ELARA POV
"Take those off."
The woman said it without looking at me. She was already moving across the room, pulling open a large wardrobe on the far wall, her back straight, her steps quiet and practiced like she'd done this exact thing a hundred times before.
I stood in the middle of the room and didn't move.
"Excuse me?"
She turned around then. She was older. Sharp eyes, grey hair pulled back tight, expression that said she had zero patience for anything I was about to say. She held out a folded piece of fabric toward me.
"Your clothes. Take them off. You'll wear this now."
I looked at the fabric in her hands. It was dark. Almost black but not quite … more like the color of a sky right before a storm decides to really commit. And it looked soft. Too soft. The kind of soft that didn't feel right.
"What is that?"
"Shadow-silk," she said. Like that was a normal thing to say. "Standard dress for residents of the East Tower."
"I'm not a resident. I'm…"
"You're the vessel." She said it flat. No cruelty in it, no warmth either. Just fact. "And the vessel wears shadow-silk. So. Take those off."
I stood there for another second just … processing that. The vessel. Not Elara. Not even a name. Just the vessel. Already.
I took my clothes off.
The shadow-silk went on and I wished immediately that it hadn't. It wasn't cold the way fabric gets cold when it's been sitting in a room. It was cold the way skin is cold when something is wrong with the person wearing it. Like it had a temperature of its own. Like it was alive in some small, quiet way that I did not want to think about too hard.
It fit perfectly. That bothered me more than the cold did.
"Someone will bring food in an hour," the woman said, already moving toward the door. "Don't leave this room tonight."
"Wait…" I turned around. "Where are you going? Nobody's explained anything to me. I don't know where I am, I don't know what I'm supposed to…"
"Someone will come." She opened the door. "Tonight you stay here. Don't touch the walls on the left side of the hallway. Don't open any door that opens by itself. And don't…" she paused, hand on the frame, "…don't let the shadows touch you if you can help it."
She left.
I stood in the middle of the room in fabric that felt like cold skin and stared at the door she'd just walked out of.
Don't let the shadows touch you.
Cool. Great. Super helpful information. Thank you so much.
I sat down on the edge of the bed … which was large and black-framed and had too many pillows … and I pressed my hands together between my knees and I just sat there for a minute. Trying to get my head straight.
Sloane was free. That was the thing I kept coming back to. Whatever happened in this palace, whatever this silk felt like on my skin, whatever those shadows were doing on the walls … Sloane was free. That was the whole point. That was the reason I signed.
The door opened.
I stood up fast.
Silas walked in like he owned the room. Which he did. He owned the whole building. He stopped a few feet inside the door and looked at me … just a quick scan, head to toe, like he was checking something off a list … and then he looked away.
"Sit down," he said.
"I'm fine standing."
He looked back at me. One second of silence.
I sat down.
He moved to the window across from the bed and stood with his back to me, hands behind him, looking out at whatever the Spire looked out at this high up. The moonlight hit the side of his face. He looked carved out of something.
"The rules are simple," he said. "You stay in the East Tower. Your movement is limited to this floor and the garden on the east side. You don't go into the west wing. You don't go below the third level. You don't shift…"
"I can't shift," I said.
He paused. "What?"
"I'm an Omega. I've never shifted. I don't … I can't do it." I kept my voice even. "So that rule's not really necessary."
Something moved in his jaw. He turned back to the window. "You eat only what's brought to you. You don't interact with the other residents unless it's unavoidable. You don't speak about the contract to anyone inside these walls." He stopped. "Are those clear?"
"Crystal."
"Good."
He moved toward the door.
"That's it?" I said.
He stopped. Didn't turn around.
"You bring me here, put me in a room, give me a list of things I can't do … and that's the whole conversation?" I didn't know why I was pushing. I knew I should stop. "I don't get to ask anything? I don't get to know anything about how this is actually going to work?"
Silas turned around slowly.
The look on his face wasn't anger. It was something colder than that. More tired.
"You get to stay alive," he said. "In this palace, in this world, for what you are … that's more than most get. So no. You don't get to ask anything tonight." He held my eyes for one more second. "Sleep."
He walked out.
The door didn't slam. That was almost worse. It just … closed. Quiet and final.
I sat on the bed for a long time after that.
The room was big. High ceiling, black walls that weren't fully black … they had something in them, some kind of depth that made them look less like walls and more like the inside of something. Two tall windows with no curtains. A wardrobe, a desk, a chair by the fireplace that was lit but barely.
And shadows in the corners that I was trying very hard not to look at.
I lasted maybe forty minutes before I needed water.
There was none in the room. I checked the desk, the small table by the bed, the wardrobe for some reason … nothing. The woman had said food in an hour but that hour had not arrived yet and my mouth was dry and I was tired and I'd had the worst night of my entire life so I figured water was a reasonable thing to want.
I opened the door and looked into the hallway.
Long. Dark. Torches on the walls spaced too far apart so there were real gaps of dark between them. The left side of the hallway had a different quality to it … darker, the shadows there thicker somehow, sitting different than normal shadows should.
Don't touch the walls on the left side.
Right. I stayed right. Walked slow, kept close to the right wall, eyes forward. There had to be something at the end of the hall. A bathroom, a water basin, something.
I was halfway down when I felt it.
A cold that wasn't the silk. A cold coming from the left side of the hallway, moving toward me, and when I turned my head there was a shadow pulling away from the wall. Not drifting like the ones in the carriage. Moving. Coming toward me with a kind of intention that made every hair on my arms stand straight up.
It had a shape. Sort of. The suggestion of one … long and reaching, edges that didn't stay still.
It crossed the hallway floor toward my feet.
My heart slammed into my ribs.
And then something happened that I can't explain.
I didn't run. I didn't scream. I didn't even step back. Something just … rose up in me. Quiet and certain in a way that nothing in my life had ever been certain. I looked at the shadow coming toward me across the floor and I opened my mouth.
"Sit."
One word.
The shadow stopped.
Not slowed. Stopped. Dead still. Right there on the floor of the hallway, edges suddenly settled, that reaching quality gone completely.
I stared at it.
It stayed.
I don't know how long I stood there just looking at it. Long enough that my heartbeat went from panicked to just … confused. Long enough to realize my hand was shaking and I hadn't noticed.
The shadow didn't move again.
I walked backward all the way to my room, keeping my eyes on it, and when I got inside I shut the door and stood against it and tried to remember how breathing worked.
What was that.
What was that.
I pressed both hands flat against the door behind me and stared at the ceiling and tried to make sense of what just happened. The shadow stopped. Because I told it to. Because I said one word and it just … obeyed.
I was so stuck in my own head that I didn't think to look up.
I didn't see him until much later … didn't know until much later that he'd been standing on the balcony at the end of the hallway the whole time. Watching. Still as stone. That careful, measuring look on his face that I was already starting to hate.
Watching me tell a rogue shadow to sit.
Watching it listen.