The days blur together in my new chambers, marked only by the sounds through the connecting door—bottles breaking, furniture overturning, and occasionally, Dorian's voice raised in argument with someone who never answers back.
He speaks to ghosts or memories or perhaps just the wine itself, demanding answers it cannot give.
I press my palm against the door each morning, testing for warmth, for any sign he's near. The wood remains cold. The handle remains locked.
After three days of silence from Dorian's room, I find Vassier in his study, cataloguing the wine stores with meticulous precision.
He doesn't look up when I enter, though I know he heard me coming.
"How many bottles has he consumed?" I ask without preamble.
"That is His Grace's private business, my lady." His tone remains professionally distant, but his hand trembles slightly as he makes another notation.
"Stop it, Vassier. Stop pretending this is normal, that watching him destroy himself is just another duty in your service."
"What would you have me do?" He finally looks up, and I see centuries of weariness in his eyes. "I am his servant, not his keeper."
"You're more than that and we both know it." I move closer, noting how he stiffens at my approach. "How long have you served him?"
"Two hundred and thirty-seven years, my lady."
"And in all that time, you've never seen him like this?"
Vassier sets down his pen with deliberate care. "His Grace has weathered many storms, but this... this may be the one that breaks him."
"Then help him," I plead, abandoning all pretense of dignity. "You've kept him alive this long, surely you can—"
"I cannot save someone who doesn't wish to be saved." His composure cracks slightly. "Do you think I haven't tried?"
"You care about him. Not as a servant cares for a master, but as—"
"As a father might care for a son he never had."
The admission seems to surprise even him.
"I've watched him grow from a creature, wild with hunger and self-loathing, into something magnificent. I've seen him master his nature, build this empire, maintain his humanity against all odds. And now I watch him pour it all away, bottle by bottle, and there's nothing—"
His voice breaks. "There's nothing I can do."
"He loves you too, you know. The way he speaks of you, trusts you above all others."
"Love is not enough to stop someone from destroying themselves, my lady. He must choose to help himself. No one can make that choice for him."
I stand there for a moment longer, watching this ancient man return to his ledgers with shaking hands, pretending the numbers matter when the master he's served for centuries is drinking himself to death one room away.
There's nothing more to say. No magic words that will make Vassier storm Dorian's chambers and force him to live.
"Thank you for your honesty," I tell him quietly, though the words taste like defeat.
He doesn't look up as I leave, but I hear him whisper, "Take care of him, my lady. If anyone can reach him now, it's you."
I want to tell him he's wrong, that I'm just as powerless as he is, but the door closes between us before I find the courage.
I spend my evenings at the window after that conversation, watching the courtyard below for any sign of life. The castle feels emptier now, as though Dorian's decline has infected the very stones.
Even the servants move quieter, speak less, their faces drawn with the anticipation of tragedy approaching.
On the fifth night, I wake to silence. The kind of silence that feels wrong. I slip from bed, bare feet silent on the cold floor, and approach the connecting door.
No light shows beneath it. No sound emerges when I press my ear to the wood.
"Dorian?" I whisper, then louder, "Dorian?"
Nothing.
Panic rises in my throat like bile. I pound on the door with both fists, not caring who might hear. "Open this door. Open it now, or I'll have Vassier break it down."
A laugh, dark and hollow, finally answers me. "Threatening property damage now?"
Relief floods through me so fast my knees nearly buckle. "You scared me."
"Everything about me should scare you." His voice comes closer, probably leaning against his side of the door now. "I'm drinking myself to death behind a locked door rather than face what I want to do to you. If that doesn't frighten you, you're not paying attention."
"What do you want to do to me?"
Silence stretches between us, heavy with unspoken truths.
"Everything," he finally admits. "I want to do everything to you, with you. I want to taste every inch of your skin, learn every sound you make when pleasure takes you completely."
Heat pools low in my belly at his words, at the raw hunger in his voice. "Then why…"
"Because I also want to drain you dry. Because I want to turn you into what I am, trap you in this eternal hell with me."
The confession hangs between us like a blade, sharp and devastating in its honesty.
I slide down the door until I'm sitting on the floor, knees drawn to my chest.
"I dream about you. Every night, I dream you come through this door and finish what we started in that tower. Sometimes the dreams are so vivid I wake up reaching for you, only to find cold sheets and this damned locked door."
"Rosalind..." His voice breaks on my name.
"I know you're dying. I can feel it, like watching winter creep over a garden. Each day you fade a little more, and I'm trapped here behind your protection while you disappear."
"Better that than the alternative."
"Is it? Is dying alone, drunk and broken, really better than taking the risk of living?"
Before he can answer, footsteps echo in the hallway outside my chambers. Mira enters without knocking, her face flushed with urgency.
"My lady, forgive the intrusion." She holds out a letter, seal unbroken. "This just arrived."
I recognize the handwriting immediately—Elias. My heart clenches at the sight of it, memories of the ballroom flooding back. Him standing there as Isabelle died, as the blood began to flow, and then... nothing.
He vanished like smoke.
"Your brother sent another message," Mira says, watching my face carefully. "The messenger says he'll try again. Says he won't abandon you."
I take the letter from her hands and tear it in half without opening it. Then quarters. Then eighths. The pieces flutter to the floor like snow, and Mira's eyes widen in surprise.
"My lady?"
"Leave me," I tell her, my voice harder than intended. "Now."
She backs out of the room, closing the door behind her with a soft click.
I stay on the floor, staring at the shredded remains of Elias's letter, thinking about the two brothers who've shaped my fate.
Elias fled when the blood began to flow, I realize with crystalline clarity. He abandoned his rebels to die whilst Dorian abandoned his humanity to keep me.
Two brothers, two betrayals, and I'm caught between them like a moth between flames, uncertain which will burn me first.