POV: Alaric / Evelyne
ALARIC
Three days ago, the shadows in his chambers started answering when he spoke.
The words came out of him without intention. Small things at first. A name muttered under his breath while he dressed. A sentence fragment during meals that did not belong to any thought he recognized. Each time, the shadows along the far wall rippled in response, thin and dark and wrong, stretching to listen.
Between his shoulder blades, the itch had changed. What began as irritation the night he bled over the altar stones had become pressure, steady and deep and settled into his spine. It pulsed when the room went quiet, slower than his heartbeat.
House arrest should have been unbearable. Instead the weeks had passed in strange comfort. Good food, fine wine, servants who flinched when they came near him. He noticed the flinching but could not find the reason for it. The imperial guards posted at every exit answered to names his family had paid for years, and the palace was still too consumed with the aftermath to bother revisiting one nobleman's confinement.
Evelyne's network kept the reports flowing. Seraphina appeared in every one. The curse destroyed, the palace stabilized, a military disaster at Thornwall that left Duke Vorenthal presumed dead. Alaric read the reports and felt nothing about any of it.
Vorenthal had touched his wife, stolen her loyalty, humiliated him in front of every noble in the capital. The man's death should have brought satisfaction or relief or vindication.
He felt none of it. He tried to summon anger, tried to picture Vorenthal's hands on Seraphina, and felt his jaw clench once before it went flat again.
At the window, his reflection watched him from the glass. The reflection stared back with an expression that matched his own in every detail except one. The eyes were studying him. Not his eyes. Something behind them, looking out.
A whisper came from the corner behind his left shoulder, low and formless. He had been hearing them for days. They carried the same cold that had risen from the Wound of Othren when he bled over the altar in the Vault of Ash and Echo, the cold that pressed against his skull until his thoughts went quiet.
He turned from the window and caught his reflection a half second late. In that sliver of delay, black and purple veins crawled across the glass where his spine should have been, thick and forked and pressing outward from under the skin. They pulsed once and sank beneath the surface before his eyes could follow.
The glass showed only his back. Smooth and normal. He reached behind himself and touched the skin between his shoulder blades. Nothing there.
Then something shifted in his chest. A tug. Directional. Pointing toward the east wing.
Evelyne.
______
EVELYNE
She had not planned to come tonight.
The imperial guards at the east entrance let her pass without a second glance. She had charmed the originals weeks ago, and when the rotation brought new faces she charmed those too. When she turned the corner into the upper corridor, his door was already open. Alaric stood in the frame with his shirt half-unlaced. Something about him made her slow down, though she could not have said what.
"You're early," he said.
"I wasn't planning on coming at all." Something about his posture was different tonight, too straight, too centered, as if every part of his body was pointed at her. "How long have you been standing there?"
He did not answer. His hand closed around her wrist and drew her inside.
The door shut behind her.
_____
EVELYNE
Months of learning Alaric Vessant had taught her what to expect. Closed eyes, distracted hands, quick encounters that left her body used and her pride hurt. She had accepted those terms because the alternative was being shut out entirely.
Tonight he looked at her with both eyes open, fixed and focused and hungry. She had waited years to see him look at her that way.
"What's gotten into you?" She meant it as teasing. His grip on her waist tightened and she forgot what she was saying.
Without hesitation his hands moved over her body, pulling at laces, tearing fabric, stripping cloth from skin with fingers that shook from urgency. Something small hit the floor, a button or a clasp, and neither of them looked. She gasped and pulled at his shirt in return, fumbling with his belt, shoving the leather aside.
When he picked her up, her legs wrapped around him on instinct. Four steps to the bed and her back hit the mattress before she had time to settle.
The first thrust drove into her with no preamble. She cried out as he buried himself to the hilt, her body arching off the bed.
Relentless from the start. Hard and deep and at a pace she could not keep up with. Her hips rocked to meet him but he was faster, always faster, driving into her at angles that made her vision blur. The sheets bunched under her back and stuck to her skin where sweat had already started to pool.
"Stay still." His voice was rough and controlled. "I want to watch."
