Merks’ thoughts reached Aithne before true waking did, slipping into her chaotic dreams like a serpent.

 

He had learned -- whether by instinct or by the simple fact that cruelty makes quick study of anything useful -- that silence could be sharpened into a weapon if one held it just right. He always let it settle first, long enough for hope to stir against all reason; long enough for her to begin wondering whether he had gone, or was asleep, or had merely grown bored of the spectacle of her. Only then would he speak, low and pleased, and the sound of him would split that fragile hope clean through.

 

At least, that’s how he pictured it in his head. For Aithne, he may as well have been screaming, “HERE I AM!” from the moment he arrived.

 

“There you are,” he said in a voice that oozed self-satifaction.

 

Aithne did not answer -- her focus was on her pain. Her ribs ached with each breath, shoulders pulled taut with a deep, bruised heaviness. Her hips and thighs throbbed with the miserable, all-encompassing complaint of flesh pushed past its limit. Even her jaw hurt for no clear reason. She could taste iron at the back of her mouth and feel the sting of skin rubbed raw in too many places. It had been a long time since she had felt this battered -- long enough that the familiarity came as its own fresh injury.

 

She sighed and opened her eyes.

 

The room emerged by degrees, although there was nothing new to see – the place looked less like something built than something excavated, a pocket gouged out of the dark and left there, close and airless, as if spite itself had taken up masonry. All it contained was the brazier, the wall, and Merks.

 

At this moment, he sat on a small boulder a little way off, one knee raised, his wrist draped loosely over it in a posture of offensive ease.

 

“No one can find this place.”

 

He let the words sit there, waiting for them to do their work. In his mind, they already had; she could hear the pleased little pulse of it beneath the spoken calm -- there, that landed, that was good, start with that, let her think on that first -- and because she could hear it so plainly, because he was so naked to her while imagining himself so composed, the line struck her as almost more contemptible than frightening. 

 

Almost -- there was fear enough in it still. Only not the sort he wanted.

 

“That is the best part.”

 

He rose and trailed his fingers over the stone as he moved, as though admiring fine workmanship in a house that belonged to him. Mine. Hidden. Better than anything the old orc has. Then, as if the thought of Urag itself were a burr under the skin of his triumph -- let him look, let him tear the whole college apart if he likes, he won’t find this, he won’t find me. He won’t find her.

 

The thought of Urag struck her like cold water, first for the memories it sprang, then because of the confusion it raised. Why would Urag be looking for her? He had no reason to. Not in this timeline.

 

“The first me found it.” Merks tapped his head. “Before, in the other life. The real me. He meant to bring you here. Before you betrayed him. Before you killed him.” With my own trophy, his mind added.

 

Aithne closed her eyes.

 

Killed him. Betrayed him. He believed it. That was the trouble -- not merely the lie, but the devotion. He had built himself a little shrine and knelt before it so often that he now mistook the shape of his own obsession for truth. In his thoughts, she could feel the wound as he understood it: humiliation, helplessness, a loss of control he had never endured, rewritten into martyrdom afterward. She had not escaped him, in his telling; she had wronged him. She had not outlasted him; she had treacherously stolen a future that ought to have belonged to him.

 

And, worst of all, because his thoughts were open to her, she could feel how much comfort that falsehood gave him.

 

“You won’t deny it?”

 

She fixed her gaze on the floor near his boots and kept silent; nothing she could say would change his mind.

 

A short laugh, sharp and satisfied. He stood and began to pace, though the room scarcely allowed it. The back-and-forth only made him look what he was: a man circling in a hole and imagining himself grand.

 

“At first I hoped you might confess." He turned and gave her a look full of wounded superiority. “But you always did prefer ruining what was best for you.”

 

That almost drew a laugh from her. The impulse died beneath the weight of pain and something heavier still.

 

She had given him the mask.

 

The thought no longer circled vaguely at the edge of her mind; it had sunk its hooks in. Ancient, dangerous, pulled from Labyrinthian of all places -- and she had put it into Merks’ hands because the moment had been crowded, because there had been other concerns, because she had not stopped to think hard enough about what it was and what it might do.

 

No; that was too kind. She had failed to think at all.

 

She should have examined it, should have tested it, questioned it. Then smashed it, buried it, dropped it into a trench beneath the sea -- anything but hand it to Merks and let him make use of it. She, of all people, should have known better than to place power in the hands of a man who mistook possession for worth and cruelty for proof of importance.

 

Fool.

 

The word came in her own voice, though it wore older echoes. Her fault. Her carelessness. This is what happens when you stop watching the edges. This is what happens when you hand a blade to a child and act surprised when he cuts at whatever is nearest.

 

She hated how readily the old pattern rose -- how quickly guilt came slinking in, eager to lace itself up with the memory of obedience. How the echoes of a darkness long gone stirred and began to cluster into a new pit of hopelessness.

 

Merks stopped pacing.

 

“I know something else now too.”

 

The room seemed to contract around those words. He had been circling toward this from the moment she woke; she knew it now with the cold certainty of a trap seen just before it springs.

