The carriage hits something—bone or branch, I can't tell—and I bite my tongue hard enough to taste blood.
Fitting, really. Blood before I even arrive.
"Stop doing that," Mira says, though her voice shakes. She means the way I'm picking at my mother's pearls, twisting them until they'll surely break. "You'll damage them."
"They're already damaged." I let them fall against my throat. "Everything we touch becomes damaged the moment we agree to these treaties."
She doesn't argue. We've been traveling for three hours through increasing desolation, and with each mile, the pretense that this is anything but a death sentence grows thinner.
The rain has turned vicious, attacking the carriage like it's trying to warn us back, but it cannot mask the sound of my own heartbeat, wild and desperate in my chest.
"Did you hear about Prince Dorian's previous wife?" Mira's voice breaks through the silence, barely audible above the storm. "Lady Isabelle Thornwood."
The name sends ice through my veins. "What about her?"
"The servants say he drained her himself." Mira's grip tightens on my hand. "Her body was found completely drained of blood just outside the manor walls. As if he'd deliberately placed her there to keep evidence off his property."
I file this away, another piece of the puzzle I'm trying to solve while the carriage races toward my doom. "What else?"
"Rosalind—"
"What else, Mira?"
She exhales slowly. "They found marks on her throat, yes. But also on her wrists. Her ankles. Behind her knees. Twenty-seven bite marks total, like he was savoring her slowly over months."
My stomach clenches, but I force myself to process this clinically. Twenty-seven. Specific. Deliberate. "There's a pattern there."
"The pattern is torture."
My stomach turns, bile rising in my throat. "You think he killed her? His own wife?"
"Who else would have done it?" Mira's voice carries the weight of certainty. "Fifty years have passed since then. He hasn't taken another bride until now."
"Why break fifty years of solitude for a political alliance then?"
The question tastes bitter on my tongue, though I already know the answer lurking in the shadows of my mind.
"The rebellions have grown more frequent these past months," Mira says, and I hear the tremor beneath her words. "More villages rising, more humans refusing to bow to vampire lords. Perhaps even monsters need allies when the world begins to turn against them."
Lightning illuminates the world outside. Skeletal trees reaching toward a merciless sky and abandoned villages with doors hanging open like mouths frozen mid-scream.
"Do you think she loved him?" I ask, though the question terrifies me more than any answer could.
She stares at me like I've lost my mind. Maybe I have. But madness might be the only thing that saves me.
"Does it matter?" Mira's voice breaks. "Love and death seem to be the same thing at Wintergrave grounds."
The carriage lurches to a stop so suddenly we're thrown forward. Through the rain-lashed window, I see why.
Wintergrave Manor doesn't just loom. It breathes.
The structure seems to pulse in the storm light, red stone walls that glisten with more than rain. It's built like something that grew from the mountain rather than was constructed on it.
Towers twist at angles that hurt to perceive. Windows stare down at us like hollow eyes, and I swear I see movement behind them, shadows that shouldn't exist.
"Welcome to Wintergrave, Your Highness."
The voice at the carriage door belongs to something that might have been human once and I see him. A skeletal butler standing beneath a black umbrella.
"I am Vassier," he says emotionlessly. "His Grace awaits."
The carriage door opens and cold mountain air rushes in, coating my lungs with the taste of iron and decay. I step out into the rain while the ground beneath my feet gives slightly, and I realize with nauseating certainty that we're not standing on mud.
It's moss. Blood moss. The kind that only grows where enough violence has soaked the earth that nothing else can survive.
The manor's doors open without anyone touching them. Inside, the air tastes like copper pennies and dead flowers, thick enough that breathing becomes conscious work. The entrance hall stretches impossibly far, lined with portraits.
"Your companion will be housed in the servants' wing," Vassier says, already moving to separate us.
"She stays with me." The words come out harder than intended.
Vassier's head turns too far, like an owl's. "His Grace's orders were quite specific. The lady's maid to the servants' quarters. The bride to the crimson suite."
We both know protest means nothing here, but it was worth trying.
Mira squeezes my hand once—our old signal for ‘be brave’—before a pale servant girl leads her away. I watch her disappear down a corridor and then I'm alone with Vassier and the watching walls.
Next was climbing stairs that creak with what sounds like whispers. The portraits here are newer, and I recognize some faces—treaty brides from the last century. All young. All beautiful.
Laughter floats from somewhere deep within the manor, too bright, too sharp, like glass breaking in slow motion.
"Your suite, Your Highness."
Behind the door the room hits me like a physical blow. Everything bleeds red—curtains, carpets, even the wood has been stained to match. But it's the bed that stops my heart.
Massive. Canopied. And wrong.
"One hour," Vassier suddenly says from the doorway. "His Grace expects you in the ballroom."
He leaves then, and I'm all alone.
A fire burns in the hearth, but its warmth feels wrong—too intimate, too alive. When I touch the wall, it pulses beneath my fingers, flesh-warm and breathing, as if the manor has a heartbeat of its own.
The bed dominates the room—massive, carved from wood so dark it devours light. I move closer, my wedding dress dragging through dust that tastes of iron when disturbed.
My hand reaches for the bedpost to steady myself, and that's when I see them clearly.
Scratches. The bedposts are destroyed—not just scratched but gouged, as if hands tried to claw through solid oak. But it's what's above the bed that makes me step back.
Even more scratches. On the canopy frame. The marks overlap, layer upon layer, as if multiple hands across multiple nights fought the same losing battle. Tried to climb upward, to escape something that came from below. Or perhaps...
I look down. The floor beneath the bed is stained darker than the rest. Not red but black. Old blood, soaked so deep it's become part of the wood itself.
Horror rises in my throat. I step back, and my elbow catches a vase on the bedside table. It falls, shatters—porcelain exploding across stone with the sharp sound of a scream.
I stand among the shattered pieces, evidence of those who came before scattered at my feet.
One hour remains before I must descend to meet the monster who owns me now.