Chapter 5
I stiffened, every instinct screaming at me to pull my shift closed, to hide the map of my humiliations. Instead, I forced my chin up. "I gave back worse than I took. My cousin walks with a limp."
Julian’s eyes lifted to mine. The liquid mercury in them was molten now, stripped of all coldness. "You shouldn't have had to."
He dipped a linen rag into the spirits. "Brace yourself."
When he pressed the soaked cloth to the wound, my hand shot out automatically, my fingers clamping around his leather-clad bicep as a silent gasp tore from my throat. The burn was excruciating. Beneath my palm, his muscle was rock-hard, unflinching, anchoring me to the table.
He worked quickly, cleaning the black residue from the cut before threading the curved needle.
Every pass of the catgut pulled our faces inches closer. I could see the tiny scar splitting his left eyebrow, the dark fan of his lashes, the steady, rhythmic pulse beating in the hollow of his throat. He didn't treat me like a fragile lady who might faint at the sight of a needle; he stitched me the way a veteran commander stitched his most trusted lieutenant—with brisk efficiency and absolute respect.
"Why did you step in?" I asked quietly, focusing on the sting of the thread to distract myself from the heat radiating off his chest. "With the hounds. You said the weak ones break. If this is a test for your master, shouldn't you have let them tear me apart?"
Julian tied off the last stitch and snipped the thread with a small pair of iron shears. He didn't step back. His hands rested on the edge of the workbench on either side of my hips, caging me in—not to trap me, I realized, but because he was leaning heavily on his arms, sudden exhaustion carving deep lines around his mouth.
"The test is to measure your will, Lysandra, not how many teeth you can pull from your own throat at once," he murmured. "And I am tired."
"Tired of what?"
"Of burying girls who almost made it."
The confession hung between us, raw and bleeding.
I looked at the fresh cut on his cheek, where a bead of blood was still trickling down toward his jaw. Without thinking, I picked up a clean corner of the spirit-soaked rag with my good left hand and reached up.
Julian flinched—just a fraction of an inch—before freezing as I pressed the cloth against his cheekbone.
His breath hitched, warm against my wrist. He closed his eyes for a second, leaning almost imperceptibly into my palm, like a starving wolf finally offered a scrap of warmth after an endless winter.
"How many?" I whispered, dabbing the blood away from his skin. The stubble along his jaw rasped against my knuckles. "How many brides have you brought through that gate, Julian?"
His eyes opened. They were haunted, ancient, drowning in a grief so vast it seemed impossible for one man’s chest to hold it.
"Ninety-nine," he said softly.
My hand stilled against his face. "A hundred years of the treaty."
"Ninety-nine daughters traded like cattle by the Sunlit Realm to buy their fat lords another year of peace," Julian said, bitterness dripping from every syllable. "Some arrived already broken by the men who sired them. Some fought like demons in the Labyrinth, only to lose their nerve when the sanctuary doors opened. None of them were ever touched by a man within these walls, Lysandra. Not once. Whatever horrors your bards sing about... the Sovereign never laid a finger on their virtue."
My brow furrowed, my mind racing over the contradictions. The subterranean forge. The lack of servants. The missing bedchambers. Vera’s mended armor.
"Then what happens to them at midnight on the Blood Moon?" I pressed, my fingers curling slightly against his jaw, refusing to let him look away. "If he doesn't bed them, and he doesn't keep them as slaves... where are the ninety-nine women, Julian?"
A deep, resonant tremor rolled through the stone floor beneath us—the heartbeat of the fortress, louder here than anywhere else, sounding less like a forge now and more like a colossal, metallic lung drawing breath.
Julian’s hand came up, covering mine where it rested against his cheek. His palm was calloused, searingly hot, pressing my fingers tighter against his skin before he slowly lowered my hand back to my lap.
The iron mask was slipping back into place, though his breathing remained unsteady.
"They are here," he said, his voice echoing strangely off the racks of weapons. "Every single one of them. They never left."
A chill colder than the Shadow Realm’s mist crept up my spine. "You mean they're dead."
"I mean they are waiting for you." Julian stepped back, breaking the suffocating pull of his proximity, and tossed a clean linen bandage onto the table beside me. "Rest, Lady Lysandra. Bind your arm. Tomorrow, the Blood Moon rises, and there will be no more trials in the mist."
He walked toward the heavy oak door of the armory, pausing with his hand on the iron ring. He didn't look back, his broad shoulders rigid beneath his battered scale-mail.
"You fought well today," he said quietly. "Better than any who came before you. Truthfully... it terrifies me."
Before I could ask him why a castellan would fear a bride succeeding in her trial, he pulled the door shut, leaving me alone in the silver gloom with the scent of his woodsmoke on my fingers and the relentless, rhythmic *thud-clang* of the heartless fortress beating beneath my boots.
The red moon did not rise all at once.
It seeped into the sky like fresh blood into bathwater, staining the bruised twilight of the Shadow Realm an ominous, feverish scarlet. From the narrow slit of my chamber window, the jagged peaks of the mountains looked like blackened ribs jutting from an open wound.
Beneath the floor, the heartbeat of the Redoubt had quickened.
It wasn't an echo of forge hammers anymore. It was a wet, heavy, rhythmic surge—a titanic pulse that vibrated through the stones, through the legs of my iron cot, and straight into the marrow of my bones. Every five seconds, the basalt trembled.
*Thump-thud. Thump-thud.*
I sat on the edge of the cot, stripped down to my linen shift and breeches, a jar of gray nightshade paste resting between my knees. With deliberate, steady strokes of a bone spatula, I coated the slender needle-point dirk I had pried from the whalebone of my ruined corset.
The venom was thick, smelling faintly of bitter almonds and rot. A scratch would paralyze a warhorse within ten heartbeats. A puncture to the carotid would drown an ox in its own lungs.
I tested my right shoulder. The stitches Julian had set held firm, biting with a dull, manageable ache as I rotated the joint. He was good with needle and thread. Too good for a butcher’s castellan.
*Ninety-nine.*
The number had festered in my skull all night, keeping sleep at bay far more effectively than the throbbing in my arm. Ninety-nine women before me. Ninety-nine daughters sent across the border to appease an ancient male terror, only to vanish into this mountain of volcanic glass.
