Chapter 32 — POV: Lyra
Air. That was the first betrayal.
It was no longer mine.
The mask clung to my face, sealing me in with the sour stench of old fabric and rubber, each breath rebounding hot against my skin. My chest tightened as though I'd been locked inside a coffin still waiting to be lowered into the earth.
I tried to pull in a steady breath, but the air dragged slow and stale, laced with the ghost of chemicals still lodged in my throat. My lungs screamed for more — but the mask gave only enough to remind me I was not in control.
Control. That was the word echoing inside me now. Not theirs. Not mine. Just the weight of it, tilting the scale toward their hands with every second.
The chair hummed faintly beneath me, not mechanical, but alive with the echo of their movements. Someone shifted — the tall one — a soft scrape of boot against cement. Then silence. The silence wasn't relief. It was worse.
"Do you feel it?" the leader's voice slipped through the cloth, warped, as if coming from inside the mask itself. "That hunger in your lungs, that clawing for air? That's what ownership tastes like."
My hands twitched uselessly against the bite of plastic at my wrists. Zip ties. Precise, unyielding. No slack, no chance. My skin burned under their sharp edges, but I kept still. If I gave them the sound of struggle, they'd savor it.
"You mistake survival for power," the leader continued, his tone low, conversational, aristocratic in its arrogance. "You think because you've crawled out of fire before, you can keep crawling. But what happens when the fire no longer burns you? When it simply watches… and waits?"
Something cold traced the line of my jaw. A finger. Gloved. Moving slowly, deliberately, as if cataloging me — not with lust, but with possession. Like I was an artifact to be claimed, catalogued, locked away.
"You want him to come," he whispered, close enough that the mask's fabric fluttered with his breath. "You believe he will. You pray he will."
My throat worked against words that wouldn't rise.
The shorter one shuffled somewhere to my left — the squeak of rubber soles, uneven, betraying nerves. He was always watching, hesitant. And yet, when his shadow leaned close, I felt something sharper in it tonight.
The crack-mask. His breath near my temple again, steady, deliberate. He didn't speak — not once — but he didn't need to. He wanted me to know he was there.
"You'll be paraded tomorrow," the leader went on, voice silk over steel. "Not as queen. Not as victim. As proof."
The sound of metal lifted from the tray. A scalpel? No. The weight was heavier. Shears. The snip of them opening and closing cut through the silence, clean and merciless.
"Proof that power is not in bloodlines, not in crowns, not even in survival. Power…" the blades whispered as they shut near my ear, close enough for me to feel the rush of displaced air, "…is in leash and collar. Mask and silence."
A laugh, low and humorless, rippled through the cloth.
"You wear your arrogance like armor, Lyra," he murmured, savoring my name. "But what happens when the world only sees the mask we've chosen for you? What happens when your name is forgotten, and only ours remains?"
The mask pressed closer against my face as his hand lingered there, palm against the rough fabric. I couldn't see his eyes, but I felt them — burning holes through the void.
My heart thundered, each beat a war drum. Not fear. Rage. A kind of rage that tasted metallic, like blood at the back of my throat.
I forced my lips apart, voice ragged but laced with venom:
"You talk too much."
The silence that followed was exquisite. Heavy. Electric.
The leader didn't move. Didn't speak. But the air shifted, as though the room itself had tilted around my defiance.
Then — the laugh again. Softer this time, like something precious.
"You'll break beautifully," he said at last. "Even queens bow when the crown is carved into their skulls."
The shears clicked once more, sharper now, before being set back on the tray. The leader's hand left my mask, but not before dragging slow across the cheek, as though signing his name into my skin.
The tall one moved behind me. The shorter one stayed too close, his cracked mask angled just enough that I knew — he was studying every twitch of my breath, every fragment of resistance.
The leader's final words curved around me like a noose:
"Tomorrow, he'll watch you wear our silence."
The sound of a lock slid into place.
And then they left me — bound, masked, swallowed in the dark.
Not silence. Not safety. Just the waiting.
And the knowledge that arrogance cuts both ways.