The needle caught the seam-light and threw it back like a tiny, perfect accusation.
Evelyn's muscles tightened before her mind could approve it. Leather creaked. The clasp bit her wrist, and pain—clean, sharp, honest—spiked through the ash's velvet fog. The attendant's gloved fingers steadied her forearm with the bored gentleness of someone handling expensive glass.
"No," Mira said, the word cracking at the edges.
Dorian didn't look at Mira. He didn't need to. His presence did the looking for him, the whole room arranged around his authority the way iron filings arrange around a magnet.
"Mrs. Thorne will rest," he repeated, and his voice made rest sound like a sentence.
Evelyn kept her gaze on the needle. She could almost feel it already, the cold kiss of metal, the bloom of something sliding into her bloodstream. The Spirit-Numbing Ash had been velvet dust; this looked like water pretending to be mercy.
Her mouth tasted like paper and pennies. The Wire behind her ribs hummed—tight, live, listening. Resolve pressed from the far end of it, not loud, not dramatic. Just there. Like a hand braced against a door that refused to open.
Evelyn forced air into her lungs, shallow and measured. "What is it?" she asked, because information was still a kind of control.
The attendant didn't answer. Her eyes stayed down, lashes barely moving.
Dorian did. "A sedative."
"Because I'm so unruly," Evelyn murmured.
Dorian's gaze slid to her restraints, then to the tablet on the metal table—still glowing faintly, still bleeding that red stamp into the sterile white. *PREGNANCY CONFIRMED.* He didn't have to say anything. His silence did it: *We can't have you thinking too clearly.*
Mira took a step forward, then stopped as if she'd hit an invisible wall. The attendants' bodies angled, subtle as a flock turning, and the air tightened around her.
"Don't," Mira said again, quieter now, like she was trying not to wake something.
Evelyn's eyes found Mira's. The cream coat looked suddenly too thin for this place, too human. Mira's hands were clenched at her sides, knuckles pale, as if she could squeeze courage out of her bones.
Evelyn spoke without moving much, the words shaped behind her teeth. "You wanted to warn me. This is your chance to be useful."
Mira's throat worked. Her gaze flicked—fast—to Dorian, then back to Evelyn. A silent question: *How do I do anything with him watching?*
Evelyn didn't have breath for a lecture. She gave Mira only what she could: a look, sharp and steady, the kind she used in boardrooms when men tried to interrupt her. *Find a crack. Pry.*
The attendant swabbed Evelyn's skin. The alcohol smell cut through the lilies, harsh and bright. Evelyn's stomach turned, and her body's betrayal made her furious—fury was warm, at least. Warmth was something the ash couldn't fully steal.
The needle hovered.
Evelyn let her mind brush the Wire, not gently this time. Not a fingertip. A palm. A push.
Nothing like words came back. The tether didn't translate. But she felt him—north, contained, coiled. A steady pulse of attention, as if he'd turned his head toward her name without hearing it.
Silas.
The thought slid through her with a strange, bitter tenderness she refused to examine.
Dorian's voice cut in, mild. "You're clenching, Mrs. Thorne. It will bruise."
"Then I'll match my lipstick," Evelyn said, and Mira made a sound that might have been a laugh strangled into a cough.
Dorian's eyes sharpened a fraction. He stepped closer to the bed, close enough that Evelyn could smell his cologne again—citrus and smoke, cleanliness with a threat underneath.
"You are not in a negotiation," he said softly.
Evelyn met his gaze. "People say that right before they lose."
For a moment, something like amusement flickered in Dorian's eyes. It didn't soften him. It only made him more dangerous, like a blade appreciating its own edge.
"Administer," he told the attendant.
The needle slid in.
It didn't hurt much. A small sting, then pressure. Evelyn watched the clear liquid disappear into her vein and imagined it spreading, a polite invasion. She tried to hold herself together in clean lines—chin lifted, shoulders still—but her body didn't care about pride. Her eyelids began to thicken almost immediately, as if gravity had doubled.
Mira's face blurred at the edges. The lilies' scent swelled until it was everywhere, funeral-sweet and suffocating.
Evelyn fought it. Not with thrashing—thrashing was for people who believed in rescue—but with focus. With counting. With anchoring herself to the few sensations the ash hadn't stolen: the bite of leather, the cold of metal, the hum of the lights, the tight, live thread of the Wire.
Dorian leaned closer, his voice lowered to something meant for her alone. "You can make this easier."
