Chapter One: The Mercy of a Nightmare
The transition was not a flash of light. It was the sound of a key turning in a lock—but the lock was in her head.
Seraphina's eyes snapped open.
Her first breath was a jagged, desperate thing that tasted of iron and rot. She scrambled backward, her heels catching on the heavy fabric of... silk? Her back hit a headboard of carved mahogany, not the weeping stone of the cathedral dungeon.
"My Lady! My Lady, you're awake!"
The voice was a scream in her ears. Seraphina didn't see the young maid, Marie, holding a tray of morning tea. She saw the executioner. She saw the shadow of the man in the dungeon door.
"Don't touch me!" Seraphina shrieked. The sound was raw, the vocal cords of a woman who had spent her final days screaming into silence.
She lunged from the bed, her legs tangling in the duvet. She hit the floor hard, crawling toward the corner of the room, her fingernails clawing at the expensive rug. To the maids, she looked like a madwoman. To Seraphina, she was trying to find a weapon—a shard of glass, a loose stone, anything.
"Get out! Get away from me!"
"My Lady, it's just us! It's Marie and Sarah!" The maid dropped the tray. The porcelain shattered—clatter-smash—and the sound sent Seraphina into a fresh panic.
The poison, her mind hissed. The wine. The Emperor is falling. They're coming for me.
"Back away!" Seraphina grabbed a fallen silver letter-opener from her bedside table, wielding it like a dagger. Her hair, once perfectly groomed, was a wild thicket around her pale, sweat-streaked face. Her eyes were wide, bloodshot, and darting. "If you step closer, I'll kill you! I won't go back! I won't let you lock the door!"
The maids fled. They didn't just leave; they ran, their footsteps echoing like hoofbeats in the hallway.
Seraphina was left alone in the sunlight of a room she hadn't seen in years. The sun was the worst part. It was the same golden light that had hit the sunflower field when she was sixteen. It was a lie.
She collapsed against the wall, the letter-opener still clutched in a white-knuckled grip. She stared at her wrists. The skin was smooth. The deep, purple gouges from the shackles were gone.
"It's not real," she whispered, her voice cracking. "It's just another torture. A dream before the end."
She stayed there for hours. The world outside her door tried to coax her out with honeyed words and familiar voices, but she didn't hear her servants or her father. She only heard the rattle of chains and the ghost of Killian's footsteps coming to watch her die.