Darkness didn't arrive like sleep. It arrived like a hand sliding over Evelyn's face—slow, polite, inevitable—until even the seam-lights became a rumor.
She floated in it, pinned by leather and by chemistry, and yet the Wire stayed lit inside her like a filament refusing to burn out. It hummed against her ribs. It tugged, not gently. Not comfortingly. A live thing pulled taut across distance.
Somewhere, he had felt her.
The thought should have been useless. It wasn't. It was the only proof she still existed as more than a body on a bed.
The Cold Palace breathed around her—filtered air, antiseptic, that faint sweetness of lilies turning sour as they warmed. Her tongue was still furred with ash. The sedative had taken her edges, sanded her mind down until thoughts came slow and heavy, but it hadn't taken the anger. Anger was stubborn. Anger survived on scraps.
Footsteps whispered outside the glass wall. Not inside. Not yet. The corridor noise was muted, as if the building had learned shame.
Evelyn tried to blink. Her eyelids obeyed halfway, then sank again. The leather at her wrists creaked when she tested it. The clasp bit, a small bright pain that flared and faded.
Pain, at least, was honest.
She dragged in air. It tasted flat—bleached, processed—until it caught on the lilies and turned green at the back of her throat. The bouquet sat on the metal table like a white accusation, petals too perfect, stems sweating into a trembling puddle.
A sound—soft, almost nothing—came from the corner.
Evelyn forced her eyes open again. The room swam, then steadied in slow increments, like a camera fighting focus.
An attendant stood near the wall, hands folded. Her gaze stayed down, but her posture had shifted: not statue-still now. Guard-still. As if Dorian's order—*Lock the room*—had made her part of the lock.
Evelyn's mouth felt full of cotton. She worked her jaw until she could shape a word.
"Water."
The attendant didn't move.
Evelyn waited. Waiting was something she could still do with precision. She let the silence stretch until it became a problem someone would want to solve.
Finally, the attendant's eyes flicked—quick, guilty—to the glass, to where cameras might be tucked into seams. Then she crossed to a cabinet and returned with a small paper cup. She held it to Evelyn's lips without meeting her gaze.
The water was room-temperature and tasted faintly of plastic. Evelyn swallowed anyway. Swallowing was still a private choice, even if it had to be borrowed.
When the cup lowered, Evelyn licked her lips and tasted metal beneath the ash, like her body remembered blood even when it wasn't there.
"How long," she rasped, "until he comes back?"
The attendant's throat moved. No answer.
Evelyn watched her face—the careful blankness, the tiny tension at the corner of her mouth. People in uniforms were trained to be invisible, but invisibility always had seams. All you had to do was find where the fabric pulled.
"He'll ask if I'm… receptive," Evelyn said, letting Dorian's word hang there like a hook. "He'll want me awake enough to agree to something."
The attendant's fingers tightened around the empty cup. A small tell. A small opening.
Evelyn's voice stayed thin, but she poured steel into it anyway. "What did he tell you to do if I refuse?"
The attendant's eyes lifted for the first time. They were brown, ordinary, young. They held a flash of something that wasn't loyalty—fear, maybe, or disgust. Then they dropped again as if burned.
Evelyn felt the Wire tighten once, a subtle internal tug that made her breath catch. Not a message. A reaction. A far-away steadiness shifting, as if someone had braced harder against a door.
Silas's resolve—still there, still unspent.
Evelyn closed her eyes briefly and let that steadiness bruise her from the inside. It had no right to feel like anything. It did.
When she opened them, she aimed her gaze at the lilies instead of the attendant. "If you were smart," she said softly, "you'd be somewhere else when this turns."
The attendant didn't answer, but the room changed anyway: a faint click in the wall, a tiny mechanical sigh. The kind of sound a lock makes when it checks itself.
Then the door hissed.
Evelyn's spine tried to straighten. Her body didn't cooperate. The sedative still clung to her muscles like damp cloth.
Dorian Wren entered alone this time.
No Mira. No bouquet-bearing softness. Just him in his dark suit, as if he'd stepped out of the corridor fully formed, pressed and certain. He carried a tablet under one arm. The knot emblem on his badge caught the seam-light and looked, for a second, less like branding and more like a sigil.
