I don’t know how long they left me in the freezing-cold cellar.
In the dark it was impossible to tell. Maybe it was hours. Maybe days.
The cold had a way of stretching time, pulling it thin and taut like taffy until it snapped and lost all meaning.
Or maybe it was only a few minutes and I was being dramatic. That felt possible too.
The cold came in waves at first. Then it stopped coming in waves and just became the air itself, the walls, the stone floor pressed against my cheek.
My fingers turned blue. I held them up and stared at them in the dark, not that I could see much, and thought: ’that’s not a good sign.’
The shivering started somewhere around what felt like the second hour. Deep, uncontrollable shuddering that rattled my teeth and made my ribs ache.
Then, at some point, the shivering slowed.
I started to feel warm.
That was when I understood. I’d read it somewhere, a long time ago, in a life that wasn’t this one.
The body gives up on shivering when it doesn’t have the energy left to shiver.
The warmth you feel at the end isn’t warmth. It’s just your nerves lying to you. A parting gift from your own biology.
I was dying of cold exposure.
I closed my eyes, figured that was probably that, and waited.
"WAKE UP!"
My eyelids cracked open.
Lady Beatrice Crystalion stood over me with her arms crossed over her chest and one foot planted directly on my stomach, the heel of her shoe grinding into my gut like she was stubbing out a cigarette.
The cellar had a single torch behind her and it framed her in orange light. She looked like a painting. She looked furious.
She looked, I had to admit, extraordinary.
"Who are you?" she said.
"Huh?" I croaked.
It came out garbled, barely a sound.
My throat had been scraped raw by the cold and my lips were cracked open and bleeding, split down the middle like old leather left in the sun. Speaking felt like chewing glass.
She looked at me for a moment.
Then she turned, picked up a wooden bucket sitting against the wall, and dumped the entire thing on my face.
Ice water. Every nerve ending in my skull fired at once.
I gasped and choked and tried to sit up, which just drove her heel deeper into my stomach.
"How dare you," she said, "commit such foul acts inside my home."
She said it quietly. That was almost worse than shouting.
"Who are you? Who sent you?"
I blinked water out of my eyes. Tried to focus on her face.
"I don’t know what you’re talking about," I managed.
"Stop these games." She tilted her head, assessing me the way you’d assess a broken piece of furniture you were deciding whether to repair or burn.
"Know this. When my son returns in a few days, he shall sever your head from your neck. I’ve already decided that much.
The same fate awaits that maid. That whore. I should have never hired Meena off the streets. It was a mistake I won’t repeat."
Something sharpened in my chest despite the cold.
"Meena has nothing to do with this," I said. "It was all me. Every bit of it."
"Hmph." She didn’t look convinced. "You two probably plotted this together from the beginning."
I couldn’t exactly argue the point without explaining who had actually sent me, which felt like a worse conversation to have.
I shifted on the stone floor instead, repositioning myself, letting my shirt fall open a little at the collar.
If I was going to die in this cellar I was at least going to go down swinging.
I looked up at her.
"Has anyone ever told you," I said, "that you’re very beautiful?"
The silence that followed was complete.
Lady Beatrice Crystalion looked down at me the way you’d look at a dog that had just spoken. Revulsion. Disbelief. Something underneath that that I couldn’t name.
"You and I," she said slowly, "are as different as the sun and the earth."
She said it like she was explaining arithmetic to someone slow. "I am out of your league. You are a base man. A commoner. The bloodline of my family is as old as the city of Windmoor itself.
Every stone in this estate was laid before your grandfather’s grandfather drew his first breath." She leaned down slightly. "Do not think your worm tongue is going to get you out of this."
I glanced up at the bar hovering above her head.
It had crept further into the red.
’Fuck.’ Not good. That was deeply not good.
This was the woman I was supposed to seduce. This was the whole assignment.
Beatrice Crystalion, widow, aristocrat, gatekeeper of information the Demon King needed.
Selena had been very clear when she’d pressed the mission dossier into my hands. ’Let absolutely nothing get in your way.’
She hadn’t been clear on what would happen if I failed, but I already knew.
She’d find someone else. Someone more charming, more capable, more everything. And I’d be left here in this cellar with my head eventually removed from my shoulders.
This was my only shot.
And I was blowing it spectacularly.
"Why did you come here?" Beatrice asked again, with the patience of someone who had already made all her decisions and was simply filling time.
"I told you," I said. "The butler position."
"So you finger my maid in the middle of my drawing room." She said it flatly. "That is the behavior of a man seeking employment."
"That’s a fair point," I admitted. "I have a fairly substantial sex drive. She was attractive. Things escalated." I held her gaze. "But she’s nothing. She’s nobody, compared to a woman like—"
Her foot connected with the side of my head.
Not the heel this time. The pointed toe. It made a sound I didn’t enjoy.
"I told you," she said calmly, "not to try that with me."
I lay very still for a moment. My skull felt like it had been rung like a bell.
My mouth filled with blood, slow and copper-warm, and I turned my head and spat it out onto the stones and watched it spread between the cracks.
I looked back up at her.
"Give me a chance," I said.
She laughed. It was a short, genuine laugh, which somehow made it worse.
"You are mad," she said. "Genuinely. You understand that, yes? You are a spy or a thief or a lunatic lying on the floor of my cellar asking me for a ’chance’."
She shook her head. "Tell me who sent you. Answer honestly, and I give you my word your death will be clean. Quick. You won’t suffer. I’m capable of that much mercy." She paused. "Who sent you?"
I looked up at her in the torchlight. My teeth were coated red when I smiled.
"I don’t feel like saying."
Something moved across her face. Past anger. Past contempt. Into something quieter and colder and more final.
She stepped back. Swung her foot. And drove the pointed toe of her shoe into the side of my skull with everything she had.
My vision fractured into white and black pieces, like a mirror dropped on tile.
Then it all went dark.
Then there was nothing at all.