The ash didn't burn.
It sat on Evelyn Vance's tongue like velvet dust, soft and deadening, as if someone had lined her mouth with felt so she couldn't taste the world properly. She swallowed anyway—because swallowing was the last private choice the Cold Palace still allowed her—and the poison slid down with the slow patience of a hand closing around her throat.
The room was white in the way hospitals tried to be clean and failed. White walls, white floor, white ceiling, all of it lit from hidden seams so there were no shadows to hide in. Even the air felt bleached. Only the restraints were honest: black leather bands around her wrists, the kind meant for expensive wrists. The metal clasp bit whenever she shifted, reminding her that pain was still permitted.
A thin screen of glass separated her from the corridor. She could see her own reflection in it if she angled her head: hair unbound, dark strands spilling like ink; lips pale; eyes too bright because her body had decided to spend its last resources on sight. The Spirit-Numbing Ash stole sensation first. Then it stole will. That was the point.
They wanted her pliable.
Evelyn flexed her fingers until the leather creaked. Her hand trembled—not fear, not yet, but the tremor of a body that had been starved of heat. She pressed her thumb to the inside of her wrist, where her pulse should have been comforting. It felt distant, like a signal traveling through a long wire.
Wire.
The thought came with a faint tug behind her ribs, a thread pulled in the dark. It wasn't pain. It wasn't even a full emotion. More like a pressure change before a storm.
Silas.
She didn't say his name out loud. Names were spells in old families, and the Vances had never stopped believing in spells. She kept the syllables behind her teeth and let her mind brush the tether like a fingertip testing a blade.
Nothing clear returned—no words, no images. The Wire didn't work like that. It gave her temperature. Weight. A sense of presence, like knowing someone is standing behind you without hearing them breathe.
Cold, distant, contained.
Alive.
Relief should have softened her. Instead it landed in her chest like a coin dropped into a well—one clean sound, then the hollow echo of what it meant.
Alive meant the curse still had something to feed on.
Alive meant she still had to finish what she started.
The door hissed open.
Two palace attendants entered first, moving with synchronized caution, eyes down, hands folded. Their uniforms were the same clinical gray as the corridor beyond the glass. They smelled faintly of antiseptic and expensive laundry detergent, the scent of people who never sweat.
Behind them came a man who did not belong in the Cold Palace's careful quiet.
He wore a suit so dark it swallowed light, tailored with the kind of precision that made fabric look like armor. His hair was silver at the temples, the rest black, combed back as if he'd pressed it into obedience. His shoes didn't squeak on the polished floor. Nothing about him announced itself—except the way the attendants stiffened, as if the air had suddenly acquired a rank.
He stopped at the foot of her bed and looked at her the way a collector looks at a painting he's deciding whether to hang or burn.
"Mrs. Thorne," he said.
The title hit like a slap. Evelyn kept her face still. She had learned early that reactions were currency, and this place trafficked in them.
"And you are?" Her voice came out rough, scraped by ash. She hated that. She hated needing water. She hated that her body betrayed her with small humiliations.
The man's mouth curved, not quite a smile. "Dorian Wren."
That name meant nothing to her. Which meant it was meant to mean nothing. People with real power didn't need famous names; they needed access.
He reached into his inner pocket and drew out a slim badge—sleek black, embossed with a minimalist emblem that looked like a stylized knot. He held it up without offering it.
"Internal Compliance," he said, as if the words themselves were handcuffs. "Thorne Holdings. Special appointment."
Evelyn's pulse bumped once, hard enough that she felt it in her throat. Thorne Holdings. Not the police. Not the courts. The corporation.
Her husband's empire.
Her husband's reach.
The Wire tugged again, faint but insistent, and for a moment she could have sworn she tasted metal beneath the ash, like blood remembered.
Dorian Wren leaned closer, his cologne clean and cold, something citrus sharpened with smoke. "I'm sure you're wondering why the company is interested in a private matter."
Private. As if imprisonment in the Cold Palace was a marital spat.
Evelyn let her gaze drift to the attendants, to their lowered eyes. They were listening. Everything in this room listened.
She lifted her chin a fraction. "If you're here, it isn't private."
His eyes flicked over her restraints, the pallor, the slight tremor in her fingers. He catalogued her weakness with professional calm. Then he said softly, "You've been accused of attempting to compromise a Thorne asset."
Asset.
The word made her stomach clench. Not because it was insulting—she'd been insulted in more creative ways—but because it was accurate in the only language men like this respected.
"What asset?" she asked, though she already knew.
Dorian's gaze held hers. "Mr. Silas Thorne."
Evelyn's breath caught, a small traitorous hitch. She forced it back down. "My husband is not an asset."
"Everything is an asset," Dorian replied, unbothered. "Some are just… sentimental."
He turned his head slightly, and one of the attendants stepped forward with a tablet. The screen glowed to life, reflected in the glass wall like a second, ghostly window.
