Perhaps the Ferrons weren’t as wealthy as their home would make them seem.
The house did appear understaffed. Their butler was a corpse—perhaps all the servants were. If they were desperate for money, that would explain why they had no choice but to keep Helena, and why Ferron spent his time hunting down Resistance fighters rather than managing his family’s guild and factories.
She remembered the Ferrons being among the wealthiest families in Paladia. They’d invented industrial steel manufacturing, allowing them to monopolise more than just Paladia’s steel industry. Most neighbouring countries had sourced from the Ferrons, too.
Clearly their fortunes must have turned if their house was in a condition like this.
She went to the nearest window. There was a radiator bolted beneath it, and the window was latticed with wrought iron and locked tight. No jumping, then.
She touched the iron with a fingertip and felt nothing. No connection to the cold metal, just that dead, empty feeling emanating through her wrist.
She pressed the length of her hand against it, bitterly missing her resonance. The world she’d known was always full of energy, humming with power that she’d been attuned to since birth.
Now everything was still. The constant sense of inertia was disorienting.
Peering through the paned glass, she saw wilderness and mountains.
She reconsidered her plans. If the necrothralls were there to watch her, they’d likely been commanded to keep her from killing herself.
She drummed her fingers on the windowsill, ignoring the little shocks of pain it sent up her arm.
Ferron, unfortunately, was not the stupid, deluded patriarch she’d hoped for.
His resonance was like Morrough’s, beyond anything she’d known was possible, but what worried her most was the way he’d gone through her memory. Morrough had done something similar, but that mental violation had been brutal and haphazard; Ferron had been surgical.
She’d assumed his quick kills were a sign of impulsiveness, but there’d be no need to keep prisoners if he could look inside their minds and take the answers.
How could she outwit someone like that? Could he see memories alone or her thoughts, too?
She turned from the window, surveying the room, wondering if his strange appearance was an effect of his abilities.
The Undying didn’t change after their ascendance. It was a part of the “gift.” Unless their bodies were so destroyed that they became liches, they were immutable. They could lose entire limbs and grow them back.
What would make Ferron look like that?
He seemed—distilled. As though he’d been taken and sublimated until all that was left was an essence—something deathly cold and gleaming. The High Reeve.
Not a person, but a weapon.
Well, Helena would be sure to treat him as one.
CHAPTER 4
IT TOOK HELENA MERE MINUTES TO EXPLORE every corner of her room and the adjoining bathroom. She was provided with only the most essential objects: soap, towels, a toothbrush, and a metal cup for water. She squeezed the cup, trying to bend it and work it. If she could break it, she’d have a nice sharp edge to slit her arteries open.
After several minutes of trying, all she had were dents in her thumbs and throbbing pain in both wrists.
Next she tried pulling down the mirror, but it was welded to the wall so firmly she couldn’t even get her fingers under it. It didn’t break when she tried hammering it with the cup, either.
She stepped back, glaring at the glass, and winced at her reflection.
She scarcely recognised the person scowling back. Sallow skin that had seen no light in more than a year, long black hair tangled almost to mats around her face. Her features were all sunken. She’d look like a necrothrall herself if not for her furious dark eyes.
She went back to the bedroom and was disappointed to find that there weren’t any drape cords for her to try to hang herself with. She checked behind all the curtains, in case one had been missed.
Just live, Helena, a voice in her mind begged.
She paused, fingers tracing the pattern on the curtain, trying to stifle it.
Luc … oh, Luc. Of course he would haunt her, refusing to accept a pragmatic choice. If he were there, he’d be telling her that her plan was terrible. He’d hated that kind of thing. People sacrificing themselves because of him or his family. He always felt responsible, convinced that if he was better, he could save everyone.
She could hear him now, telling her stubbornly that she wasn’t going to die. She could come up with a better plan if she’d just stop fixating on this one.
She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Luc. This is the best I can do.”
She went to the door leading to the hallway.
The instructions to stay out of sight implied she could leave her room. Her body trembled in anticipation, heartbeat quickening.
She gripped the knob, and it turned easily. The heavy door swung open, revealing a long corridor spilling into darkness, but rather than exhilaration at this freedom, Helena’s heart stopped.
The sconces along the wall were no longer illuminated. She hadn’t noticed how ominous the corridor was, thin and winding, full of creeping shadows like teeth that gave way to a mouthlike darkness.
She was used to constant light in Central.
She stood frozen. It was irrational. It was a house. She’d seen too many real, awful things to be afraid of shadows and hallways, but her legs wouldn’t move. The doorknob rattled in her hand.
The darkness was like a pulsing oesophagus, the long shadows swaying with the wind, threatening to swallow her. If she stepped out, she’d fall into the cold, awful, unending dark again.
She would never be found.
Terror coursed through her as the shadows stirred again, crawling towards her.
Her chest spasmed, sending a shock of pain through her lungs. She shrank back into the room and shut the door, her body pressed close against the reassuring surface of it, lungs and heart pulsing. She couldn’t breathe.
She knew the terror of the stasis tank would haunt her, but she had not realised the way it had rooted itself inside her, grown through her nerves and organs to paralyse her.
She stayed crouched, without sense of time, until there was a rap at the door, the soft clatter of dishes, and retreating footsteps.
She cracked the door open and found a cloth bundle and a tray of food. Pulling them inside quickly, she tried not to see the vanishing darkness again.
The door safely closed, she stared in revulsion. The meal was pig slop, as if someone had taken kitchen scraps and the day’s leftovers, put them in a pot, and boiled them. She’d sooner starve.
She shoved the tray aside.
Untying the bundle, she found sets of underclothes, wool stockings, and one dress, red as blood.
There were stitch marks along the hems and the neck and bodice from where the details and lace had been carelessly ripped off to make it as plain as possible.
Helena wished bitterly she hadn’t flinched at the sight of those roses.
She looked over at the food again. She’d have to be careful around Aurelia.
At the bottom of the bundle were three sets of slippers. Dancing slippers by the look of them, impractically thin-soled and delicate shoes with ribbon laces, cast off because the fabric on the toes was wearing thin and they’d lost their satiny sheen.
Aside from the stockings, Helena put it all into the wardrobe, preferring to remain in the thin scratchy dress from Central.