Three days pass before I gather enough courage to seek him out.
Three days of that servant boy's blood haunting my dreams. OfIsabelle's song playing on repeat in my mind. Of understanding that I live in a mausoleum where the dead are more alive than the living.
My chambers have been changed—no longer drowning in crimson but wrapped in deep blue, like midnight, like the space between stars where nothing lives.
I'd asked for different colours and received the shade of suffocation instead. Even mercy here comes tainted with cruelty.
I heard them discussing it yesterday, Vassier and Lady Lydia, their voices carrying through the walls that breathe every secret through this place.
"Blue," Lydia had laughed, that tinkling sound like glass breaking. "She chose blue. How precious."
"His Grace approved it," Vassier replied in his dust-dry voice.
"Of course he did. It's the colour of corpses, after all. How fitting for Isabelle's replacement."
Their laughter had followed me down the corridor, clung to me like cobwebs.
But Dorian has vanished like smoke, like shame given form and fled.
I search the places I've learned he haunts—the study where ancient maps yellow at the edges, the tower where he watches storms roll across dead valleys. Even the wine cellar where bottles of pomegranate poison line walls like promises of self-destruction.
Nothing. Even Vassier claims ignorance, though his skeletal face holds something that might be concern. Or hunger.
I can no longer tell the difference.
"Walk with me," I tell Mira on the fourth morning, when the walls feel too much like a throat closing around me. "I need air that doesn't taste of blood."
The garden sprawls behind Wintergrave like a beautiful corpse. Winter has murdered everything with artistic precision—roses frozen mid-bloom, their petals crystallised into glass that shatters at the slightest touch.
The maze of hedges stands brown and brittle, paths leading nowhere good. Frost cracks beneath our feet like small bones breaking.
The cold bites immediately through my dress. I've forgotten my gloves again—my mind scattered since that night in Isabelle's room. Mira notices, pulls off her own worn leather ones without hesitation.
"Take them, my lady."
I accept without thought. It's what we do, what we've always done. She serves, I take. The leather is warm from her hands, soft from years of use.
Only after pulling them on do I notice how her fingers have already turned red from the cold.
"You look terrible," Mira says. "Your skin's gone grey as his. This place is eating you from the inside."
"I entered her room." The confession falls between us like a stone through ice. "Isabelle's room."
Mira stops walking. The cold has turned her lips blue, or perhaps that's fear. "My lady—"
"I saw her portrait." The words come out flat, dead. "We have the same face, Mira. Same features, same build, same everything except the eyes. I could be her twin."
Silence stretches between us, broken only by frost cracking beneath our shifting weight.
"So that's why," Mira says quietly. "Fifty years of refusing every bride, then suddenly he chooses you."
"He saw her face in mine."
"But he must know you're not her. He's not mad, just..." She searches for the word. "Haunted."
"Maybe that's worse. Maybe choosing me knowing I'm not her is the point. A daily reminder of what he lost."
Mira shakes her head. "Or maybe he's trying to save you both. Him from solitude, you from whatever fate awaited you otherwise."
"By trapping me here with his grief?"
"May I speak freely, my lady?" Mira asks carefully.
"When have you ever held back?"
"With respect, I need your permission for what I'm about to say."
I wave my hand—her glove loose on my smaller fingers. "Granted."
"You're not the first to notice. The servants saw it immediately when you arrived. They bet on whether he calls you by her name in bed."
The bluntness of it steals my breath. "He doesn't come to my bed."
"No?" Mira's surprise seems genuine. "Then what does he—"
"He leaves poetry. Removes thorns from roses." My laugh cracks. "There was a piano in her room. Sheet music. A song she wrote for him about wanting to die in his arms."
"You confronted him?"
"He caught me playing it. And there was a servant—a boy, bringing linens—" My voice grows quiet. "Dorian tore his throat out."
"He keeps verse like proof of love. That's sick."
"That's grief." The words surprise us both. I didn't mean to defend him, but here in the frozen garden, I find myself understanding. "Imagine loving someone so much that their absence becomes a physical wound. Imagine carrying that for fifty years."
Mira stares at me. "You're defending him? After what he did?"
"He only lost control when I invaded her space." I touch a frozen rose, watch it shatter beneath my fingers. "Monsters who try not to be monsters are still monsters, but the trying matters."
We've reached the garden's heart, where a fountain stands frozen solid. The water caught mid-fall, icicles hanging like fangs from cherub mouths. Beautiful and dead, like everything here.
Mira takes my hands and I feel how cold we both are, two ghosts pretending at life. "You're beginning to care for him."
"I'm beginning to understand him. There's a difference."
"Is there?" Her grip tightens. "May I share what the servants say?"
"You're asking permission often today."
"This one might hurt."
I meet her eyes, see genuine concern there. "Tell me."
"The master is doomed. That's what the older staff say. He drinks poison instead of blood. The pomegranate wine is killing him. Slowly, but certainly. Has been for years, perhaps decades."
The world tilts. I see it now, the signs I missed—the way he trembles after drinking blood, the grey undertone to his marble skin.
"If he dies..."
"You're left to Lady Lydia's mercy." Mira finishes the thought. "And we both know these two have none."
We stand in the frozen garden, surrounded by beauty that couldn't survive winter, and I understand the trap completely now.
Stay, and watch my husband slowly poison himself to death over a ghost, leaving me to his sister's savage graces.
Run, and die in the forests, or be dragged back to face worse.
"What will you do?" Mira asks.
I look at the frozen fountain, at the cherubs whose mouths scream silently beneath ice.
What can I do? I'm married to a monster who loves a ghost, protected only by his twisted honour and slow suicide, surrounded by vampires who see me as entertainment at best, food at worst.
"Survive," I say finally. "Somehow."