He did not rush. The unbinding was a dissection. The leather straps, cold and stiffened by the struggle, fell from her wrists and ankles with soft, final thuds onto the bedclothes. She did not look at him, did not acknowledge the fiery needles of returning blood. Her gaze was turned inward, fixed on the fresh and yawning absence where someone precious had been carved from the world. The freedom of her limbs was a hollow, mocking thing.
She scuttled backward, a crab-like retreat to the farthest edge of the massive bed, dragging the thin shift of her gown over herself. The distance between them stretched into a geography of silence.
It was then her eyes, blurred with unshed tears, found the drawing. It hung beside the fireplace, a stark accusation in the gloom. His work. He had posed her under the pretense of capturing beauty, but he had captured something else—her vulnerability, her exposed silhouette rendered not as form but as conquered territory. Every line was a claim. It was all still so horribly fresh.
"Henry?" The name was a scrap of sound, worn to nothing.
He watched her, a statue of patient observation.
"Did I… did I ever do something wrong?" The question was a child's whisper in the dark, soft enough to be swallowed by the fire's crackle.
He said nothing. He simply turned to face her fully, mirroring her position. Two monarchs on a barren plain of linen.
The dam within her, strained by terror and the ghost of grapes, broke.
"You," she began, the word both accusation and dirge. "I can still remember our wedding. You performed perfection for the crowd. Every smile was a stitch sewing my shroud. That day was the first page of my sorrows." A ragged breath sawed from her. "Do you remember our first dance? Your hand wasn't on my back—it was a brand. And our staged consummation… the witnesses listening at the door. I have hated every sun that rose since. And sometimes… sometimes it leads me to beg the question: was it me? Was there some flaw in my very soul that deserved this?" Her cries were not pretty; they were ugly, wrenching things that shook her frame. "Obviously, I was the one who was wrong. The whole time. I never… I never planned a life as a specimen in your collection of broken things."
Her confession spilled between them, a pool of anguish on the sheets. She had handed him the blueprint of her deepest shame—the fear that her own existence was the original sin. And he, across the vast expanse, absorbed it. His silence was not pity. It was curation. He was collecting this, too, another precious fragment of her ruin to archive and study.
"Why are you so cruel?"
The question fell into the silence, the raw, pulsing heart of her misery. Tears carved pale tracks through the remains of her dignity.
"Who built this devil in you, Henry?" she wept, the words dissolving into sobs torn from a place of irrevocable damage. "Tell me. I want to know everything. Because I am broken. You have broken me."
A terrible, yearning compulsion moved her. She crept across the vast bed, drawn to the source of her annihilation. She felt infinitesimal, a moth circling a star that burned with cold, black light. Her small hands, tremulous and chilled, rose to frame his face. The touch was a ghost of past tenderness, mapping the monument of his indifference. His skin was cool, unyielding marble.
"Tell me everything," she whispered, her breath a faint mist against his impassive mouth. "There must be a foundation. Even in the darkest tower, there must be a first stone. Tell me what forged you, so I might understand the tool that shattered me."
Her plea hung in the air, a fragile offering. She was begging for the blueprint of her own ruin.
"Two broken hearts can become whole," she whispered, a desperate, alchemical hope glowing in her tear-bright eyes. "You and me."
Henry's smile was a slender blade, cutting the sentiment. "My mother," he said, his voice a soft, chilling confide, "did not believe in mending. She believed in tempering." His hand closed around hers, a demonstration of grip. "To stand tall, she said, one must first learn to stand in blood."
His gaze grew distant, focused on a private gallery of horrors. "Her lessons were… tangible. I was seven. She gave me a live dove, its heart beating a frantic rhythm against my palms. 'This is vulnerability,' she cooed. Then she placed a paring knife in my other hand. 'This is resolution.' She guided my fingers, not to kill it quickly, but to pluck it, feather by feather, while it stared at me with black, knowing eyes. Then she showed me how to open its breast. 'Feel its last tremor,' she whispered into my ear. 'That is the pulse of a thing you now own.' I slept with that heart under my pillow until it turned to leather."
He paused, watching the revulsion twist Gisela's features.
"At ten, it was a hound puppy, loyal and licking. 'Affection is a weapon you must learn to hold by the blade,' she declared. For a month, I fed it, trained it, let it sleep at the foot of my bed. Then she took me to the kennels. 'Now, butcher it. Not for meat. For understanding.' She made me skin it myself. Slowly. With anatomical precision, teaching me the names of the muscles and tendons as I revealed them. 'See how its loyalty is just a series of strings?' she said, pointing to the nerves. 'You can cut them.'"
He leaned closer, the memory animating him with a ghastly warmth. "Sebastian… my half-brother… was not a lesson. He was my masterpiece. I was fourteen. He loved a little spotted mare, a foolish, gentle thing. My mother brought me to the stables at dawn. 'He finds his peace here,' she said. 'You must become the architect of his unrest.'"
Henry's eyes locked onto Gisela's, ensuring she saw every detail. "I didn't harm the boy. I had the mare led into the courtyard. I made him watch from his window as I took a hammer to its legs. Not to kill—to shatter. The sound was… instructive. Then I cut it open while it still breathed, and pulled forth the living foal it carried. It died in my hands, a wet, shuddering lump. I left them both in the straw for him to find. Sebastian didn't just leave court. He tried to take his own life that very night. He failed, of course. My mother said a living failure was a more enduring monument."
He released her hand, his point made. "You ask who built this devil? She didn't build. She sculpted. With live flesh and hot blood. I learned to love the purity of it—the absolute authority that comes from understanding a thing's every fragile component. There is no breaking here, Gisela. Only the serene, unmovable silence that comes after the last scream has faded." He brushed a tear from her cheek with his knuckle, a mockery of tenderness. "Your broken heart wants to mend mine? There is no heart here. There is only architecture. And you, my dear, are merely the latest occupant of a very dark room."
He stood, leaving her on the vast bed. The firelight guttered, casting the drawn, claiming lines of her portrait into sudden, dancing relief before it sank back into gloom. The taste of grape and salt lingered on her tongue, a sacrament now poisoned by understanding. The architecture enclosed her, sound and complete, and in its perfect silence, she finally heard the truth: she was not a prisoner in his dark tower. She was its final, living stone.