax and the metallic tang of oiled weapons.
"You should learn your place, little sister," Jason said, stepping into her path and forcing her to stop. "You embarrassed me in front of the collateral. You embarrassed the family."
"You know that she'll eventually Be Family,shes marrying Althea. so stop harassing her, better yet stop trying to get close to her" Eli didn't slow her breathing. She didn't even look at him. She stood like a statue, ignoring the man who had nearly cost her her life.
"You think you're untouchable because you're the family's favorite weapon," Jason continued, his voice dropping to a low, oily hiss. "But you're not Althea. Father doesn't trust you with the business—not like he trusts us." He stepped closer, his smile sharpening into something jagged and cruel. "In this family, Elizabeth, you're expendable. A tool to be used until it's too blunt to be effective. And you're looking very blunt lately."
Eli finally looked at him. Her one good eye was a piercing, electric blue that seemed to cut through the shadows. Her voice was a low vibration, steady and devoid of fear.
"I won't let what happened to Amy happen again."
Jason froze. For a single, fleeting second, the mask of the arrogant prince slipped, revealing something hollow and panicked underneath. The sneer vanished, replaced by a raw, jagged fear.
Then the mask slammed back into place. "Careful," he whispered, leaning in until his breath was cold against her ear. "People who talk about the dead tend to join them."
He shoved past her, his shoulder clipping her injured arm with deliberate force. Eli didn't make a sound, but her face went ashen, her fingers curling into a tight, trembling fist.
Runa, standing in the shadows just beyond the turn of the corridor, felt her breath hitch.
Amy. The name echoed in her mind—a ghost she hadn't known lived within these walls. It was a name that made Jason Vale look like he had seen his own executioner.
Runa realized then that the blood on Eli's knuckles and the bruises on her face weren't just about the escape attempt or Toni's audition. They were about a history of failures—and a girl named Amy who hadn't survived the Vales.