Seraphina woke to firelight and the strange, disorienting sense of having slept somewhere she had never meant to fall asleep at all.
She sat up too fast, the worn leather chair creaking beneath her, and found the study empty — Lucien gone, the fire burned down to embers but somehow still warm enough that the room hadn’t gone cold in whatever hours had passed.
A blanket, dark wool, had been laid over her at some point without waking her, tucked with more care than she’d expected from a man who spent most of their conversation looking like he regretted every word of it.
The small mirror was still tucked safely in her coat, resting against the mark on her chest, which had faded overnight from angry black to something closer to a faint, silvery scar — still visible, still hers, but quiet now, no longer pulsing with every breath.
“You’re awake.” Evelyne’s voice, when Seraphina drew the mirror out, sounded almost relieved.
“I was beginning to wonder if that mark had done more damage than either of us realized.”
“I’m fine.” Seraphina rubbed at her eyes, pushing upright out of the chair, taking proper stock of the study for the first time in daylight — or what passed for daylight in a castle with no visible windows, the firelight now supplemented by a soft, ambient gold that seemed to seep from the stone itself.
“Where’s Lucien?”
“Gone to deal with something, I’d imagine, given how this castle tends to occupy its lord’s time.” Evelyne’s reflection studied her with unusual care.
“You spoke with him a long while last night, before you fell asleep in that chair. What did he tell you?”
“Everything, I think.” Seraphina relayed the curse, the Hollow King, her mother’s visit and the choice she’d made with the mirror — and watched, as she spoke, Evelyne’s expression grow steadily more guarded, until by the end it had settled into something carefully, deliberately blank.
“He told you more than I expected him to,” Evelyne said finally.
“I’m not unhappy about it. I simply know Lucien Blackthorn rarely gives away that much truth in one sitting unless he’s already decided something important about the person he’s telling it to.” Evelyne’s gaze sharpened.
“Be careful, Seraphina. Not of him — I don’t believe he means you harm, whatever the villages say. Be careful of how quickly you’re inclined to trust anyone in this place, myself included. Three hundred years teaches even good people how to bend the truth into whatever shape keeps them safest.”
Seraphina considered that, turning the mirror over once in her hands.
“Is that a warning about him, or about you?”
Evelyne’s expression flickered — surprise, quickly smoothed over.
“Perceptive,” she said.
“Ask me again once you trust me enough to actually want the answer.”
Before Seraphina could press further, a soft knock sounded at the study door, and she tucked the mirror hastily back into her coat as it swung open to reveal not Lucien, but a woman she hadn’t yet met — older, silver-haired, dressed in simple gray with a ring of keys at her belt that jingled faintly as she stepped inside.
“You’re awake,” the woman said, in a voice warmer than Seraphina expected from anyone living in a cursed castle.
“Good. Lord Blackthorn asked that I bring you something to eat, and offered — if you’re willing — to show you a little more of the castle, provided you promise not to wander anywhere on your own just yet.”
Seraphina raised an eyebrow.
“Is that a rule, or a warning?”
“Both, dear, if you’re smart about it.” The woman set down a tray of bread and fruit on a small table near the fire, then gestured toward the study door with something almost like mischief in her expression.
“I’m Agnes. I’ve kept this castle running since before you were born, and I’ll tell you plainly what his lordship is often too careful to say outright — there are corridors in this place even I don’t walk alone, and you’d do well to let someone else lead the way until you understand which ones those are.” This chapter was taken from novelping . com without permission.
“How many are there?”
Agnes’s smile didn’t waver, but something behind her eyes did.
“More than there used to be,” she said.
“The castle’s been changing since you arrived, Miss Vale. Waking up rooms that have stayed quiet longer than I’ve been alive. I’d be lying if I said that didn’t worry me.”
Seraphina ate quickly, questions crowding faster than she could ask them, and followed Agnes out of the study into a corridor unlike the one she’d walked the night before — narrower, older, lined with portraits instead of tapestries, faces staring down from gilt frames gone dark with centuries of dust.
“Blackthorns,” Agnes said, noting the direction of her gaze.
“Every lord and lady this castle’s had, going back further than the paintings can even properly show anymore.” She paused before one portrait in particular — a young man with familiar golden eyes, dressed in clothes centuries out of fashion, his expression somehow both proud and deeply, quietly sad.
“That one’s Lucien. Painted not long before the curse took hold. He doesn’t like to look at it much, these days.”
Seraphina studied the portrait, struck by how little the face had changed in three hundred years, and how much the eyes in the painting seemed to already know something the young man in them hadn’t lived long enough yet to learn.
Further down the corridor, past a dozen more portraits, the hallway ended abruptly at a door unlike any of the others — black iron, banded and bolted in a way that looked less decorative and more like a warning, etched all over with the same thorn-and-rose pattern as the mirror’s frame.
“And that,” Agnes said, her voice dropping lower, “is exactly the kind of door I meant. That corridor’s been sealed since before I came to serve this house, dear. Whatever’s behind it, his lordship’s never once let anyone through — not staff, not visitors, not even, so far as I know, himself.”
Seraphina felt the faint scar above her heart give a slow, deliberate pulse, warm and insistent, as though something behind that door had just noticed her standing this close to it for the very first time.
“Then maybe,” she said quietly, more to herself than to Agnes, “it’s time someone finally did.”