Mira Ashwood's POV
The mist came under the door like it had fingers.
Mira was already awake she'd barely slept since Kael had dragged her back to her room three hours ago, apologizing the whole way, locking the door with shaking hands and refusing to meet her eyes. She'd been lying on the bed staring at the ceiling, thinking about the west tower and the mirror and the new moon, when the cold crept in.
She sat up.
The mist was white and low, sliding across the stone floor like it was looking for something. It wasn't normal fog. Normal fog didn't move like that deliberate, slow, hugging the ground with purpose. Her skin prickled the moment it touched her bare feet.
She pulled her feet up onto the bed.
The mist kept coming.
Within minutes, it was ankle-deep across the entire floor, glowing faintly purple at the edges, the same purple she'd seen pouring out of the Mistwood when the cult's army had crossed the barrier. Her heart rate climbed. She pressed herself against the headboard and watched it swirl and shift and settle like something alive deciding whether to strike.
Then the roar came.
It shook the walls. Literally shook them she felt it in her back teeth, in her sternum, in the soles of her feet through the mattress. Not a shout. Not a yell. A roar, deep and ragged and full of so much pain that it didn't sound human at all.
The mist pulsed. The purple at its edges flared bright, then faded.
Then silence.
Then another roar, longer this time, more broken, the kind of sound a person makes when they've stopped caring who can hear them because the pain is bigger than pride.
Mira was off the bed before she decided to move. Her feet hit the mist and the cold shot up her legs like electricity, but she barely noticed. She was at the door in three steps, pressing her ear against the wood.
The roaring was coming from somewhere above her. Up and to the left. The same direction as the scream she'd heard earlier, before Kael had dragged her back.
Her hand found the door handle.
Locked. Of course it was locked. After his mistake earlier, Kael had double-checked twice.
But the mist was rising. It was up to her knees now, cold enough to ache, and where it touched her skin, her Mirror power buzzed and crackled like a live wire. Something in the mist was connected to Shade. She could feel it the same way you feel thunder before you hear it in your body first, in your bones, before your brain catches up.
The roaring had become something worse. Quieter. Broken. Like a person who has been screaming so long they've run out of screaming and what's left is just breathing and barely that.
Mira pressed her palm flat against the door and pushed her power into it the way she'd tried before with the wall not forcing, just asking. Just reaching.
The lock clicked open.
She stared at her hand.
She hadn't known she could do that.
She filed that away to panic about later and stepped into the hall.
The mist was everywhere out here too, thicker, moving faster. It parted around her feet as she walked, which was somehow more frightening than if it had just behaved normally. Like it recognized her. Like it knew she was Mirror-Touched and was deciding what to do about that.
She followed the sound.
Up a staircase she hadn't been shown, one that curved sharply and opened into a corridor she didn't recognize. More doors, all closed. At the end, one door different from the others twice as wide, iron-banded, with a faint glow coming from beneath it.
Not candlelight. Not purple mist-light.
Silver.
She pushed the door open.
The room hit her like a wall of feeling before she'd even fully stepped inside not her feelings, someone else's. Rage. Grief. Exhaustion so deep it had gone past feeling and become something structural, like a building that's been damaged so long it's just the shape the damage makes.
Shade was on the floor.
Not sitting. Not crouching. On his knees with both hands pressed to his skull, his head bent, his whole body shaking. His tattoos were going insane blazing white, then black, then white again, cycling so fast it looked like lightning trapped under his skin. The mist was thickest around him, swirling in a tight spiral like a storm with him at its center.
Mira's chest cracked open.
She didn't want it to. She had a whole list of reasons to hate him the locked door, the word slave, Petra's empty eyes, the tally marks on the floor. She held onto those reasons like a rope.
But he was on the floor. And he was making sounds she'd never heard from another living thing, sounds that said I am in more pain than you have ever imagined, and I have been here so long I can't remember what it felt like before.
Her feet moved.
"Stop." His voice came out shattered. "Don't come closer."
"You're in pain."
"I'm always in pain." He lifted his head, and she saw his face for the first time since the car gray, slick with sweat, his silver eyes blown so wide the color was almost gone. "This is just a bad night. Leave."
"How long have you been like this?"
"Mira"
"How long?"
A pause. The mist pulsed. His tattoos flared.
"Since you came back inside the Citadel," he said, like the words cost him something. "You were gone from the corridor for forty minutes. The voices" He stopped. "They know when you're close. When you move away, they get louder to punish me for letting you."
The mist doesn't just react to him, she realized. It reacts to them together. It was measuring the distance between them.
"That's not fair," she said.
"No." His jaw tightened. "It's not."
She crossed the room.
"I said don't"
She sat down on the floor in front of him and put both her hands over his where they were still pressed to his skull.
The effect was immediate and violent.
His whole body jerked like she'd sent electricity through him. The mist exploded outward, slammed into the walls, and then just like that first moment when he'd grabbed her arm went flat and still and silent. His tattoos stopped cycling and settled into a slow, steady silver glow, the way they looked when they were supposed to look.
The roaring in the room disappeared.
The silence that followed was enormous.
Shade was breathing hard, head down, her hands over his. She could feel his pulse through her palms too fast, but slowing. His shoulders dropped the way hers had on the floor of her room three hours ago, that same collapse of muscles that have been holding too long.
Neither of them spoke.
After a while, he said, "You unlocked your own door."
"Yes."
"How?"
"I don't know yet."
Another silence. "You could have run."
"I know."
"Why didn't you?"
She thought about lying. She was good at being quiet and small and giving people the answers that kept the peace. Old habit.
Instead she said, "Because you were hurting and no one was helping you and I couldn't make myself walk past that."
He looked up at her then. Really looked not calculating, not guarded, not the face of the Rogue King who collected Mirror-Touched girls and called them slaves. Something under all of that. Raw and bewildered and so tired it looked like grief.
"That's either very brave or very stupid," he said.
"With me it's usually both."
Something moved in his expression. Not quite a smile. Something that hadn't decided yet whether it was allowed to be a smile.
Then his eyes dropped to her hands. Still over his. Still glowing faintly where their skin touched.
"Mira." His voice had changed. Quieter. Careful, the way you get careful when something matters too much to risk saying wrong. "There's something I need to tell you. About what you are. About what the curse actually"
The door behind her flew open.
Kael stood in the doorway, chest heaving, face white as the mist.
"My King." He was looking at Shade, not Mira, and his eyes held something she'd never seen in them before.
Fear. Real fear. The kind that meant something had already gone wrong.
"One of the girls is gone," Kael said. "Room four. We don't know how. The door was locked from the outside and the lock wasn't broken, but she's" He swallowed. "She's just gone. And she left something behind."
Shade was already rising. "What?"
Kael looked at Mira then. And the fear in his face got worse.
"She left a message," he said. "Scratched into the floor. It says" He stopped. Started again. "It says tell the new one: he lied about Petra. Petra isn't with a healer."
The mist, still and flat a moment ago, began to move again.
"Petra is in the walls."