 

He touched two fingers to his temple. “Your trick. The supposed mind-reading.”

 

She did not move. That stillness was answer enough. His mind lit with delight before his mouth caught up -- there it is, there, she didn’t expect that, I knew it, I knew it -- and then he smiled.

 

“I wondered. At first I thought you heard everything -- every ugly thought, every secret, every little thing I’d rather keep to myself. Do you know what that does to a man? Thinking some woman can sit there and rummage through his head whenever she pleases?”

 

Of course he would cast himself as the victim. Even in his own mind, the fear he had felt came wrapped in indignation, as though her hearing him had been a violation greater than anything he had done.

 

“So I tested it.” He crouched in front of her, too close, his eyes bright in the dim light. This is good. Make her understand. Make her know she’s not ahead of you anymore. “I thought things on purpose. Bait. Filth. Things I knew should make you flinch. Things any decent woman would react to. Things meant for you.”

 

Her stomach turned -- not at the words themselves, nor even at the memory of catching such thoughts when the amulet had not been there to intervene (although it did explain the curious stray thought she had picked up once when she bent to pick something up and the amulet had left her skin and she had been hit with a distinct flash of Merks imagining being pegged by Nyatt), but at the bright little self-congratulation pulsing beneath them. He was proud of this. Proud of the hours he had spent fouling his own mind solely to watch for signs of her hearing it.

 

“You can’t do it whenever you like. In fact…” His mouth curved, "…almost never. You might be able to hear occasional snippets of thoughts, somehow, but you can’t read minds. You’re not nearly as powerful as you wanted me to think.”

 

He was absurdly proud of that line; she knew it not from the smirk at his mouth but from the bright flare in his thoughts as he heard himself say it -- there, that was good, that sounded clever, that hurt her -- and the knowledge made her hate him more than the words themselves.

 

Aithne stared at a crack in the floor and let the feelings turn through her in their ugly braid --  anger, because he was so pleased with himself; hate, because he wore falsehood like a title; doubt, because she had helped make this version of him possible; despair, because none of that could now be undone.

 

And then -- to her immediate disgust -- pity.

 

It came so thinly she almost mistook it for exhaustion; just a pale edge of feeling, like sunlight pressing around the side of a thundercloud. Not enough to soften anything or even call itself compassion. But enough to make the full shape of him suddenly, hideously visible.

 

He was proud of a hole in the ground. Proud of broken memories stitched into martyrdom; proud of solving half a mystery and mistaking it for mastery. Proud of frightening a woman who could barely move. Proud, most of all, of a story in which he was finally important.

 

He wanted to be grand -- wronged, fated, central. What he was, in the end, looked smaller. Not harmless; never harmless. But smaller. Smaller and meaner and more ruined than the role he was trying to wear. A damaged little man in borrowed significance, giddy because he had found one corner of the dark and mistaken it for dominion.

 

The pity sickened her, moreso because it was a healthier version of the same emotion that had driven her to push against him in the first place, way back then in a very different lifetime.

 

She had learned nothing, it seemed.

 

He stared into her face and smiled as if he had seen surrender there. “There. Now you understand.”

 

Of course he would mistake pity for defeat. He had mistaken everything else.

 

He turned away from her and resumed his little circuit of the room, roaming it as though it were some private manor and not a buried pocket of darkness. “I want you to know that there are no tricks left. No one is coming. No one knows this place. No one can find it. And whatever little edge you thought you had over me…” He laughed softly and left his words dangling dramatically, though the effect was mostly lost by his internal smug self-appreciation of it.

 

Aithne let her head rest against her chest and just breathed. The room blurred. Somewhere along the line her hands had begun to tremble; she gripped them into fists and willed them still. Her body hurt in slow waves now rather than sharp ones, though perhaps that was only because the sharper pains had stopped distinguishing themselves. Everything felt battered -- used past its limit, then pushed a little further out of spite.

 

“We have time.”

 

That made her look at him, and she found him smiling as if he was offering comfort. And there, for one hideous instant, that near-pity brushed her again -- then burned away beneath colder things. Not hope; nothing so generous. But not surrender either.

 

Just endurance.

 

Just breath.

 

Just the hard, narrowing certainty that she had survived worse men than Merks -- stronger men, crueler men, grander men, men more honestly monstrous. He was dangerous, yes; more dangerous now than before, because he had learned enough to become confident. But confidence was not the same thing as truth, and his story -- however devoutly he held it -- was still a lie.

 

Aithne closed her eyes. The room remained what it was: dark, stale, buried. Merks remained what he was: smiling in borrowed darkness, pleased with scraps. Her body remained what it was: bruised, shaking, far too aware of itself.

 

Nothing had improved.

 

Still, when she breathed in again, what she found at the center of herself was cleaner than despair. Not hope. Not yet. But something that might, if left alive long enough, learn its shape.

 

 

 

Next chapter

 

Previous chapter

 

Start from the beginning

 

Join the Shae's Discord!