She held herself in place and let him fuck her. His eyes stayed open the entire time, locked on her face. He was watching her and he was not looking away.
For the first time in their years together, she believed he was seeing her.
"Harder," she gasped. "Please. God, harder."
The bed frame groaned when his hips slammed into hers. The first orgasm hit her hard, her back arching, her voice cracking on his name, her fingers gripping his wrist hard enough to leave crescents in his skin.
He kept going. Pulled her leg higher, changed the angle, fucked her through the aftershocks until she was shaking beneath him.
"More." His voice was too calm for what his body was doing. "I'm not finished with you."
_____
ALARIC
The restlessness had a direction now.
Every sound Evelyne made fed something inside him that was closer to purpose than hunger, a certainty that he needed to fill her, finish inside her, plant something that would take root.
She moaned his name and her body tightened around his cock. The pleasure was distant, muffled, as if it belonged to someone else and he was only borrowing the sensation. That should have bothered him. A month ago it would have. The thought flickered once and went dark.
"Please." Her voice reached him from very far away. "Please don't stop."
Stopping was not possible. He pulled out, flipped her facedown, grabbed her hips and yanked them upward. She gasped into the pillow as he entered her from behind in one stroke.
"You'll give me everything, won't you?" His voice came out different. Low and patient and absolutely certain.
One hand slid forward and pressed flat against her belly. The skin there was hot from exertion and damp, and he held her with deliberate pressure against it.
"Yes," she said into the pillow. "Anything. Whatever you want."
The pressure in his spine pulsed once, hard, in time with his thrust. He came inside her and his mind went blank.
______
EVELYNE
She had never experienced anything close to this. Her body shuddered through an orgasm that left her deaf and blind for several seconds.
Alaric's weight settled on top of her, his cock still twitching inside her. She could feel his release spreading warm and deep.
They lay still, breathing, soaked in sweat.
Then his hand found her hip again and she felt him hardening.
"Alaric." She could barely form the word. "Wait. I can't."
"You can." He rolled her onto her back with hands that were gentler but no less certain, and started moving again, slower and deeper. "You were made for this."
After the third time she stopped counting. Her body was sore in ways she did not know were possible. Her cunt ached and throbbed and still clenched around him every time he pressed deep.
When he finally stopped, she lay beneath him trembling, barely able to draw breath.
He rolled off her. Lay on his back. One arm draped across his eyes. Somewhere in the room a draft moved the curtains and the candle on the nightstand flickered.
"Alaric?"
"I finally know what I want." His voice was flat and spent. "Sleep."
_________
EVELYNE
She should have pushed for answers. He had never touched her with that kind of need or focus.
Instead she told herself it was victory. He had finally chosen her over a wife who never wanted him. Bruises already marked her hips and thighs, and she would take it, take him however he came to her. She did not let herself think about what that said about her.
Something shifted low in her belly. A small cold weight that had not been there before. It settled.
She pressed her hand against it, then pulled away. Probably soreness. Probably nothing.
Her eyes closed. Sleep took her in seconds.
_______
ALARIC
Beside her, Alaric lay still.
She had whispered that she loved him. Her hand had pressed flat against his chest, looking for his heartbeat. He felt her palm and nothing underneath it.
The restlessness was gone. A cold, functional calm sat in its place. She would serve the purpose, though the purpose itself stayed unnamed, lodged somewhere behind his thoughts where he could not examine it.
She was useful. She was willing. That was enough.
_______
EVELYNE
She woke to the sound of water.
Alaric stood at the wash basin, bare from the waist up, splashing his face. Through the window behind him the sky was turning grey.
Every muscle screamed when she tried to sit. Bruises covered her hips. Her throat was raw. The bedsheets smelled of copper and something faintly mineral. He had taken her four times, maybe five.
She dressed slowly, wincing through each piece of clothing. Her corset laces took three attempts because her fingers would not stop shaking. When she finished she crossed to where he stood and pressed herself against his back.
"We need to discuss what comes next."
He did not turn around. "Vorenthal fell at Thornwall. What else?"
"Thornwall fortress fell. His entire unit was destroyed, no survivors."
"Seraphina?"
