Vincent looked younger.
Before the grey slipped into his skin. Before the smile died on his face. His hair was slightly shorter—cut just below his shoulders in lazy, aristocratic waves that still managed to look like they'd been arranged by a personal storm. His eyes, though…those were sharper. Cleaner. No smudges of guilt. No film of tired remorse. Just bright, polished steel set in a face carved by discipline and slow disdain.
I looked from him to Elias and nearly shattered again.
She was watching me.
Not just watching. Piercing through me. Her gaze, soft and liquid with the threat of tears, locked to mine like I was still someone she believed could save her. Her mouth twitched into a smile. The kind you give a scared child right before the thunder cracks. "It's okay," she whispered. Her voice was gentle. Meant to soothe. But her lip was trembling.
I couldn't reach her.
Gods, I tried. I tried. My arms pulled taut against the chains. My knees scraped hard against stone. But the weight of the vision was absolute. I could scream. I could cry. I could rip my voice to ribbons and still I would not breach the boundary between past and present. This was memory. This was theatre. And I was the chained audience to the worst play I'd ever survived.
Vincent turned to her like he'd been summoned by gravity. His gaze cool. Calculating. Unreadable in the way a scalpel is unreadable just before it cuts. "You've been quiet this morning," he said, voice smooth, emotionless, devoid of warmth. The way you'd speak to a letter you were about to burn.
Elias stiffened. "I didn't think we had anything left to say."
He nodded once. "You're probably right."
"Then why come?" she snapped, venom creeping beneath her grief like a second heart. "To gloat? To watch me rot a little longer? Or are you just here to make sure your pet project ends properly?"
Vincent didn't flinch. "Your execution has been moved up."
The silence cracked like a jawbone under pressure.
Elias's entire body jerked. Her mouth parted. Her chest fluttered in small, shallow gulps of air. "When?"
Vincent met her eyes and said it with the gentleness of a guillotine. "Today."
I think my soul made a sound. Something between a moan and a prayer. My body arched forward in denial, but the chains held fast. Across from me, Elias's composure shattered like a mirror dropped in winter.
"No. No. No—" She said, backing up, pressing against the stone wall like it might give way, like she could melt into the darkness and vanish. Her knees buckled. Her face twisted into something between terror and pleading. "Vincent, please—don't do this. Not today. Not like this. You said—"
"I said what I had to," Vincent replied, voice like dry parchment. He stepped toward her. Slowly. Methodically. "This is mercy."
"Mercy?!" Her scream tore through the room like glass through silk. "Is that what you call it?! Lying to me, dragging me here, breaking me down, and then handing me over like spare change?!"
Vincent reached out—gently, cruelly—and took her by the crown of the head.
My heart left my body.
"No," I whispered, throat dry. "Don't—don't touch her—don't—"
She whimpered. Just once. A high, sharp sound like the soul leaking out of her throat. Vincent tilted her head back, exposing her neck like a priest prepping a lamb.
Then came the knife.
Gods, the knife.
It gleamed in the low light, cruelly curved, wickedly etched. It was beautiful the way poison is beautiful—sharp, sleek, designed for intimacy.
I didn't scream.
I broke.
Something inside me snapped—not loudly. Not with fire or fury. Just a quiet, echoing fracture like a soul being hollowed from the inside. My head dropped. My breath faltered. I was past rage. Past pleading. I was drifting. Unmoored.
And then I moved.
Not my body. Not even my voice.
Just my forehead.
I lowered it, slow and deliberate, until the cold stone floor met it with a solid, numbing thud. I did it again. And again. Over and over. Desperate. Numb. Trying to wake up. Trying to leave. Trying to erase myself from the story. Blood smeared across the stone from my brow, but I didn't care. I would've cracked my skull in half if it meant escaping that room.
And then I heard her.
She mouthed the words, barely audible over the clanging horror of my heart.
"I love you."
Three simple words. Small. Shaking. Not completely spoken but rather stitched into the moment with lips that trembled too hard to form sound. Her eyes locked onto mine—wide, wet, shimmering like candlelight drowning in its own wax. I was crying by then. Not delicately. Not with dignity. My throat was raw. My chest ached with a grief that no longer had volume. The sound that left me was a whisper, cracked and hopeless.
"No," I said. A single syllable dropped like a stone into a well. It wasn't a protest. It was a prayer. A denial carved from everything I had left, everything I'd built to keep this memory at bay. But the knife didn't pause.
It kissed her throat with surgical finality, a line of red blooming against skin far too pale, and in that moment, all the gods I'd ever stopped believing in mocked me in silence. Her body collapsed like the last note of a song that shouldn't have ended, limbs folding with a whisper of fabric and blood. No gasp. No scream. Just the soft, terrible slump of a life snuffed out with precision.
I looked at Vincent. Really looked.
And I wanted to burn him alive.
My face twisted—contorted into something inhuman with the sheer force of grief, rage, and helpless, choking hatred. I wanted to reach through the stone and claw his heart out through his ribcage. I wanted to scream until language itself shattered. I wanted to curse every fiber of his being for taking the only thing I ever loved and turning her into a red stain on the floor. But just as the fury reached its crescendo, just as my mouth opened to curse him for the monster he was—
Something caught the light.