Evelyn's tongue felt too big for her mouth. "You're… already making it easy," she managed.
His gaze dropped again, almost lazily, to her abdomen. The glance was brief. It still felt like a hand.
"You don't understand what's at stake," Dorian said.
Evelyn's laugh came out wrong—thin, frayed. "Oh, I understand stakes. I married into them."
Mira's eyes flashed. She moved her lips without sound, shaping something Evelyn couldn't catch. A name? A warning? The sedative thickened the air between them, turning the room into water.
Evelyn tried to hold Mira's gaze, to pin her there like a note under glass. *Get it to him.* The last coherent thought she could afford.
The attendant withdrew the needle. A tiny bead of blood rose, bright as a pinprick ruby, then got wiped away before it could become anything.
Evelyn's head sank into the pillow. The white ceiling drifted, seam-lights stretching like halos. The corporate cold inside her—the part that made plans and kept ledgers—began to smear at the edges. In its place, something older stirred. The room didn't look like a hospital anymore. It looked like an altar.
The leather restraints weren't restraints. They were offerings.
The lilies weren't flowers. They were a prophecy.
Her lips parted, but her voice slipped. The ash and the sedative braided together, a rope tightening around her will.
Dorian straightened. "We'll continue when you're… receptive."
Mira stepped forward again, desperation making her reckless. "You can't—"
Dorian lifted a hand, not even looking at her, and the attendants moved. One of them touched Mira's elbow—not hard, just enough to redirect her like a misfiled document.
Mira's eyes stayed on Evelyn. Wide. Bright. Wet at the rims.
Evelyn tried to speak. The word wouldn't form. Her tongue felt like it belonged to someone else.
So she did the only thing left.
She reached for the Wire.
Not delicately. Not cautiously. She pushed her awareness down that thread until it burned. Until the hum became a scream only she could hear. The tether tightened, and in that tightening she felt him react—an answering tension, immediate, instinctive, like a hand grabbing the other end of a rope.
For one heartbeat, the distance shrank.
She didn't see Silas. The Wire didn't give visions. But she felt the shape of him: a steady, brutal calm; the edge of exhaustion kept under lock; and beneath it all, something that made her chest ache in a way the ash couldn't numb.
Attention.
As if he'd been listening for her even while hiding under another name.
Evelyn let the feeling slam through her, not comfort, not forgiveness—just contact. A flare in the dark.
*Alive,* she tried to send, though she didn't know if the Wire carried thoughts. *They're pulling.*
The sedative dragged her under in slow, thick waves. The room dimmed at the edges, like a camera lens closing.
Mira mouthed something again, more urgent now. Evelyn caught only fragments: "—north—" and then "—don't—" and then Mira's lips formed a word that looked like *Zhou* before the attendants blocked her with their bodies.
Zhou Yan.
Silas's alias, spoken without sound.
Evelyn's mind snagged on it, the way a hook catches fabric. Mira knew. Mira knew where he was—or at least what he was called.
A new variable slid into Evelyn's mental ledger, even as the ledger dissolved into black ink.
Dorian's shoes whispered on the polished floor as he moved toward the door. "Lock the room," he said. "No visitors."
Mira's voice rose, sharp with panic. "You're making it worse."
Dorian paused at the threshold. He turned his head just enough for Evelyn to see his profile, clean and indifferent in the seam-light. "Worse for whom?"
Mira's mouth opened. No answer came out. In that silence, Evelyn heard the truth: worse for everyone. Worse for the city under the glass. Worse for the old debts. Worse for the child in her body, unasked-for and suddenly priceless.
The door hissed.
The room sealed.
The attendants became statues again. The tablet's glow remained, a small, cruel lighthouse on the metal table beside the lilies.
Evelyn lay strapped to white sheets, sinking through layers of numbness. The ash dulled her skin. The sedative dulled her mind. But the Wire—stubborn, ancient, unpaid—stayed bright.
It tightened one last time, a live thread pulled taut across the empire.
Somewhere far north, a man under a borrowed name would feel it like a tug on his ribs. Not a message. Not a map.
A summons.
And in the Cold Palace, Evelyn drifted toward darkness with the taste of lilies and metal in her mouth, already calculating through the fog: Mira knew the alias. Dorian wanted alignment. The company wanted continuity.
The curse wanted blood.
Her future happiness—her desperate, fiercely protected future—hung somewhere between those demands, trembling like a drop of water on steel, waiting to fall.