Mira Ashwood's POV
The door swung open and Mira scrambled backward so fast she fell off the bed.
She hit the floor hard, elbow first, and pain shot up her arm. She didn't care. She was already pressing herself against the wall, heart slamming, eyes locked on the doorway.
A guard. Just a guard.
He was one of Shade's wolves big, silent, the kind of man who looked like he'd been carved out of rock and given just enough personality to follow orders. He set a new candle on the table, lit it from a small flint in his pocket, and looked at Mira on the floor without any expression at all.
"The King says sleep," the guard said. "Tomorrow you begin your duties."
"My duties." The words tasted like something rotten. "You mean being a battery."
The guard's expression didn't change. He walked back to the door.
"Wait!" Mira pushed herself to her feet. "The girl in the next room. Lena. I want to talk to her."
He stopped with his hand on the door. A flicker of something crossed his face too fast to name.
"There is no one in the next room," he said.
Then he pulled the door shut. The lock clicked.
Mira stood in the small circle of new candlelight and listened to his footsteps fade down the hall. She waited until she couldn't hear them anymore. Then she pressed her ear back to the left wall.
"Lena," she whispered.
Nothing.
"Lena, it's okay. He's gone."
Silence. Deep, heavy silence, the kind that meant someone was working very hard to make it.
Mira pulled back from the wall. Either Lena was too scared to answer, or the guard had stopped outside, waiting, listening. Either way, pushing it felt dangerous.
She sat on the floor instead of the bed. She didn't know why. The floor felt more honest somehow. Harder. Less like pretending any of this was okay.
And that was when it hit her. Not all at once, the way big things usually hit you in stories. Slowly, the way cold water rises first your feet, then your ankles, then before you know it you're in it up to your neck.
She missed home.
The thought was humiliating. Home had been terrible. Home had been Elara stealing every good thing and Silas laughing in her face and villagers throwing flower petals at her like a joke. Home had been years of being invisible, of being the quiet omega, of shrinking herself down smaller and smaller so she took up less space and gave people fewer reasons to notice her and find her lacking.
She hated home.
And she missed it so much her chest physically hurt.
She missed the smell of her mother's kitchen the wood smoke and dried herbs hanging from the ceiling. She missed her narrow little bed with the quilt that had a hole in one corner that she'd been meaning to fix for two years. She missed the festival lights, even the ones that had been strung up to celebrate a holiday that had never once celebrated her. She missed knowing where everything was. She missed the predictability of a life that fit inside a shape she understood, even when that shape was painful.
Here, she didn't know the shape of anything.
The tears came before she decided to let them. That was always how it was she never decided to cry, it just happened, like weather. Hot and sudden and deeply inconvenient.
She pulled her knees to her chest and pressed her face against them so no one would hear.
You're not weak, she told herself. Crying doesn't mean you're weak. You can cry and still be strong.
She wasn't sure she believed that. But she kept saying it anyway, the way you hum to yourself in the dark not because the sound means anything, but because silence is worse.
After a while, the tears stopped. They always stopped eventually. She wiped her face on her sleeve and stared at the candle flame until her breathing steadied.
Then the whispers started.
At first, she thought it was Lena trying again. She pressed her ear to the left wall. Nothing. She tried the right wall. Nothing. She tried the wall behind the bed.
The whispers were loudest there.
They weren't words, exactly not at first. More like the shape of words. Like hearing a conversation through several closed doors, where you catch the rhythm but none of the meaning. Her power prickled at the edges of her skin, the way it did when something was trying to get through.
She pressed both palms flat against the stone.
The whispers sharpened.
not safe
he doesn't know
she has to find the
Then nothing. Like a radio losing signal mid-sentence.
Mira stood back, breathing hard. The candle flame was bending toward the wall, pulled by something she couldn't see. She watched it lean and lean and lean until she was almost convinced it would go horizontal.
Then it straightened.
She sat back down on the floor and tried to think clearly.
Okay. Facts. She was good at facts when she was scared because facts were solid, and solid things were harder to drown in.
Fact one: Shade had six Mirror-Touched wolves locked in this castle. Maybe more.
Fact two: He used them to quiet his curse. When they ran out of power Lena hadn't finished that sentence, and the unfinished part was the most frightening thing Mira had heard all night.
Fact three: The walls were whispering things to her. Which meant either the Citadel was genuinely haunted, or her power was picking up something that normal wolves couldn't hear.
Fact four: The guard had lied about Lena. Which meant someone had told him to lie.
She chewed the inside of her cheek. Back in Oakheart, when Elara had been lying about something, Mira had always been the last to figure it out. She trusted too easily, assumed the best too readily, always found an excuse for the cruelty of people who didn't deserve excuses.
She was not going to do that here.
Shade Nightborne was not misunderstood. He was not secretly soft underneath the hard exterior. He had locked her in a room and called her a slave, and there were other girls in the walls of this castle who had run out of something, and she was not going to let herself run out of whatever it was.
The candle burned halfway down.
She still couldn't sleep.
Every time she closed her eyes, the whispers came back not from the walls now, but from somewhere inside her own head. Not the death-echoes, those belonged to Shade. These were different. Lighter. Like something trying to wake up.
Find the mirror, the whispers said. Before he does.
Her eyes flew open.
Not a fragment this time. A full sentence. Clear as a bell.
She sat up straight, staring at the wall.
And that was when she saw it something she hadn't noticed before, because the candle had been too low and she'd been too scared to look carefully. There, in the corner where the wall met the floor, almost completely hidden behind the leg of the bed.
A scratch in the stone. Thin and deliberate, like someone had spent hours carving it with a nail.
She dragged the bed aside, her pulse going double.
Words. Someone had scratched words into the floor of this room, letter by letter, small enough to hide but deep enough to last.
He will drain you dry. The mirror is in the west tower. Break it before the new moon or none of us go home.
Below the message, a name.
Mira's hands went cold.
The name scratched into the floor was Lena.
And below Lena's name, six small marks like tally lines.
Then a seventh mark still being scratched, still fresh, the stone dust not yet settled.
Mira looked at her own fingernail. Then at the fresh seventh mark.
It was the exact same size as her fingernail.
She had no memory of crawling to the corner. She had no memory of scratching anything into the floor.
But the dust was warm under her hands.
And the candle went out.