A single tear sliding down his cheek.
Slow, silent, yet undeniably real.
It traced the line of his face like it had been waiting there for years, buried under the ruin and rigor of a man who'd long since forgotten how to feel. I froze. My thoughts jammed, skidding against the sudden impossibility of it. Vincent. Crying. That didn't make sense. That wasn't in the script. He was stone, cold and mechanical. A man who delivered death like it was a legal formality. And yet here he was, standing over my sister's corpse…crying.
The world tilted sideways.
Something inside me fractured differently this time—not from grief, but from uncertainty. Because this moment… I didn't remember this. I had blacked out before. Fainted. Whatever cowardly verb you wanted to assign it, I hadn't seen this part. Everything I thought I knew about that day had been built on a hole. A missing piece. And now the piece had teeth. And a tear.
Vincent turned to me, slowly, with the weight of someone dragging an entire history behind his spine. His mouth opened—not cruel, not commanding. Just...quiet, almost broken. "Forgive me Cecil," he said.
I reeled.
Forgive him?
FORGIVE him?!
My lips moved but no sound came. I didn't know what I believed anymore. I didn't know what was anymore. Everything—every inch of him, every moment we'd shared since the Tower began, every cold warning he'd whispered in the shadows, every time he'd told me to go back to Graywatch "for my own good"… It wasn't just manipulation, was it? No. He meant it. Was he trying to warn me about something? Just what the hell is my relationship with him anymore?
I wasn't calm. I wasn't resolved. But the hate started to change. Not vanish. Not weaken. Just shift. Evolve. Like a storm learning how to whisper. I stared at him, breath heavy, trying to understand the man before me and the one I'd built in my head. I was on the edge of something—not forgiveness, but curiosity.
And then…the world screamed.
It started low. Not sound—pressure. Like reality had been twisted in some cosmic vice and the metal was starting to bend. The air vibrated, not with noise, but with presence. My lungs went still. My throat dried out in an instant, and I gasped like I'd just swallowed frost.
"What the fuck," I managed, breath pooling visibly in the air, mist curling out from my mouth like I was exhaling ghosts.
Vincent turned toward the door, stiff and sharp—and for the first time since I'd known him, I saw it.
Absolute terror.
Not just concern.
Pure. Unfiltered. Terror.
He didn't say a word. Just slid the dagger back into his coat with the rigid economy of a man preparing for a fight he knew he couldn't win. The stillness in the room was deafening. Then—
Step.
Wet. Heavy. Impossible.
Step.
The sound echoed with weight that didn't belong in this world. The room shook—not with movement, but anticipation. Like the air itself had started to flinch.
Step.
My chest tightened with every footfall, something primal curling in on itself beneath my ribs. Vincent's shoulders twitched. The pressure kept building, layering, stacking like a scream made of atmosphere. The stone under me throbbed with it. The chains began to hum.
Then came the man.
He, or rather it, turned the corner. Something massive. Shapeless. Dripping with black that wasn't just shadow—it was absence. My body responded before my brain. My stomach seized. My throat buckled.
And I vomited.
Hard.
Onto the floor. Onto the chains.
The bile burned, but not as much as the truth.
Because I knew.
I knew the moment that thing entered the room that Vincent had never been the figure of wrath I was meant to resist. Never the monster at the root of my nightmares. He was only the consequence. The echo. The goddam footnote.
This man—this presence—this was the source.
My true hatred.
The one my mind had banished from memory like a cursed object buried beneath a cathedral.
I didn't know his face. I couldn't. It was still wreathed in shadow, unreadable, void-like. My brain refused to register his features, refused to remember.
But when he turned to look at me—
I screamed.
My body moved before my mind could register what was happening. Not a choice. Not instinct. Something deeper—something ugly and old, bursting up through bone and thought like it had been waiting in the pit of my soul for this exact moment. I didn't calculate it. I didn't weigh the risks. I didn't think about the terror curdling in my chest like milk left too long in the sun.
I just launched.
A snarl rising in my throat like a death wish coated in spit and fury, every muscle coiling into a final, bounding thrust toward that man—that thing—wrapped in shadows that didn't obey light, that bent it like smoke bending around a flame.
I didn't make it a single step.
Time fractured.
The air thickened like syrup gone rancid. My limbs dragged through it, resistance crawling over my skin like invisible ants. I moved in molasses, vision stretching and distorting with every twitch of my joints. My heartbeat slowed, each thump echoing like a funeral bell struck in reverse. I should've been panicking, gasping, breaking. But then I felt it.
The humming.
Not in my ears. No, not something so obvious. This hum came from nowhere and everywhere all at once—through bone, through blood, through the roots of my fucking teeth. It throbbed in the hollow behind my sternum, a low, pulsing vibration that made thought impossible, made time irrelevant. I'd felt it before. Not recently. Not clearly. But enough for my memory to wheeze and cough up a single image.
