CHAPTER 11 — THE THINGS THAT OWN HIM
1585 Words
The mansion should have felt familiar. Instead, it felt distracting.
Silas dropped a leather-bound journal onto the library table and unfolded another brittle map beside it. Ancient sketches of forgotten catacombs, faded family crests, coded letters stolen from monasteries—fragments gathered from kingdoms that no longer existed. Five centuries of searching lay scattered across the polished wood. Kings had died. Empires had collapsed. Churches had burned. Yet the key remained hidden.
He picked up a document written in Latin. Read the first line. Read it again. Nothing remained. A different image forced itself into his thoughts. Aria standing beside the classroom window as afternoon sunlight caught the silver strands of her hair. He shut his eyes. When he opened them, he forced himself back to the page. Three paragraphs later, he realized he had absorbed nothing.
For the first time in five centuries, every document he opened became another memory of Elise. He wasn't thinking about Aria. He was thinking about the woman he had buried centuries ago. The resemblance was making him careless, and carelessness cost time. Time meant failure. Failure meant Margaret.
His fingers tightened around the parchment. "Damn it." He hurled it across the room. The parchment struck an ink bottle. Black ink spilled over maps older than nations. Silas barely noticed. He reached for another journal. Read the same paragraph five times. Nothing. He picked up a different book entirely—a theological treatise on sainthood. He had no interest in sainthood. He set it down. Reached for a pen. Began writing notes on a fresh sheet of parchment. Halfway through the first line, he stopped. He had written "Aria."
Silas stared at the word. Then he crushed the parchment in his fist.
The resemblance wasn't perfect. Aria's eyes held fire. Elise's had held kindness. Their smiles were different. Their voices were nothing alike. But sometimes, for a single heartbeat, the distance between centuries disappeared. And every time it happened, he lost focus. Every time he lost focus, the key remained hidden. Every moment the key remained hidden, Margaret grew more impatient.
He hated it. It weakened him.
Elise had died long before the Church imprisoned Margaret. Centuries before the key had even become his purpose. He still remembered the wolves. The snow. The blood. The scream that never truly left him. He had buried what little remained of her with his own hands. The dead should remain dead. Yet Aria forced memories he had spent centuries burying back to the surface. Every memory stole another moment from the search.
Silas leaned against the table. "This changes nothing." The empty library swallowed the words. She was merely a student. A coincidence. A distraction wearing a familiar face. Nothing more. He needed to focus. He needed to find the key. He could not afford to waste another moment on memories of a woman who had been dead for centuries.
He looked at the crushed parchment in his hand. Unfolded it. Stared at her name again.
This resemblance was becoming a problem.
---
Sleep came without warning. The dream did not.
Darkness stretched endlessly around him. Silent. Ancient. Unchanging. He knew this place. He had stood here countless times across the centuries. A woman's footsteps echoed somewhere beyond the darkness. She never appeared. She never needed to.
"Five hundred years."
Her voice rolled through the void like distant thunder. Silas lowered his head. Not from fear. From habit.
"Five hundred years, and the key is still hidden."
Silence stretched between them, vast and heavy.
"You crossed kingdoms. You burned monasteries. You murdered priests. Yet now one schoolgirl has stolen more of your attention than the key."
The words struck harder than any blow. Silas said nothing. Because denial would have been a lie. Margaret always knew everything.
"I can feel distraction moving through my blood." Not yours. Mine. Her blood flowed through him. Her curse sustained him. Even separated by hundreds of miles, she felt everything.
"I have not abandoned my oath."
"No." Her voice remained calm. Terribly calm. "But for the first time since I sent you into the world, your purpose has begun to waver."
Ancient memories surfaced. A ruined cathedral. Broken stained glass. Blood covering cracked stone. Margaret standing before him, not as a prisoner, but as a queen. Power wrapped around her like a living storm. He had knelt. Not because she demanded it. Because there had been no other choice. He had sworn to free her. The words had faded with time. The weight never had.
"You remember."
"I do."
"Then remember this." Her voice became colder. "The key is the only purpose that has survived five centuries. I did not place you among humans so you could become distracted by ghosts."
Silas's jaw tightened. "She resembles Elise."
