Chapter 4 — What the East Wing Holds
773 Words
Three days passed.
I learned the castle's rhythms the way I learned any new kitchen — slowly, by feel, by trial and a great deal of error. The west corridor was safe in the mornings. The library on the second floor was always empty after midnight and always occupied before it. The garden, half-wild and smelling of night-blooming jasmine, was the one place where no one ever followed me.
That should have been my first warning.
It was on the fourth morning that I found the door.
I wasn't looking for it. I was following Otto's flour trail — he had been experimenting with a honey lavender loaf and had, in his eight-hundred-year-old distraction, left white footprints all the way down the east corridor before I realized where I was.
The east wing.
The door at the end was different from the others. The others were dark wood, heavy, carved with geometric patterns that I'd been told were protective symbols. This door was pale — almost white — and the carvings on it were different. They moved.
Not quickly. Not in a way that would catch your eye if you weren't paying attention. But I was paying attention. The lines shifted like breath, like something sleeping behind the wood.
I reached out without entirely meaning to.
"Don't."
I spun around. Damien was at the end of the corridor, perfectly still, watching me with an expression I hadn't seen on him before. Not cold. Something more complicated than cold.
"Sorry," I said. "I got lost following Otto's flour. I wasn't —"
"I know." He walked toward me, steady, unhurried, and stopped when he was close enough that I could see the details of his face clearly. He looked tired. Not the way humans looked tired, but some older version of it, like something worn thin over a very long time. "I should have had the corridor sealed. It wasn't — I didn't think you'd come this far."
"What's in there?"
A long pause. Behind him, a window showed the sky beginning to go the color of embers.
"Something from a very long time ago," he said finally. "Something I am not yet ready to discuss."
I wanted to push. Every instinct I had — the curious, relentless part of me that had always needed to know why a recipe worked, not just that it did — wanted to ask the next question and the one after that.
Instead I looked at him. At the quiet devastation he was trying very hard not to show.
"Okay," I said.
He blinked. As if he'd expected resistance.
"Okay?"
"You said when you were ready. So." I shrugged, stepped carefully away from the pale door. "When you're ready."
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "You're not what I expected."
I almost laughed. "Sera said the same thing about you."
Something shifted in his expression — not quite a smile, but something warmer than his usual careful blankness. He fell into step beside me as I turned back toward the west corridor, and for a while we walked in silence.
"The carvings," I said at last. "On your door. The ones that move."
"Mm."
"Are they alive?"
"In a sense."
"Is that a yes?"
"It is a vampire king's way of saying yes without committing to an explanation."
I stopped walking. He stopped too, a beat later, and looked back at me with an expression I was beginning to catalog — the one that meant he had surprised himself.
"Did you just make a joke?" I asked.
The corner of his mouth moved. "I have been known to."
"In the last thousand years?"
"Occasionally."
I started walking again, smiling at the floor so he wouldn't see it.
Behind me, very quietly, I heard him do the same.
✦ ✦ ✦
That evening, I made him something.
I don't know why. It wasn't a calculated move — I wasn't trying to soften him or win him over or make myself indispensable. It was simply what I did when I didn't know what else to do. I baked.
It was a small tart. Salted caramel, dark chocolate base, a scattering of sea salt on top. The kind of thing that tasted like it had thought about you before you arrived.
I left it outside his study door without knocking.
In the morning, the plate was back outside my chamber. Clean. With a single line written on a card in handwriting so precise it looked like engraving:
It was better than I deserved.
I read it four times. Then I put it in my pocket and went to start breakfast.
- Writer