He didn't glance at the attendant. He didn't need to. Authority didn't look down.
"Mrs. Thorne," he said, and the title landed with its usual clean cruelty.
Evelyn's throat scratched when she spoke. "You're early."
"I'm efficient." He walked to the table and set the tablet down beside the lilies. The metal clicked. The puddle of water shivered outward in rings, then stilled. "How do you feel?"
Evelyn let her mouth curve without warmth. "Cherished."
A pause. A faint narrowing of his eyes, as if he enjoyed her more when she was sharp.
"I prefer you lucid," Dorian said. "The sedative was… situational."
"Because Mira got sentimental," Evelyn murmured.
Dorian's gaze slid over her face like a scanner. "Miss Lark exceeded her scope."
"She told you something you didn't want said out loud," Evelyn replied, and her pulse thudded once when she saw it land. Not a flinch—Dorian didn't flinch—but a micro-adjustment, like a man shifting his weight away from a crack in the floor.
Dorian's voice stayed smooth. "You're imagining allies where there are none."
Evelyn's wrists ached against the leather. She tested the restraint again, just enough to make the clasp bite. "Then why bother with flowers?"
Dorian's attention flicked briefly to the lilies. "Symbols calm people."
"Or warn them," Evelyn said. She tasted the word *warning* the way Mira had said it, like a candle flame held too close to skin.
Dorian leaned his hip against the edge of the metal table—casualness worn like armor. "We're going to speak plainly now."
Evelyn breathed shallowly. The Wire hummed under her sternum, taut, listening. She didn't know if Silas could hear words, but she felt him the way you feel pressure before thunder.
"Plainly," Evelyn echoed.
Dorian tapped the tablet. The screen lit, casting a cold glow upward. He didn't show her surveillance this time. He showed her a map—sleek, minimalist, a city grid with layers. Corporate campuses marked in clean lines. Logistics routes. Security zones.
And, beneath it, faint as a watermark: older lines. Curving paths that didn't match streets. Knots at intersections that looked too deliberate to be aesthetic.
Evelyn's mouth went dry.
"You like systems," Dorian said, watching her watch. "You like believing everything is controllable if you can see the diagram."
Evelyn forced her voice to stay even. "Is this supposed to impress me?"
"It's supposed to inform you." He zoomed in with two fingers. A section of the city pulsed faintly. "There are infrastructure layers Thorne Holdings maintains that do not appear on public records."
Evelyn stared at the faint, older lines. The knot points. The way they seemed to converge like veins toward the Cold Palace's location.
"What is that?" she asked, and hated how her voice betrayed her with a slight roughness.
Dorian's eyes held hers. "Debt."
The word hit with the same weight it had carried in Mira's mouth, but colder now, stripped of any human tremor.
Evelyn's stomach clenched. Her mind—despite the sedative—began to assemble a ledger. *Who owes. Who collects. What collateral looks like in a city that believes in ancient contracts.*
Dorian continued, "You know about the curse."
Evelyn didn't answer. Denial would be childish. Confirmation would be ammunition.
Dorian's smile was small. "Your silence is confirmation enough."
He tapped again. Another file opened: a timeline, clean and corporate, punctuated with dates and names. Weddings. Deaths. Births that ended before they began. It looked like an investor report if you didn't read the blood between the lines.
Evelyn's breath snagged when she saw the pattern made visible. Not superstition. Not myth. Data.
Her own family's horror translated into a spreadsheet.
"You've been trying to outmaneuver it," Dorian said, almost conversational. "Poison. Timing. A clean break."
Evelyn's fingers twitched against leather. "You don't know what I've been trying to do."
Dorian's gaze dropped—brief, clinical—to her abdomen. "I know you were running out of time."
Heat crawled up Evelyn's throat, not blush but rage. She forced it down until it became something usable.
"You want me to bring him back," she said. "Into alignment."
"Yes."
"And if I do?" Evelyn asked. "You reverse the Ash? You let me out of here? You let me—what—go home and play wife?"
