"I love it when they beg."
The voice was garbled and distant, as if it had pierced through the surface of a deep lake that Eliza was currently drowning in, even when its source was sitting directly across from her at the ritual table. Eliza to the right, Seraphine to the left, and Lucien centered. Always.
And Lucien's magic gripping her mind like a vice, most of the time.
But not tonight. Not fully.
Eliza stared forward, her face impassive as the horror at what she had just been a part of softly stabbed at the secret corners of her mind — the ones too far for him to reach anymore. The ones she had carefully cultivated during her eight years at Chateau de la Nuit.
"Now, now, Seraphine," Aristide chided from behind with a cold amusement. He crossed the chamber to his seat at the head of the table opposite of his son. "There is no artistry in desperation. The begging is merely a symptom. It is the breaking that matters. Hope," he mused, "is the most exquisite thing to remove from a person."
Seraphine's laugh was like the scrape of a blade across porcelain — pretty and wrong. The sound was no longer warped, but sharp and clear. It was a clarity Eliza hadn't experienced in years.
"And she broke beautifully, didn't she?" Seraphine purred. She turned to face Eliza, a mocking smile cutting across her face. "I like it when the light leaves their eyes, don't you?"
Eliza stayed silent, guarding herself with the blank face she had learned to wear like a second skin.
Seraphine's smile sharpened around the edges. "All of this for you, and you have nothing to say?" She tilted her head and studied Eliza the way a cat studies something small and cornered.
"Leave her." Lucien's voice cut across the chamber like a knife through silk — quiet and absolute.
Seraphine held Eliza's gaze for a moment longer, as if to make it clear that she was choosing to obey rather than being compelled to. "As you wish, my lord."
Eliza felt Lucien's hand before she heard him move. His fingers found her jaw with a practiced tenderness that turned her stomach, tilting her face toward his as though she were a portrait he was adjusting on a wall. "You did well tonight," he murmured, his dark, ocean eyes searching hers for something she refused to give him. "I'm proud of you."
Proud.
The word landed like a stone at the bottom of the lake. She met his gaze and kept her expression as still as winter glass. There had been a time — before she understood what he was, what she was, what all of this meant — when his approval had meant something to her. When she had confused his attention for affection, his obsession for devotion.
That girl felt very far away now.
She mourned her sometimes, in the small hours of the night when the castle settled and groaned and she was left alone with what remained of herself.
"Thank you," she said. Because it was what he wanted to hear.
Lucien released her chin and looked down at what remained on the ritual table with an expression of quiet satisfaction, the way a man might regard a particularly fine piece of craftsmanship. "You feel it, don't you?" he said softly. "The power. How much stronger you are now than you were an hour ago."
And she did feel it. That was the worst part — the way the power hummed beneath her skin like a second heartbeat, warm and terrible and wholly indifferent to what it had cost. Her gift did not mourn what it consumed. It simply grew.
She said nothing, just stared ahead, her eyes glazed.
"It's futile, Lucien," Cassius said from beside her. "Can't you see that?"
A long pause settled over the table. Eliza felt the air shift around them, the way even the candlelight seemed to hold its breath.
"Mind yourself," Lucien said, his voice carrying the softness of a man who had never needed to raise his voice to be dangerous.
"I only mean —"
"I know what you mean." Lucien reached for the goblet in front of him with a steady hand and turned it slowly between his fingers. "You think she is somewhere else. That what you see in her eyes is absence." He set the goblet down. "It isn't."
Eliza held her breath, hoping against hope that Lucien could not sense her slipping past his grasp.
Cassius said nothing, but his eyes shifted toward Aristide expectantly.
"She is here," Lucien continued, his gaze sliding to Eliza with the patient hunger she had grown used to. "She is always here. She simply hasn't decided to come back to us yet." The corner of his mouth curled, but barely. "She will."
The fire in the hearth crackled and spat. Somewhere deep in the castle, a clock was marking the hour.
"I know how we can help her," Aristide said finally, locking eyes with Lucien from across the table with a look that dared him to refuse. "Lucien, my son, why don't you remind us of the night you so graciously liberated your wife from the savages who denied her her birthright."
Seraphine squealed in delight.
Eliza's jaw tightened.
Cassius shifted in his seat but said nothing further. Whatever objection had briefly surfaced in him had retreated back beneath the waterline, swallowed whole by a single look from Aristide. Eliza had watched men do that for years — shrink themselves down to fit inside the space Aristide allowed them. It was one of the first things she had learned about the Nox family. They did not need to break everyone in the room. They only needed to break one person at a time, and let the rest draw their own conclusions.
