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My vision suddenly went black. But then into the darkness came a beat. A pulse. A heart, but not mine. One hammering, frantic and afraid. Then light, just a flicker of it. A small stone room lit by a flickering fire. A pedestal. A box of dark and polished wood. Stone steps spiraling away into shadow in the corner, worn smooth by long-dead feet.

And a scream. A woman’s scream, ragged and teary, a cry for help with no breath left behind it.

Her.

My blood went to ice.

“ALEXANDRA!”

I came back to myself with hands gripping my shoulders, the gardens swimming into focus, my shirt soaked through, and sweat dripping down my face like tears. Aster stood before me, holding me up, his face a mask of alarm. And behind him, Lazaros kneeled in the grass, chest heaving, drenched in sweat, his eyes wide and fixed on mine.

“Something’s wrong,” I said… Hollow…. Quiet. As though whatever I had just seen had reached into me and drawn out all my strength through the wound.

And then I saw it.

Darkness. Rippling through my brother. A single dark wave rose behind his collar and crawled toward his jaw before it sank away into his hairline and was gone. There and gone in less than a heartbeat. My gaze cut to Laz, and I knew from the horror on his face that I had not imagined it.

He had seen it too.

“What the fuck just happened?” Aster’s voice boomed through the gardens, and I flinched at the sheer noise.

I shook my head, dazed, my mind scrabbling at the edges of the vision, at the box, the fire, the scream. The stone steps. Steps I hadn’t set foot upon in years and yet…

The memory surfaced slowly, then all at once, with the awful weight of a thing I should have understood the moment it happened.

The corridor.

Only yesterday, when I was walking her back toward the kitchens, her hand tucked into my arm and her cheeks still flushed from the archery yard. And the way she had simply… stopped.

In front of that plain, iron-banded door set into the old stone, the one I had passed ten thousand times and never once thought of as anything but storage. Yes. It had once been our prison. But since my father’s day a new one had been built, far from the city, and the old one left to the dark. I remembered, even as a boy, the haunted look that came over my father’s face every time he had to go down there. He bore it for as long as he could, and then one day he could bear it no longer, and demanded a new prison be raised elsewhere. The old one was given over to the kitchens, somewhere to keep the overflow through the winter months, surplus wine and ale, and little else.

My brother and I used to run riot through there as boys. And our father, whenever he caught us at it, would fly into a fury unlike anything else could ever rouse in him. We never understood it. His face, every single time, had not been angry so much as horrified. As though he had caught us chasing ghosts and not each other.

I had not thought of it in years. And yet now, standing here, I could not understand why the memory of those days had risen up to assault me so suddenly.

Then I remembered the way she had tilted her head. Gone still, and distant. As though she could hear some sound rising up through the wood that no one else in all the world could hear.

As though she were hearing the ghosts of every soul who had ever died down there, in the dark, in payment for their crimes.

‘What’s down there?’ she had asked in a faraway tone.

‘The cellars’, I had told her. And I had not told her the rest. The stairs that wound far deeper than any wine store, down past the foundations, into the old dark of the place. I had taken her by the hand and led her toward the smell of fresh bread, and I had thought no more of it.

She had heard something, I was certain of it now. Standing at that door, she had heard something calling her, and I had told her it was nothing.

“Lazaros.” I turned to my brother, and the certainty was a blade through my chest. “I know where she is!”

He dragged himself up off the grass, pale and shaking, one hand pressed to his head, and his eyes met mine with the same dawning, dreadful knowledge.

“So do I,” he breathed. “The prison, beneath the castle.” He swallowed. “Atlas… there are things down there… I can feel them now… Old things. Things our father must have sealed away and forbade us ever to see for a reason. The darkness, perhaps he felt it too?”

But I was already moving.

Already running.

Because the thread between us was thinning toward nothing with every breath I wasted. And somewhere far beneath my own feet, beneath the castle I had sworn to keep her safe within, the woman I loved was screaming for help in the dark.

And I had walked her past that door, and told her…