The clock strikes three when he comes to me.
No knock. No warning. The door simply opens, and Dorian stands in the threshold like a wound cut into the darkness.
Still wearing his feast clothes, though the blood has been cleaned from his lips. Still beautiful, though I know now what that beauty conceals.
I sit at my vanity, refusing to turn. I watch him in the mirror instead—this creature who drinks from servant girls whilst maintaining eye contact with his wife, this contradiction of restraint and hunger who leaves me poetry.
"You're awake," he observes.
The words settle in the space between us, heavy as stones.
"Sleep requires a certain peace of mind I seem to have misplaced." I set down my brush with deliberate calm, though my pulse hammers betrayal against my throat. "Perhaps I dropped it somewhere between the wedding vows and watching you drain that child."
"She volunteered."
The casualness of it. The dismissal. As if consent can exist in a manor where the walls themselves breathe submission.
"She was drugged with pomegranate wine."
He enters my chamber properly now, and the temperature drops with him.
The fire in the hearth cowers, flames shrinking as if they, too, understand what stands amongst us. The shadows deepen, pooling in corners like spilt ink, and I feel the room itself recoil from his presence.
"You disapprove of my nature."
Tedious. The word cuts deeper than it should, reducing my horror to an inconvenience, my fear to a bore.
"I disapprove of the performance." I finally turn to face him, finding fury easier than fear. Always easier than fear. "The way you watched me whilst you fed. Like you were teaching me something. Or punishing me. I haven't decided which."
"Perhaps both."
The crimson room seems to pulse around us, those flesh-warm walls breathing their strange life. I see him notice my awareness of it, see something like amusement flicker across his marble features.
Everything here lives because he permits it. Everything here submits because he demands it.
"This room offends me," I say suddenly, the words spilling out before I can stop them. "Everything is drowning in red, like I'm living inside a heart. Or a threat. Could I not have even one choice? One single thing in this place that belongs to me?"
"A choice?" His laugh is soft, dangerous, the sound of silk drawn across a blade. "How novel."
He moves closer, each step deliberate, predatory. I hold my ground though every instinct screams run.
But where would I run? This is his domain. These walls breathe because he wills it. These flames cower because he exists.
I am trapped in a living cage that beats with his pulse, not mine.
"You want choices," he says, now close enough that I can smell wine on him, sweet and wrong, like fruit left too long in the sun. "You had a choice. The wine. You poured it out the window like a fool."
"That wasn't a choice. That was a trap dressed in mercy."
"Everything here is a trap." His hand rises to my face, fingers hovering just shy of contact. The almost-touch burns worse than contact would. "Some are simply kinder than others."
The space between his fingers and my skin thrums with possibility, with threat, with something I refuse to name.
"Is that what you tell yourself when you leave me poetry? When you remove the thorns from roses? That you're being kind?"
Something shifts in his expression—a crack in marble, quickly sealed. But I saw it. I always see the cracks now, have learned to look for them in the perfect mask he wears.
"You kept them."
"I'm sentimental about my manipulation. It's a character flaw."
His jaw tightens. I'm irritating him, I can see it in the way his stillness becomes less controlled, more coiled.
Good. Let him feel something other than that terrible emptiness. Let him burn with something human, even if it's only an annoyance.
"You speak so cleverly," he says, voice dropping to barely above a whisper. The quiet of it is worse than shouting would be. "Always so ready with your wit, your words. Do you think they protect you?"
"I think they remind you I'm not her."
The word hangs between us. Isabelle. The ghost that haunts every corner of this cursed union, whose absence shapes my presence more than anything I could ever do.
His hand finally makes contact, fingers cold against my jaw, tilting my face up to meet his gaze. The touch burns with frost, with finality, with possession I cannot escape.
"No," he agrees. "She knew when to be silent."
"And look how well that worked for her."
The crack in his control splits wide.
He kisses me with violence barely leashed. His mouth burns cold against mine, and I taste sweetness and copper mingling into something that shouldn't exist.
When I try to pull away, his hand tangles in my hair, holding me still. His teeth graze my lower lip, sharp enough to almost break skin, and I feel the moment his control shatters entirely.
The world narrows to this point of almost-pain.
He wrenches himself away, turning his back to me. I watch him fumble for the wine bottle on my mantle—when did he bring it?—watch him drink deeply, desperately.
The sound of his swallowing fills the room, wet and wrong.
When he turns back, I see what the wine costs him.
His face transforms. The marble perfection cracks to reveal the monster beneath—fangs extended like delicate daggers, eyes flooded crimson as fresh blood, and beneath them, a network of veins darkening his skin like infection, like death wearing a beautiful mask.
This is what I married.
"Is this what you wanted to see?" His voice comes out distorted by the fangs.
I should run. Should scream. But I am tired of pretending horror is the only thing I feel.
"Yes," I say simply.
The confession seems to break something in him. The veins fade, the fangs retract, the red bleeds from his eyes. He looks more exhausted than any immortal should.
For a moment, I see not a monster but a man drowning in his own nature.
"The room," he says quietly, moving toward the door. "Choose whatever colours you wish. Vassier will arrange it."
The door closes behind him with the finality of a coffin lid. The walls continue their breathing around me, in and out, in and out.
I touch my lip where his teeth nearly broke through, and the revulsion rises in my throat like bile. I spit into the basin. Once. Twice. The taste remains.
You want more, a voice whispers. Not his. Mine. The treacherous part of me that responded to his kiss even as my mind screamed in protest.
"No," I say aloud to the empty room, to the breathing walls, to myself.
But the word sounds hollow even to my own ears. Because I know, with the certainty of the damned, that when he comes again—and he will come again—I will not turn away.
And I will hate myself for it until the day I die.