The cube.
That black cube I'd found with Salem in the secret chamber hidden beneath the ossuary of the cathedral. I'd touched it once, just once, back when the rot of the church hadn't quite peeled itself open for me yet. I remembered the nightmare that followed. Or rather…the vision. The hallucination. The presence. The woman in white with glowing lips and a face veiled in light. I'd tried to forget about the event. But here it was again. The same hum. The same pressure.
I didn't need to turn. I didn't need to see her.
She was already there.
Pressed against my right side, so close that I could feel the chill of her lips on my ear—like snow had learned how to whisper. My eyes darted to the side, too slow, too weak to fight the molasses time had become. But still, I caught her. Just a fragment. A glow. Her lips, softly illuminated with light that had no source. Her skin like marble, her robes too layered and intricate for my brain to process in one glance. But the thing that snagged me—the thing that cracked my breath into fragments—was the single strand of emerald green hair hidden amongst her otherwise strands of pure white, pristine and strangely perfected in all the right ways.
Her voice was low and commanding.
"Calm yourself."
The words weren't spoken so much as injected. My vision shattered.
And in a split second, I was back.
The world slammed into place with the subtlety of a warhorn. The chamber. The doll. The chains. The cold wet kiss of the floor on my knees. The pulsing red light flickering down from the ceiling like the Tower had decided mood lighting was necessary for psychological crucifixion. My arms were still bound. The iron was still biting. But something had shifted. The room had shifted.
She was screaming.
The long-haired woman—the judge of wrath, the whispering spider who'd slithered around my trauma with surgical glee—was screaming. Sprawled across the stone like a puppet with its strings cut, her voice tore through the chamber, ragged and raw, echoing off the walls like it wanted to flay the stone with pitch alone. Her limbs spasmed. Her hair whipped in every direction as guards—massive, armored, and visibly unnerved—rushed toward her, trying not to trample her as she thrashed.
Then she pointed at me.
A single, shaking finger that trembled as if afraid of its own accusation.
"H-He's a monster!" she shrieked, eyes wide and white, lips trembling in wild spasms. "That wasn't his! That wasn't his wrath! That was—that was someone else!"
The guards tried to hush her. One bent low, speaking softly. She shoved him aside with a strength that didn't make sense in her thin, elegant frame.
"I saw him!" she screamed. "I saw the man with the face of death! I—I saw her! Such a creature is not meant to exist here! Not with him! Not inside his mind!"
Her hands clawed at her own scalp as if trying to rip the image out. Her mouth ran wild, words flooding out in gasping, splintered panic, fragmented by fear.
The guards didn't hesitate.
Two of them surged forward, and before I could blink, they were at my side. The chains cracked open—not gently, not ceremoniously, but violently, as if the stone itself had rejected their weight. They seized me by the arms and dragged me—boots skidding against wet floor, heels knocking against uneven tile—as the screaming behind us began to taper into whimpers.
Willow was waiting.
Sitting on the cot like she hadn't moved an inch, her legs crossed and one eyebrow arched like a courtesan watching a particularly disappointing performance.
The cell door slammed shut behind me. The air snapped. The weight of whatever that had been clamped down inside my chest like iron jaws refusing to loosen.
I stumbled upright.
"Did I—" I started, voice hoarse, cracked. "Did I pass? Did I clear the floor?"
The same massive guard from before stood outside the bars, looming like a thunderstorm that had learned how to smirk. He glanced sideways, jaw tight beneath his helm.
"There seemed to have been…an interference," he muttered.
My blood turned to ash.
"Interference?" I repeated, staggering toward the bars. "What does that mean? I faced the trial! I endured the my wrath! I did what the ritual demanded—"
"You will be…reassessed," he cut in, as if that explained anything. "Your case has been flagged for re-judgment. You will be called again when the chamber stabilizes."
"I don't have time for that!" I barked, slamming my fists against the bars.
The guard didn't flinch. He only turned, muttering something to the others before they all marched down the corridor, their steps fading into silence like gods leaving a battlefield.
I turned, panting, broken, brain boiling.
Willow, unbothered, slowly tapped the edge of the cot beside her.
"Reassessed?" she said, voice drenched in dry amusement. "Darling, you know you're either very special or very cursed when even existential torture doesn't know what to do with you."
I barely heard her.
I was pacing now, back and forth like an animal too intelligent for its cage. Reassessed. That meant delay. That meant waiting. And every second I sat in this cell doing nothing, Vincent was out there. Searching. Plotting. Winning. And behind him, deeper still—that thing. That presence. That man cloaked in nightmare who wasn't supposed to exist. And her. The woman from the cube. The hum was still ringing in the base of my skull like a divine migraine that hadn't finished blooming.
I clenched my fists. Thought of Elias. Thought of Vincent's tear. Thought of that shadow turning the corner.
No more cages.
I needed answers.
I needed out.
I turned to Willow, wild-eyed and half-feral. "We're breaking out."
She blinked once. Then smiled.
"Finally," she purred.