Page 98 of Lustling

The sensation is immediate. A pressure blooms across my skin and then a second sensation, more terrible: a small, sanding pull as if something inside me is being drawn out. Cassiel’s ribbon hiccups and goes silent. Bastion’s plates slacken as if a muscle has been cut. Deimos’s tug returns, muffled and small, like a voice on the other side of a door.

I try to scream and the sound is trapped behind a hand of thick velvet.

Zepharion smiles as if he has been given a private joke. He places his palm flat against the choker at my throat and I feel it pulse once, twice. Heat rolls from his hand up into the collar. A faint thread hums toward him. The hum is a thief and I am the pocket it lifts from.

“You are very brave,” he says softly. “Very foolish. But bravery is useful once it is contained.”

The attendants set to work with mechanical gentleness. They bathe me, oil me, dress me in silk that clings and covers andobscures. They adorn me with a circlet that is prettier than practical. They praise nothing at all. Their faces are blank.

I try again to reach for the bonds. A single thought rides up from the well of me and stretches toward Cassiel. It meets the collar like a hand hitting glass. The glass is thin and cold, and the thought hitches and dissolves.

Zepharion notices and hums with delight. “You had power,” he says, as if naming a museum piece. “So many useful things. Now they will be taught how to sing tome.”

He does not need to explain how the choker works. I feel the answer in my limbs, in the silence where my voice used to live. He has not broken the bonds so much as rerouted them. The collar tastes of a slow, clean theft.

I remember, with a clarity so sharp it feels like pain, the way Deimos kissed my hand in the fortress and the promise he made. The promise slices me open because I cannot answer it. I cannot tell him I am emptying. I cannot tell him that the thing I trusted most has been harvested in sleep and restraint.

Zepharion takes my hand and leads me to the door. Not roughly. Not forcefully. As if I have been chosen by fate and I am only now learning my part.

He murmurs in my ear as we walk, words velveteen and poisonous. “You will learn to like it,” he says. “You will learn to want your place. But for now, stay quiet and be beautiful.”

I stand in my silk and feel the metal at my throat like a splinter. I want to claw it off. I cannot. The collar hums with a patient, thieving sound. My bonds at this moment are a library closed to me. I am a book locked in a case.

When the doors swing open and the corridor beyond stretches black and gilded, Zepharion gives me a smile that could be mercy or threat. He says nothing more. He does not need to.

I walk after him because my body obeys and my mind is a muffled pool. My feet move and my hands are empty of power. The fortress I left feels a lifetime away and Deimos’s last ragged call is a ghost clinging to the hem of my thoughts.

I step into the black and the choker hums against my pulse.

SIXTY-ONE

The doors to the throne room open without a sound.

Two of the women who dressed me stand at my sides, one hand each at my elbows, guiding but not holding. Still I feel caged. My bare feet step onto polished obsidian veined in red like blood frozen in glass. The air smells of sulfur and smoke and something sweeter, like wine gone too dark, too old.

My legs obey, but each step feels like wading through water that resists. There is a cold ring at my throat, metal against skin. A thin circlet of black and garnet that rests at the base of my neck. It hums in a way I cannot parse.

The room is massive. A cathedral of bone and shadow. Arched ceilings lined in gold filigree. Velvet banners hang like throats slit open and hung to dry. Every inch of the chamber screams decadence and death.

And it is crowded. Rows and rows of demons. Creatures in silk and metal, masks and claws. Some human shaped, others not at all. They are laughing, talking, drinking red from jeweled cups.

Until they see me. Then silence. Breath held across a hundred throats.

The crowd parts as I am led forward, the sound of my steps echoing through the sudden stillness. Every eye finds me. I feel them crawl across my skin. Judging. Wanting. Tasting.

And then I see him. Zepharion waits in the center of the throne room. He does not sit. He never sits when he can be the center of every gaze.

He walks to meet me, each step slow and deliberate. His robe trails. His hair glimmers red in the light of the chandeliers, and his smile is all teeth and prophecy.

When we meet in the center of the room, he takes my hand in both of his, cool fingers wrapping around mine.

“You are radiant,” he murmurs, eyes raking down the violet silk of my gown. “You look exactly as a queen should.”

I flush, unwilling. The moment stretches and then breaks, the voices returning like a crashing tide. Laughter. Whispering. Applause. They are cheering for me.

Zepharion raises our joined hands. “Let it be known,” he calls, his voice booming without ever needing to shout. “Isarienne has arrived. My bride. My queen. The one I have waited for across realms and centuries.”

More cheers. Some furious, some fervent. All of them deafening.