I watch him disappear behind the locked door for the third time this week. The same door on the second floor that Vassier warned me from.
But Dorian enters it like a man visiting church.
He vanishes into that room for hours. Returns hollowed out, as if whatever waits behind that door drains him more thoroughly than any hunger could.
What could hold such power over a creature who's lived for centuries? What makes a monster seek penance?
My curiosity burns worse than fear.
When he leaves for the evening hunt, I find Mira in the servants' quarters. My friend looks thinner, shadows pooling beneath her eyes like bruises. This place is killing us both, just at different speeds.
"I need the key to the locked room on the second floor."
Mira's face pales further, if such a thing is possible. "You can't. Marjorie says that room—"
"I don't care what Marjorie says. I need to know what my husband hides behind that door."
It takes an hour of pleading, of promises, of reminders that we're already damned. Finally, Mira produces an iron key, ancient and cold.
"The housekeeper will notice it's missing. You have perhaps an hour before—"
"An hour is enough."
The door opens on hinges that haven't been oiled in decades. The sound scrapes against silence like nails on glass.
Inside is a mausoleum dressed as a bedroom.
The bed still bears the impression of a body, sheets yellowed with age but perfectly preserved. Gowns hang in the wardrobe, waiting for someone who will never wear them again. A hairbrush on the vanity still holds strands of dark hair, each one a relic.
The realization strikes with bitter clarity. Of course, the chambers are hers. Everything remains exactly as she left it. The sacred shrine where my husband comes to worship his true wife while his replacement sleeps alone.
How utterly, wretchedly predictable.
A piano sits in the corner, lid open, keys yellowed like old bones. Sheet music rests on the stand, handwriting feminine and flowing. The title reads simply: For D.
The lyrics are there, visible even from across the room. A song of surrender, of desire twisted into death wish. The words blur through tears I didn't know were falling:
Love me hard, I’ll make you beg
Sink your teeth into my neck
Say my name like it’s a crime
I’m your poison, drink me dry
Isabelle wrote this. Isabelle, the ghost whose name no one speaks.
Isabelle, who apparently loved a monster and paid the price every bride before and after would pay.
I sit at the piano, fingers finding keys that haven't been touched in decades. The melody comes easily—haunting, minor key, a waltz for the damned.
I play it through once, twice, tears streaming down my cheeks as I sing words written by a dead woman for the monster we both married.
When the last note fades, I lift my head.
Above the mantle hangs a single portrait, massive, dominating the room with its presence. Oil on canvas, painted with the devotion of worship and the precision of obsession.
She's beautiful, this Isabelle. Dark hair that falls in waves past her shoulders, caught in some eternal wind. Pale skin that seems to glow against the shadows the artist rendered with loving care.
Full mouth curved in a secret smile, as if she knows something the world never will. High cheekbones that catch light like blade edges.
I step closer, drawn by something I cannot name.
The way she tilts her head in the portrait, slightly to the left, observing the viewer with those deep brown eyes—it's familiar somehow. The curve of her jaw, the arch of her brow, even the way her hands rest folded in her lap.
My breath catches. The room spins slightly, and I grip the piano for support.
No.
I move closer still, until I'm standing directly beneath the portrait, staring up at Isabelle's face.
At the nose that mirrors mine exactly. At the mouth shaped precisely like my own. At the cheekbones I see every morning in my mirror.
The only difference lies in the eyes—hers are brown where mine are green. But even that distinction feels fragile, insignificant against the weight of everything else.
We could be sisters. Twins, even, separated only by time and death.
My legs threaten to give way as understanding crashes over me. Fifty years without taking another bride. Fifty years of refusing every alliance, every offer, every woman presented to him.
Until he saw me.
No. He saw her.
Not me. Never me. Just her echo walking in my skin.
I don't hear the door open. Don't sense him until the temperature plummets, until my breath fogs in the suddenly arctic air.
Dorian stands in the doorway, and I've never seen him like this—wild, uncontrolled, the careful marble facade shattered entirely.
His eyes burn red, the veins beneath them black as infection, fangs fully extended. This is the monster without any mask at all.
"Get out." His voice doesn't sound human. Doesn't sound like anything that's ever been human.
I rise from the piano bench on trembling legs. "She wrote it for you. This song. She wanted you to—"
He moves faster than sight. One moment he's in the doorway, the next he's on me, slamming me back against the wall hard enough to crack plaster.
His hand wraps around my throat, holding me there as easily as one might hold a butterfly before tearing off its wings.
"She isn't just dead." The words spill out broken, bleeding from my lips. "You never let her go."
"GET OUT!"
The roar shakes the entire room. Picture frames fall, shattering on ancient floorboards. The piano strings hum discordantly, responding to his rage like the manor itself recoils.
A servant enters—young man, bringing fresh linens, wrong place, wrong moment—
Dorian turns with inhuman speed. The boy doesn't even have time to scream before fangs tear through his throat. Not the careful feeding I've witnessed, not the controlled sips at banquets.
This is savage, animal, the truth beneath centuries of pretence.
Blood sprays across Isabelle's portraits, across the piano keys, across me as I watch frozen. While my husband destroys an innocent child simply because he existed in the wrong moment.
The boy's body drops, drained in seconds, like it’s nothing.
Dorian's chest heaves unnecessarily, blood dripping from his chin onto the preserved carpet. When he looks at me, I see it with perfect clarity—with me, only with me, he restrains himself.
Everyone else is food. Everyone else can die for the crime of proximity when his control snaps.
"I said GET OUT!"
I run. Flee down corridors that seem to stretch and twist, past portraits whose eyes follow my escape, past windows that show nothing but darkness despite the early hour.
I run until I reach my chambers, slam the door, slide down against it gasping for breath that won't come.
My throat throbs where he held me. My tears won't stop.
I understand now with perfect, terrible clarity: I am his punishment.
Every day he looks at me and sees what he lost. Every day I remind him that Isabelle is gone, that all his preservation and shrine-keeping can't bring back the dead.
I'm the living proof of his failure—another bride, another woman who isn't her, another heart beating in the silence where Isabelle's stopped.
And he'll keep me alive, keep me safe, keep restraining himself until the weight of it drives us both mad.
Because killing me would be mercy.
And Dorian North has forgotten what mercy means.