Lucien was quiet for a moment. He looked at his father from across the length of the table, and something passed between them that Eliza could not name — not disagreement, exactly, but the ghost of one.
"She was quite smitten with you, was she not?" Aristide prodded.
"But didn't she have a boyfriend?" Seraphine chimed in, turning toward Aristide with a wicked grin. "The human boy. What was his name?"
Eliza's pulse quickened.
Jack.
The candles surged and flickered, but if anyone noticed, they didn't seem concerned.
Aristide smirked at Seraphine as she continued to speak, dark-throated and sweet. "That's right," she said. "His name was Jack. Adorable, ordinary, completely useless Jack."
The candles surged again.
Eliza pressed her nails into her palm beneath the table. She could not afford to lose control. Not here. Not yet.
"He begged, didn't he?" Seraphine continued, turning the memory over the way one turns a knife in the light to admire its edge. "When they brought him out. He begged and begged and —"
"He fought first," Cassius said quietly.
A beat of silence.
"He did," Aristide allowed with the mild approval one might extend to a dog that had learned a new trick. "I'll give him that. For a human. Completely outmatched, of course, but there was something almost —"
"He called out for her," Seraphine said, and her smile turned sweetly vicious as her eyes cut to Eliza. "Even at the end. He was still calling her name."
The flames on every candle in the chamber shot upward simultaneously. Several snuffed out entirely, plunging the corners of the room into shadow.
Lucien glanced at the candles, then at Eliza.
"Elizabeth," he said with an undercurrent of awe and desire.
She said nothing. She was somewhere far beneath the surface of herself, in a place where the water was very dark and very cold, and she was pressing both hands against a door she had spent eight years learning to keep shut.
Jack's voice. She could still hear it, sometimes, in the space between sleeping and waking. The way he had said her name — not like a possession, not like a piece on a board to be moved and managed — but like she was the only thing in the room worth looking at.
"And her parents," Aristide continued, folding his hands on the table and narrowing his eyes at Eliza. "The hunters. Now they put up a fight."
"Her mother," Cassius said, almost to himself.
"Her mother," Aristide confirmed, nodding slowly. "Remarkable woman, really. Completely outgunned, of course. But she kept fighting long after she had any reasonable cause for hope." He paused. "She was still reaching for the girl when —"
The table cracked down the center.
The sound was sharp and clean, like a bone snapping, and every person in the chamber went very still.
Eliza was standing.
She did not remember rising from her chair.
The power was no longer humming. It was roaring — white and furious — tearing through the careful seams she had stitched herself into over years of captivity, ripping past every layer of compliance and performance and deliberate, studied blankness. It poured out of her like floodwater through a broken dam and she felt, for the first time in eight years, completely and terrifyingly herself. Lucien rose from his chair.
"Elizabeth —" The windows exploded outward. The fire in the hearth went wild, twisting toward the ceiling in a column of white-gold flame before extinguishing itself entirely, throwing the chamber into chaos. Candlesticks toppled. The goblets on the table flew backward. Seraphine screamed — a real one this time, stripped entirely of its theater — and threw herself sideways off her chair.
Eliza turned toward the door.
"Stop her." Aristide's voice, commanding and cold, cut through the darkness. She felt Lucien's magic reach for her — the familiar, horrible sensation of fingers closing around the inside of her skull — and for one terrible half-second it found purchase. She staggered.
No.
She grabbed hold of the power still coursing through her and turned it inward, driving it against his grip the way you drive a wedge into a split piece of wood, and she felt the moment his hold cracked. Not broke — cracked. But it was enough.
She ran.
Through the corridor, down the servants' staircase, her power blazing ahead of her like a torch and clearing the way — doors flying open before she reached them, guards thrown sideways before they could reach her, every lock yielding without being touched. Behind her, distantly, she heard Lucien's voice — not commanding this time, not cold — just her name, called into the dark with something raw underneath it that she refused to let herself hear.
She did not stop.
She did not look back.
The front gates of Chateau de la Nuit came apart at the hinges as she hit the open air, and then there was nothing but the night around her — cold and enormous and indifferent — and the road stretching ahead, and the first real breath she had taken in eight years filling her lungs like something sacred.
She closed her eyes tight, imagining someplace familiar and safe and far away from Paris, and turned on her heel.
And then, she disappeared.