Chapter 7 Chapter Seven

I didn’t go to him that night.

I lay rigid beside Ellis, staring at the canopy above our bed, replaying his words until they lost all shape. There are things in this house that want to take you from me. I won’t let that happen again. Again. Not “I won’t let that happen.” Again.

He’d said it like a man who had already lost someone once.

Malachir’s absence was its own kind of pressure, like a held breath in the walls. There were no whispers or heat curling against my skin. Just silence, thick enough to choke on, and the growing certainty that he was letting me settle in my own guilt on purpose.

Sleep never came. Instead, sometime past two, I heard a door, somewhere down the hall. A soft kind of sound someone makes when they don’t want to be heard closing it.

I slid out from under the sheets. Ellis didn’t stir, his breathing stayed slow and even... a bit too even, the way a person breathes when you know they’re pretending. I noted that but I said nothing, padding barefoot into the corridor.

The hallway was empty, but at the far end, near the locked east wing, a thin seam of candlelight bled out from beneath the door that was never supposed to open.

I crept closer, my heart a fist against my ribs. The chanting was back, it sounded like Ellis's voice or something wearing his shape. It was low and threading through a language I didn’t recognize but somehow understood anyway. Fragments surfaced like debris, bound, blood-price. she comes back wearing her.

"Wearing her?"

My stomach dropped.

Then, underneath it, a second voice. It sounded higher and pained. It was a woman’s voice, filled with exhaustion, like she had said the same words ten thousand times across ten thousand nights. “You promised it would end with me.”

I pressed my palm flat against the door, and the wood was warm, warm like something living, and for one dizzying second I swore I felt it push back against my hand like a pulse.

“Ruby.”

I spun. Mrs. Graves stood at the top of the stairwell, a candle in her grip, her face pale in the flicker. She didn’t scold me this time. She looked afraid for me, and that frightened me more than anything.

“Come away from there,” she breathed. “Now. Before he knows you heard.”

“Who’s in there? Whose voice..."

“That is not a conversation for these halls.” Her hand closed around my wrist, surprisingly strong for a woman her age, and she pulled me back down the corridor, glancing over her shoulder twice like something might be following. Only when we reached the stairs did she stop, chest heaving.

“Lady Eleanor stood exactly where you stood,” she whispered. “The night before she disappeared. I found her at that same door, and I told her the same thing I’m telling you.” She gripped both my hands now, her eyes wet. “This house does not let its wives go. It trades them.”

“Trades them for what?”

Mrs. Graves opened her mouth... and stopped. Down the hall, the east wing door had gone dark and silent. As if it had never glowed at all.

“Go back to bed, child,” she said instead, voice suddenly flat, like a shutter dropping over a window. “Forget what you heard for your own sake.”

She left me standing alone in the dark with no answers, only a new and colder fear coiled beside the old one.

Breakfast was unbearable in a different way than usual.

Ellis looked like he hadn’t slept at all, there were faint shadows beneath his eyes and a stiffness to his jaw that hadn’t been there yesterday. He didn’t mention the east wing and neither did I. We circled each other over eggs and coffee like two people defusing a bomb by pretending it wasn’t ticking.

Then Malachir returned, and he was furious.

“You went to the door,” he hissed, and his voice had lost its usual honeyed cruelty, it was jagged now. “You stupid, curious girl. Do you have any idea what you almost woke?”

"I’m sorry," I thought back at him, startled by his tone. "I just wanted..."

“You wanted answers you are not ready for.” A pause, and when he spoke again some of the silk had crept back in, though it sat wrong over the panic still humming underneath. “Stay away from that wing, Ruby. I mean it. Not as a game. Not tonight or any night, until I say otherwise.”

It was the first time he had ever told me no.

Across the table, Ellis set down his fork with unusual care. “You’re pale again,” he said. “Did you sleep?”

“Not particularly.” That much, at least, was true.

His grey eyes searched mine, and for one unguarded moment I saw something in them I hadn’t expected, not suspicion, but raw grief, quickly smothered. “Ruby, I need you to trust me on something, even if I can’t explain it yet. Whatever you hear in this house after dark, whatever voices... you cannot answer them. Do you understand me?”

The room went very still.

He knew.

The careful way he said voices, plural, like the word cost him something to speak aloud.

“Ellis...”

“Just promise me.” His hand closed over mine on the table, the first real warmth he’d offered me since our wedding night, urgent and trembling faintly at the edges. “Promise me you won’t answer him.”

Behind my ribs, Malachir’s laugh turned low and dangerous. “Let’s see whose promise you keep, little whore.”

And then, from the direction of the east wing, faint but unmistakable, a woman began to scream.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​