The door had made no sound. One moment Aurelia was adrift in the gray haze of her regret, and the next, a voice cleaved through the silence.
"You didn't eat the pie."
Her head snapped up, violet eyes wide with shock.
Calvus was simply there, inside her beautiful prison, having slipped through the door like a shadow given form. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic bird in a cage.
His gaze, however, did not linger on her face. It swept the room with predatory efficiency and landed on the two empty wooden bowls on the floor beside her. The pie sat pristine and ignored on its porcelain plate.
A stillness, more dangerous than any outburst, settled over him. Without a word to her, he turned and strode from the room, his footsteps echoing down the corridor with a grim, purposeful rhythm.
He went straight to the small servants' parlor near the kitchen hearth. Amora was there, as he knew she would be, seated on a low stool too close to the fire. She stared into the flames, her expression distant, caught in a private reverie.
A useless, poetic thought circled in her mind: How strange that a fire can warm you and still burn you. It was a metaphor she was turning over, thinking of Calvus—of the heat of her feelings for him and the certain destruction they promised.
She didn't hear Calvus approach until his shadow fell over her, blotting out the fire's light. She flinched, looking up into his impassive face.
"Who," he asked, his voice devoid of all warmth, "delivered food to my prisoner?"
The question was a trapdoor opening beneath her feet. The fire's warmth vanished, replaced by an instant, icy dread.
"Your prisoner? It wasn't me. Why would I feed her?" she lied, forcing a brittle laugh.
"I know you." His voice dropped to a deadly whisper. "Whore. I know you." She could see the fury tightening the skin around his eyes, the promise of violence in the set of his jaw. He looked like he wanted to peel the truth from her flesh.
"Yes. You know me, but are you sure you know every inch of my skin," she said, her voice softening into a dangerous purr.
Amora rose slowly, a calculated grace in her movement. Her hand lifted, not in haste, but with a deliberate, almost reverent slowness. Her fingertips, pale against the dark wool of his tunic, began at the strong line of his collarbone.
She brushed downward, a faint whisper of contact over the finely woven fabric. Her touch traced the unyielding plane of his chest, following the path of a silver fastening. It was not a caress of passion, but one of profound assertion—a silent, daring claim to territory that was not hers.
"We should—" she began, her voice a low murmur meant for him alone.
But the sentence died in the air. Her fingers had scarcely passed his sternum when his own hand shot up, a blur of motion, and seized her wrist in a crushing grip, halting her progress entirely.
"I should do what?" he snarled.
The intimate, brushing touch was now imprisoned in his fist, its intended meaning twisted into an act of insolence.
The connection was broken, replaced by the brutal clarity of his restraint.
Calvus's grip on her wrist was a band of iron, his eyes twin chips of frost.
"You're endangering yourself," he said, his voice low and lethal. "I will not take a minute to end you. Do not mistake my patience for value."
Amora did not pull away.
Instead, she leaned into the pain, her gaze searching his face for any crack, any memory. "Calvus," she whispered, the name she used for the boy he once was, a private talisman. "I have always been with you. Through the blood and the silence. I have loved you. Aurelia is your past...a fantasy. She is nothing compared to the history we share. To the flesh and blood I have offered you."
For a fleeting second, something flickered in his eyes—not warmth, but the shadow of a shared, grimy past. It was gone in an instant, snuffed out by a colder, more present contempt.
"Amora," he said, and her name in his mouth was a dismissal. "You forget your place. You are a companion I purchased. A convenience. Nothing more. Now, you will go to that room. You will collect every bowl, every crumb of the sustenance you stole for her. You will bring them to me."
"Do you even know what you're holding in that pink cage?" she breathed, her eyes wide with faux-concern. "She carries King Tenebrarum's child. You are starving a king's heir. Is that a game you are ready to win?"
"You think you possess information?" he murmured, his grip tightening until her bones creaked.
"I have always known. That child changes nothing. It only makes her more mine." he said, his voice returning to its whip-crack command, "You do not deserve to be spoken to. You deserve to be used, climbed on every night, screaming like a cheap goat."
"Now go. Get. The. Bowls."
The finality in his tone was absolute. The arrow she had shot had not only missed, but had shown him her entire quiver. The fight drained from her.
The seductive curve of her spine straightened into a line of defeat. The fire that had warmed her was now just a source of light, exposing her utterly.
A ragged sigh escaped her, a hollow surrender. She wanted to scream, to refuse, to make him see her. But she couldn't.
His will was the only gravity pull in the room.
Without another word, she turned. Her walk to Aurelia's prison was not a stroll, but a trudge.
Each step away from him felt like a step into obscurity. She had gone from a woman brushing his chest to an errand girl, sent to clean up the evidence of her own pathetic charity.
The door to the gilded room lay ahead, but it was her own cell that seemed to close around her.
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To be continued...