"Barely functioning from what my sources say. The Empress gave her mourning time then pulled her back to duty." Evelyne paused. "Something changed with the trial deadline. My sources aren't clear on details, but it's months now, not weeks. Some kind of error in the original research."
"Months." His voice carried nothing.
"She's still in the capital, under imperial protection. Prince Thalion assigned as her escort. The ward network across the seventeen estates is failing and she's bound to it. She'll have to travel to each estate to stabilize the ley lines before the wards collapse."
"The prince." No reaction at all.
"My family has stopped answering my letters." She said it quietly. "Since the house arrest."
"You have me."
Those words should have warmed her. He delivered them flat and empty, a fact rather than a comfort.
"What do we do now?" she asked.
"We wait. Nobody is watching us."
"And then?"
"Then we will see what comes."
That was wrong. The Alaric she knew would have had three plans before she finished her first sentence. This version of him was too patient, too calm, and he did not seem to notice. She swallowed and tasted something sour at the back of her throat.
"Are you all right?" she asked.
He turned to look at her fully.
"I am better than I have been in months."
Her stomach tightened. She could not say why.
_______
ALARIC
The itch between his shoulder blades had returned, faint and steady and impossible to reach.
He scratched at it and found smooth skin, slightly cool under his fingers.
"What is it?" Evelyne had finished adjusting her dress and was watching him. The marks he had left on her covered her arms and neck, teeth impressions and bruises and finger-shaped pressure along her collarbone.
"Nothing."
She came up behind him. Her fingers traced down his spine.
He closed his eyes and let her.
_______
EVELYNE
The cold patch was worse than last week.
She had first noticed it during one of her early visits after the curse was destroyed, a small circle of cold skin between his shoulder blades that she had dismissed as poor circulation. Every visit since, it had been wider.
Tonight her palm pressed flat against it and the cold bit through her fingers. The patch had doubled in size. The cold stopped at a clear line and the warm skin started right there.
He shivered under her touch. "Does that help?"
"I don't know." She rubbed circles from the center outward. Warm skin. Back to the center. Cold again. "Alaric, this is bigger than last time. You need a healer."
"I feel nothing there."
That was the part that frightened her. Through his ribs his heartbeat was steady and slow, far too slow for a man who had spent hours doing what he did to her.
She kissed the cold spot once and stepped back. Gathered the last of her things from the chair by the door.
"I'll come again tomorrow night," she said.
He did not turn from the window. "I know."
She left the way she had come, past the guards who smiled and never questioned. For weeks now, being near him had felt wrong. She could not explain it. The comfort was gone. What replaced it kept her shoulders tight and her breathing shallow whenever she was in his room, and she only noticed when she left and her body relaxed again.
She told herself it was nothing and kept walking.
______
ALARIC
From the window he watched her cross the courtyard below, arms folded against the early cold, heading for the servants' gate.
Inside the room, the whispers had gone silent. The shadows along the far wall were still. The itch between his shoulder blades had stopped, replaced by warmth that spread downward through his torso in slow, satisfied waves.
One hand rested against the windowpane. In the reflection, his hand rested against his. The glass was warm under his palm and cold everywhere else.
A knock at the door. The servant who entered with his breakfast tray looked pale. Her hands shook as she set the tray down, and she stepped back from him faster than was polite.
"You look unwell," he said.
"Just tired, my lord." She would not meet his eyes. "The household has been feeling poorly. Several of us."
She turned to leave. Two steps into the corridor her legs buckled and her knees hit the stone floor with a crack that echoed down the hallway. Voices rose from the far end of the passage. Two servants came running, and someone called for water and someone else for the physician.
Alaric listened from his chair. The commotion carried for several minutes, raised voices, the scrape of the girl being lifted, questions nobody could answer.
He picked up his fork, cut into the breakfast, chewed slowly and swallowed. The food had no taste but he ate it anyway while the commotion in the corridor went on.
Halfway through the meal, he smiled.
He did not know why. Nothing was funny. Nothing had changed. But the corners of his mouth pulled up and stayed there, and the thing underneath the calm watched the morning through his eyes.