"I am to be crowned queen tomorrow. Get this vile thing out of my sight!" Isabella's shriek echoed off the stone walls as she glared at the portrait—a luminous, tastefully rendered nude of Aurelia.
Three maids flurried forward, their movements timid as they carefully lifted the heavy frame from the wall.
"Bring it to me!" she commanded, her voice a whip-crack. They hurried, tilting the painting toward her.
Isabella drew a slender dagger from her sleeve. "I pray you rot where you've hidden," she whispered, her voice venomous. She traced the blade lightly over the painted throat, then slashed downward with a sudden, furious cry.
Again and again, she ripped through the canvas, her breath coming in sharp gasps, until the serene image was a tattered ruin of shreds and splintered wood. She stood back, panting, a smile twisting her lips as she surveyed her new masterpiece.
Then, a voice cut through the chamber's tension like winter frost.
"What have you done?"
Isabella froze. The voice was Tenebrarum's.
He stood in the doorway, his presence swallowing the light. His eyes swept from Isabella's triumphant face to the carnage at her feet. He strode forward, and the maids fled without a sound. He did not look at them.
His hand shot out, not to strike, but to grip her jaw with terrifying precision, forcing her to meet his gaze before he flung her aside. She stumbled and fell hard, the stone floor biting into her palms.
He did not glance at her. His attention was fixed on the ruined canvas. He knelt, gathering the largest shred—a fragment that held the gentle curve of Aurelia's painted cheek. His thumb brushed the surface, his expression not one of anger, but of a profound, chilling loss.
"You have no right," he said, his voice dangerously quiet, "to touch what is mine. Do you understand what you have destroyed?"
"It is just a portrait!" Isabella cried, tears of pain and rage springing to her eyes. One hand cupped her throbbing cheek, already blooming with the ghost of his grip.
"Just a…" His words died in a snarl. His hand clenched into a fist, knuckles white, and for a heartbeat, the air itself seemed to darken with the promise of violence. "Leave," he whispered, the word colder than any shout. "Before I forget you are necessary and end you here."
Isabella scrambled to her feet, her composure shattered.
She did not walk, but fled—a scurrying, desperate thing vanishing into the shadows of the corridor, leaving Tenebrarum alone with the ghost in the tattered canvas, wondering not for the first time where in the dark he had lost the real Aurelia.
Where in the world are you?
The whisper was a raw scrape in the silence of his chamber. It was the first time his assassins had ever taken so long. The kingdom was a tinderbox of worries—rebellious lords, empty coffers, the looming coronation of that spoiled girl—yet here he sat, in the dark, whispering to a ghost.
A cold fury, born of helplessness, finally broke through the stillness. "Bring me Sorana!" he roared, his voice a thunderclap of command that echoed down the hall. Beyond the door, he heard the distinct clatter of a guard's armor as the man stumbled in haste.
Time bled away, each second a fresh insult. Finally, the doors groaned open. Sorana was thrust inside, the guards melting back into the corridor. The heavy doors shut, leaving her alone with him.
"My king." Her voice was a thread of sound. She prostrated herself, her forehead pressing against the cold stone floor.
Tenebrarum rose from his throne-like chair in one fluid, predatory motion. She could feel the weight of his gaze even through the ornate mask, a pressure pinning her to the spot.
"You maintain," he began, his voice deceptively soft, "that you do not know where Lady Flavia is."
"Yes, my lord. I swear it."
"You do not know… but you did know of her plan to escape." The statement hung in the air, not a question, but an executioner's axe held aloft.
Sorana's breath hitched.
"No...ye..es..I..." She stammered, sound forming but no words. She knew Tenebrarum. He killed messengers for bearing bad news. He executed servants for a spilled goblet.
Lying to his face was a death sentence writ in blood. She should be a corpse already. The fact that she was not filled her not with hope, but with a deeper, more confusing terror.
"Take her to the dungeons," he ordered, his voice flat, devoid of its usual lethal heat.
The guards re-entered, their hands closing on her arms. As they dragged her away, a dizzying realization swept through her fear. This was unlike Tenebrarum. The Tenebrarum she knew would have painted these stones with her life for this betrayal. Yet he had chosen the dungeon. A slow decay, not a swift end.
It was not mercy. It was something far more unsettling.
It was the terrible,nascent flicker of a man who might, perhaps, be learning to love.
And in his world, love was the most volatile and dangerous thing of all.
Please, come back.
The thought was a poison in his blood. Just one day without her, and here he was—a king who knelt to no god—praying to the silence for her.
He remembered the first time he saw her.
The auction block. The harsh light on her pale skin, the defiant set of her jaw even in chains.
She was so devastatingly beautiful it had felt like an insult. The only thoughts in his mind then were primal, dark things: to slack her open, to claim her, to use her until the fire in her eyes guttered out and she was just another broken thing.
He would have sex with her until she wore off. Until she died from it.
But somewhere in the middle… something broke in him instead he started to care for her.
A memory surfaced, sharp and sweet as a blade. Her voice, barely a whisper in the bright room of his training chamber, a fragile offering in a world he had made of stone and steel: "Let me please you."
It hadn't been submission. It had been a choice. A gift. And it had unraveled him.
Now, that voice was gone. The silence it left behind was a kingdom of ruin. He would burn the world to hear it again.
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To be continued...