On it: surveillance stills. Grainy, angled, taken from above. Evelyn recognized the curve of her own shoulder, the fall of her hair. Another image—her hand over a glass, a pale powder dissolving. Another—Silas's profile, sharp and unreadable, lifting the drink.
Her heart did not race. It slowed, heavy as a door closing.
Dorian watched her with the patience of someone waiting for a confession to ripen.
"You're very thorough," Evelyn said.
"I'm very employed." He tapped the tablet once, and the images shifted to something else: a medical report, black text on white, with a red stamp across the top. *PREGNANCY CONFIRMED.*
Evelyn's skin went cold in a way the Cold Palace could not take credit for.
The ash dulled sensation, but it couldn't dull the sudden awareness of her abdomen, the way her body had been quietly, treacherously building a future without asking her permission.
Dorian's voice softened, almost kind. "Congratulations."
The word was obscene.
Evelyn stared at the report until the letters blurred. Somewhere behind her ribs, the Wire tightened—like a finger hooking under a necklace and pulling. Not pain. Not comfort. A presence shifting, as if someone far away had turned their head.
Silas felt something.
Of course he did.
She swallowed, and the ash made it feel like swallowing paper. "Why are you showing me this?"
Dorian's eyes didn't blink often. "Because the company has an interest in the continuity of the Thorne line."
Continuity. Line. Old words dressed in modern suits.
Evelyn's mind moved the way it always did when fear tried to enter: it became a boardroom. Pros and cons. Risk assessments. Contingencies.
If they knew about the pregnancy, then—
Then the curse knew too.
Her family's superstition had never been superstition to her. It was a ledger written in blood: widow after widow, each woman blooming briefly in luxury and then rotting from the inside, each husband dying young, each child—if there was a child—never making it past infancy without something inexplicable taking them. The Vance curse didn't just punish love. It punished legacy.
And she had made a plan around that punishment. A plan that required precision and timing and a heart that didn't flinch.
Dorian Wren set the tablet down on the small metal table beside her bed, close enough that she could reach it if her hands weren't bound. A deliberate cruelty.
"Your current condition," he said, "is temporary. The Ash is… effective, but reversible."
Evelyn's eyes narrowed. "Why would you reverse it?"
"Because," Dorian said, and his voice lowered as if the walls might be offended, "Mr. Thorne has been… difficult to locate."
The air in the room shifted. The attendants' shoulders tightened. Even the lights seemed to hum louder.
Evelyn felt the Wire respond, a faint vibration like a phone on silent.
Silas was alive. Hiding. And now the company was admitting it.
Dorian continued, "He has certain… loyalties that make him unpredictable. We believe you can be useful in bringing him back into alignment."
Alignment. Like a misbehaving machine.
Evelyn let her gaze drift to the glass wall, to her reflection—pale, bound, eyes too sharp for her weakened body. She looked like a woman in a museum display: *Here is what happens when you try to leave.*
"You think he'll come for me," she said.
Dorian didn't deny it. He didn't confirm it. He simply watched, and in that watching was a kind of certainty that made Evelyn's spine prickle.
"I think," he said, "that he has always come for you."
The Wire tightened again, and this time it brought something with it—so faint she might have imagined it if she weren't starving for sensation: a steady, contained heat. Not joy. Not peace.
Resolve.
Silas's resolve.
It slid into her chest like a knife being sheathed.
For a moment, the corporate coldness she'd built her life around cracked, and something older breathed through. The Cold Palace's white walls seemed less like a hospital and more like a tomb. The lights became funeral candles. The ash on her tongue turned to grave dust.
A child.
A husband who had loved her since childhood—though she didn't know that yet, not truly, not in the way that mattered.
A curse that demanded a sacrifice.
And now a new man in a dark suit had arrived to tighten the net.
Dorian Wren straightened, smoothing an invisible crease in his sleeve. "We'll be speaking again, Mrs. Thorne. Soon."
He turned to leave, then paused at the door as if remembering something trivial.
"Oh," he added, almost conversationally, "there's someone else who wanted to meet you."
The attendants shifted aside.
A woman stepped into the doorway.
She was younger than Dorian, maybe in her late twenties, wearing a cream coat that looked too soft for this place. Her hair was pinned with a pearl clip, and her lipstick was the precise shade of a bruise. She held a small bouquet of white lilies—fresh, absurdly alive.
Her eyes found Evelyn's, and she smiled as if they were old friends.
"Evelyn Vance," she said, voice sweet as sugar over poison. "I'm Mira Lark. I work for the family."
Which family, she didn't say.
She lifted the lilies slightly, offering them through the air Evelyn couldn't reach.
"I brought you something," Mira continued. "A welcome gift."
The scent of the lilies hit Evelyn like a memory of funerals.
And somewhere, far north under a different name, a man she had not yet managed to kill drew a breath—steady, controlled—while the Wire between them tightened, thread by thread, as if the empire itself were pulling them back together.