The darkness was total—a suffocating velvet that filled her eyes, her mouth, her lungs. Gisela moved through it, not walking but drifting, a phantom in a starless sea. Her amber eyes were glassy, reflecting nothing.
The hands that seized her were not hands, but hooks of frozen wire. They bit into the soft flesh of her upper arm and yanked. The world pivoted; the unseen floor rose to meet her ribs with a sickening, soundless crunch. Her jaw wrenched open in a perfect, agonized O, a scream clawing its way up her throat—only to be swallowed by the void the moment it left her tongue. The silence that followed was more violent than any sound.
"Who—?" The word was a shredded gasp. "Where—?"
Then, the faces. Hilda.
A kaleidoscope of memory,each fragment a razor: Hilda's smile, fractured. The frame of her eyeglasses, snapping. The moment her confiding whisper had curdled into a warning. The final, fixed stare, glazed with unspoken accusation. They flashed and swarmed, a silent, mocking gallery.
"Stop!" The plea was a papery rustle, lost in the crawlspace of the dark.
The figure—a man-shaped cutout of nothing—resumed its purpose. It dragged her, her nightgown rucking up, the skin of her legs scraping and burning on the rough, cold stone. There was no destination, only the terrible, endless process of being moved against her will.
It stopped. It let go. She lay in a heap, tears leaking into the abyss.
It turned. The absence where its face should be focused on her.
"Hilda?" Gisela whimpered.
The figure kindled from within. Not with light, but with a negative radiance, a black so profound it seemed to suck the very concept of sight from her eyes. Its outline smoldered and peeled away into ash that did not fall.
"We could have run." The voice was the sound of a grave settling, the grate of a slab. "When I told you to. When's I named the price. You chose the gilded cage. And I chose the cold earth." It drifted closer, the space around it growing bitterly cold. "My death was your first brick."
"No…"
"There are more." The voice was suddenly at her ear, inside her skull. "You will suffer, Gisela. You will learn the architecture of despair. Bolt. By. Bolt."
A hand of freezing cinders locked around her throat. It did not squeeze the air, but the soul, compressing the very will to scream into a tiny, black diamond of pure dread.
---
A sound tore through the chamber—a raw, strangled animal noise. It was her own voice.
Gisela's body arched off the bed as if still yanked by wires, a final, physical echo of the fall. Her eyes flew open, blind in the tangible darkness of her bedchamber. True air, cold and sharp, flooded her starving lungs in a ragged, sobbing gasp. The pressure on her neck remained, a ghost-cuff of pure terror.
She was upright, shuddering, the sweat of nightmare chilling instantly on her skin.
A shift in the darkness beside her. The precise, deliberate sound of a man settling onto the mattress.
Henry had not been sleeping. He had been waiting.
He did not immediately touch her. He allowed her a single, trembling moment to inhabit the vastness of her fear, to feel its borders. Then, his hand—dry and deliberate—came to rest between her shuddering shoulder blades. It was not a caress. It was a claim, a staking of ground.
"A dream," he stated into the darkness, his voice flat and final as a seal pressed into wax.
His other hand rose, his fingers threading into the sweat-damp hair at the nape of her neck. Not to comfort, but to orient, to steady her trembling for his inspection. He pulled her back, not into an embrace, but into the solid, unyielding plane of his chest. He was the wall against which her silent, post-nightmare convulsions beat themselves out.
He held her like that, a specimen pinned. The nightmare had been a phantom of loss and fire. This—his calculated, wakeful calm, his cold analysis of her terror—was the reality. It was the first true bolt.
Then, like a slow, cold tide, awareness returned.
The solid presence against which she trembled was not a refuge. It was the source.
The arms around her were not sheltering, but constricting—the living walls of the very architecture he had described. Her cheek was pressed not to a lover's chest, but to the unyielding stone of her jailer. Henry. The realization seeped into her veins, a paralyzing poison that stiffened her limbs mid-sob.
She did not jerk away. A violent recoil would be a confession—of knowledge, of blame, of a spirit not yet fully broken. Instead, she went perfectly still. Then, with a deliberate, weary slowness that spoke of utter defeat, she peeled herself from him. The movement was not an escape, but a retreat; not a rejection, but a surrender of a false comfort. She created a space of cold sheets between them, drawing her knees to her chest.
He had killed Hilda. Her tears were the intended irrigation for the barren ground he had made of her life.
He allowed the distance, watching as one might observe the settling of sediment in a glass. His expression held a detached, almost academic curiosity.
"How profound must the nightmare have been," he pondered aloud, his voice a low, smooth murmur in the dark, "to wring such exquisite sorrow from my little angel?" The term of endearment was a blade wrapped in velvet, its edge pressing just enough to draw blood beneath the skin.
Gisela's breathing evened, not from calm, but from a supreme act of containment. She raised a trembling hand and wiped at the tears on her face with a rough, inelegant swipe of her palm. The gesture eradicated the evidence, but not the sting.
"It was nothing," she whispered, the words hollow and dry as a bone. They were the required currency, the necessary lie to appease the warden. She remembered her place in the design. The title was ash in her mouth.
"…My lord."
Moving with the stiff, careful precision of a convalescent, she pushed back the covers and rose. The floor was mercilessly cold. She did not glance at him, focusing instead on the dim outline of the bathing chamber door. Each step she took was measured, a silent performance of composure for an audience of one. Her back was straight, but it felt as thin as parchment, vulnerable to the slightest pressure of his gaze.
As she shut the door behind her, the latch clicking with a terrifying finality, she was alone with the echo of the nightmare and the deeper horror of the waking world. In the silent, dark water of a waiting basin, she would see only the pale, haunted face of the latest occupant—a woman beginning to understand that the most terrifying rooms are not those we are dragged into, but those we learn to inhabit.