The entrance to the oubliette lay beneath the cathedral's altar — a hidden stair carved from bone and black salt. The passage was so narrow, Isadora had to turn sideways to slip through, the walls breathing against her shoulders like the lungs of some buried beast.
No light.
No sound.
Only the slow pull downward — a spiral into silence, where even memory lost its shape.
Each step she took was colder than the last. Time didn't pass here — it fractured. Shadows did not follow her; they led her. And the sword in her hand, the one taken from her mirrored self, pulsed with heat like a living thing.
She clutched it tighter.
If Lucien was still alive, he was somewhere below.
If the Devil had left a piece of him behind… she would find it.
Or burn with him.
---
At the bottom of the stairs, she found the Chains.
Not chains of iron or steel. These were made of regret.
Each link forged from one of Lucien's mistakes.
Each loop engraved with memories:
The night he left her behind at the river.
The letter he never sent.
The secret he kept about the man in the red coat.
The lie he told when he swore he wasn't afraid.
They slithered across the stone floor like serpents — winding up the walls, biting into the ceiling, suspending something in mid-air.
Lucien.
He hung like a marionette, wrists bound, feet inches above the floor, eyes closed but twitching with nightmares. His skin was pale, bruised, carved with symbols she couldn't read but felt in her blood — words that bled.
> "Lucien," she whispered.
His head snapped up.
Eyes wide. Wild.
> "No," he rasped. "No, you're not her. She wouldn't come here. She wouldn't —"
"You're another mask. Another test."
She dropped the blade.
It clanged like a scream in the silence.
Then she stepped closer and pressed her forehead against his chest — where his heartbeat fluttered like a bird trying to die quietly.
> "It's me," she said.
"You remember the sound I made the first time I laughed?"
"The way we hid from the storm in the hollow of the ruined chapel?"
"You swore the lightning bent away from me."
A beat.
Then another.
And then, his voice cracked.
> "You were the storm."
---
She raised her hands to the chains.
They recoiled.
Hissed.
Burned her palms open.
These weren't chains that could be broken by force — only by understanding.
Each link had to be faced.
Each wound had to be forgiven.
Not by her.
But by Lucien himself.
> "You can't save me," he whispered.
"I'm too tangled in the past."
> "Then let me bleed with you," she said.
"Until we drown the past together."
She touched the first chain.
It sizzled against her skin and spoke in her own voice:
> "You never came back. You never answered my letters. You ran."
Lucien flinched. Closed his eyes.
> "Because I was afraid," he whispered.
The chain shivered.
And shattered.
One link down.
---
They moved like that, link by link.
Pain by pain.
Each memory was a beast she forced him to look at, and when he did — not with pride, but with truth — the chains cracked.
One memory showed his infidelity — not of flesh, but of faith.
Another showed him standing at her grave, long after he'd believed she was gone, whispering prayers to a god neither of them had ever loved.
One memory burned worst of all.
Lucien turning from her in the Devil's court. Letting her go.
Letting the Devil claim her.
> "I thought I was protecting you," he said.
> "You were saving yourself," she replied.
"But I forgive you."
And that chain broke too.
---
When the final link crumbled, Lucien fell into her arms.
His skin was warm again.
His voice, hoarse but human.
They sat in the cold silence of the oubliette, wrapped in shadows and sweat, neither speaking for a long time. The blade at her feet pulsed. The broken chains scattered like dying snakes.
Then Lucien looked up at her, and for the first time since the beginning of all this, his eyes held something close to peace.
> "Why did you come back?" he asked.
Isadora pressed her mouth to his, slow and soft and aching.
> "Because I chose you," she said.
"Even after hell, I still choose you."
---
Far above them, the Devil stood at the altar.
Watching.
Smiling.
> "Let them have this moment," he whispered to the Red Veil, now folded on his throne.
"For when I take her womb, I want the child to know it was born of love."
End of Chapter Sixteen.