Dorian's eyes didn't soften. "You return to your role."
Role. Asset. Continuity. Words that turned living people into parts on a balance sheet.
Evelyn's chest ached—not from tenderness, not quite, but from the Wire's constant pressure. Silas's steadiness pressed back, as if he were holding the other end of a rope and refusing to let it slack.
She swallowed. The ash made it feel like swallowing cloth. "And what does he get?"
Dorian's gaze sharpened with a hint of interest, as if she'd finally asked the right question. "He gets to stop running."
Evelyn's laugh came out thin. "That's not a gift. That's a cage with nicer lighting."
Dorian leaned forward slightly. "You're not thinking broadly enough."
Evelyn met his eyes. "Then broaden me."
For the first time, Dorian hesitated—only a beat, only a hairline pause—but it was there. He slid the tablet closer to her, angling it so she could see a final page.
A contract.
Not legal language. Not quite. It was formatted like one—headings, clauses, signatures—but the symbols threaded through it were wrong. Too old. Too curved. The knot emblem appeared again and again, like a stamp pressed into wax.
At the bottom: a blank line labeled in neat type.
**WIRE HOLDER:**
Evelyn's pulse jumped. The Wire inside her seemed to tighten in response, as if the tether recognized its own name in ink.
"What is this?" she whispered, and hated that whisper. Hated how the room had pulled it from her.
Dorian's voice dropped, intimate as a threat. "A renegotiation."
Evelyn's mouth went cold. "You can renegotiate a curse?"
Dorian's eyes were very steady. "You can renegotiate a debt."
The lilies' scent thickened, sweetening toward rot. Evelyn stared at the blank signature line and felt, with sudden clarity, how the city under the glass must look: not streets, but veins; not towers, but teeth.
She tried to pull a full breath. Her ribs resisted. The Wire hummed like a live cable.
"You want me to sign," she said. "To bind him."
Dorian didn't correct her. He didn't need to.
Evelyn's gaze flicked to the glass wall, to her reflection hovering pale over the bed. She looked like a woman being asked to authorize her own execution with a stylus.
Somewhere in the north, a man under a borrowed name would be feeling that same tightening—no words, no map—just pressure, just summons.
Evelyn forced her voice into something sharp enough to cut. "If I sign, what do I get?"
Dorian's smile returned, thin as wire. "Choice."
The word should have been a lie. In his mouth, it sounded like a product.
Evelyn stared at the contract until the symbols began to swim. The sedative made everything soft at the edges, but the fear was crisp. Not fear of dying. Fear of being owned in a way even she couldn't out-plan.
Her hand trembled against the restraint. A tiny, traitorous tremor.
Dorian watched it with satisfaction so mild it was almost polite.
"Think," he said. "You're good at that."
Evelyn's throat tightened around a sound that wasn't quite a sob and wasn't quite a laugh. The corporate cold inside her—her clean, ruthless calculus—tried to rise and take over.
But underneath it, something else stirred, darker and wetter, like velvet curtains in a mausoleum.
A husband who would come when summoned.
A child she hadn't asked for, already being priced.
A city that collected.
Evelyn closed her eyes for half a second and pushed her awareness down the Wire again—not a message, not words—just a pulse of contact, a flare of alarm.
*They have paper for our blood,* her mind wanted to say.
When she opened her eyes, Dorian was still there, patient as a lock.
"Bring him back," he said softly, "and you won't have to watch the debt collect interest."
Evelyn's gaze slid to the lilies. One petal had begun to curl inward, browning at the edge—small decay in a perfect room.
Her voice came out low, scraped raw. "And if I refuse?"
Dorian's eyes flicked, once, to her abdomen—quick as a blade.
"We will protect continuity," he said. "With or without your cooperation."
Evelyn's chest hollowed, an ache so deep it felt structural. The Wire tightened hard enough to make her teeth ache.
She didn't have Mira in the room. She didn't have Silas. She had only the thread and the contract and the lilies decaying in sterile water.
And she had to decide—right now, strapped to white sheets—whether to be bait, blade, or signature.
The room held its breath around her, waiting for the sound of ink.
***