"Exactly." The word cut through the darkness like a blade. "Memory is wasting time. The key matters."
"I am aware of what matters."
"Then prove it."
---
"The girl wears the face of the woman you lost."
Silas remained silent.
Margaret: "And the blood in her veins belongs to the wolves."
His head snapped up.
"Impossible."
"The curse hides what she is. It does not change what she was born."
"You're lying."
"You know I cannot lie."
His breathing faltered. Fragments returned. Aria's heightened senses. Her unnatural instincts. The scent he could never quite understand. . Everything aligned. Everything made sense.
---
Pain exploded through his body. Every vein ignited. He collapsed. The dream shattered.
Silas awoke screaming into the darkness of his bedroom. His heartbeat hammered against his ribs. Fire raced beneath his skin. His own blood began rejecting him. He staggered toward a cabinet and tore it open. Bottles of preserved blood crashed to the floor. He drank. Nothing. The burning worsened.
"Drink living blood."
Margaret's voice came from everywhere and nowhere.
Silas refused. The pain increased. Every heartbeat felt like shattering glass. He gripped the stone fireplace. It cracked beneath his fingers.
"Disobey me again, and you will beg for death."
He could not speak. Could barely breathe. His veins burned with the certainty that his body was devouring itself.
"I have obeyed," he managed.
"You delayed."
"I searched."
"Not enough "
Another wave of agony bent him double. It felt as though his own blood wished to consume him.
"Find the key," Margaret commanded. "Or remember what obedience costs."
---
He fled the mansion. Not to hunt. To survive.
The forest blurred around him. Every heartbeat echoed inside his skull. Every scent tortured him. He covered his nose. It changed nothing.
Then another smell reached him. Holy oil. Silver.
A Church hunter stepped onto the woodland path, crossbow raised. Recognition flashed across the man's face.
Silas stopped. His breathing came in ragged bursts. "Leave." The word scraped out of his throat.
The hunter laughed. "I've hunted your kind for thirty years."
Silas's hands trembled. "I said leave."
"Silver bolt through the heart, and you're done." The hunter raised his crossbow. "Just like the others."
The bolt flew. Silas caught it inches from his chest. The silver seared his palm. He dropped it with a hiss.
"Leave," he repeated. Not because he feared the hunter. Because he feared himself.
The hunter reached for another bolt. "You're weak.
Margaret's voice echoed inside his skull. You have forgotten why I chose you.
Something inside Silas snapped. Not a conscious decision. A removal. She had taken away his restraint. The monster he had spent centuries controlling was unleashed.
He did not remember moving. He only remembered the hunter's crossbow clattering to the ground. He remembered the man's eyes widening. He remembered screaming. "I told you to leave!"
When the red haze cleared, the hunter lay dead at his feet. His throat was torn open. His body had been ripped apart. Silas stared at his own hands. They were covered in blood.
---
"See what you truly are."
Margaret's voice came softly now. Almost tender. That made it worse.
Silas fell to his knees in the forest mud. His body still burned, but the agony had faded to something bearable. Punishment complete. Lesson delivered.
"You have forgotten why I chose you." Her voice echoed through the darkness of the trees. "Do not mistake memory for destiny."
He looked at the dead hunter. At the blood on his hands. At the monster he had spent half a millennium trying to control.
"Find the key."
Long pause.
"Or I will erase the distraction myself."
Silas's head snapped up. "She is irrelevant."
"Then prove it."
"I will."
"You have three months."
The words settled over him like a sentence. He had come to Ashthorne for one purpose. The key. If Aria continued distracting him, then Margaret would remove the distraction herself. Not out of jealousy. Not out of petty cruelty. Because she was interfering with the mission. That was far worse. That made it logical. That made it inevitable.
Silas knelt in the darkness, surrounded by the remains of the hunter, and understood something he had never fully accepted. After more than five hundred years, he was not free. Margaret still owned him through the blood she had given him. And his growing inability to focus on the key had put both his mission and Aria's life in danger.
Three days. He would find the key. If the girl remained an obstacle, Margaret would remove her. That was simply how failure was punished.
He rose from the mud. Walked away from the hunter's body. Did not look back.
He had work to do.
- Writer
