The Enemy's Vow

The Worst Room

(Damien)

I have the staff move her belongings to the attic on the third day.

There is no dramatic reasoning behind it, not really, only a slow accumulating irritation I cannot name cleanly, watching her walk the halls of my house like she is measuring it for herself rather than accepting the size of the cage I have built for her. Marcus reports she has explored nearly every unlocked corridor in the east wing. The staff report she asks no questions, demands nothing, thanks them with a quiet courtesy that unsettles them more than hostility would.

I decide the guest room I gave her, with its four poster bed and view of the gardens, is too generous as a beginning for a woman who put a bullet in my shoulder three nights ago.

The attic sits at the top of the north stairs, a space that was once storage before storage moved elsewhere and no one bothered to convert it into anything better. The ceiling slopes low enough that a tall man would have to duck. The single window is cracked along the bottom pane, patched years ago with tape that has yellowed and peeled at the corners, letting a thin whistle of cold air into the room whenever the wind picks up outside. There is a narrow bed with a mattress that has gone thin and lumpy with age. No rug. No fireplace. In winter, which is close enough now to smell in the mornings, this room will be closer to a freezer than a bedroom.

I tell myself I am testing her. I tell myself this is simply the natural continuation of everything I promised at the altar, the rules, the boundaries, the slow education in exactly what she has married into. I do not examine too closely the part of me that wants, very specifically, to see her face c***k when she understands what I have done.

She does not give me that.

I am there when the staff shows up with her, standing at the bottom of the stairs where she cannot easily see me but I can see her, and I watch her step into the doorway and take in the room, the broken window, the thin mattress, the bare walls, with an expression that does not change at all. No horror. No plea. She sets down the single bag of belongings she brought from her father's house and says, to the maid hovering nervously behind her, "Thank you. That will be all."

The maid glances toward the stairs, toward me, uncertain, and I give the smallest shake of my head, and she scurries off, leaving Lyra alone in the doorway of the worst room in my house.

She closes the door.

I expect, later that evening, some request. A note sent through staff, perhaps, asking for a different arrangement, or at minimum for blankets against the cold that is already settling into the manor's old bones. I have the cameras installed in that room specifically for this reason, small discreet lenses tucked into the corner molding where she will not think to look for them, because I want to see it. I want to watch the moment her composure finally gives.

It does not come.

I watch on the small screen in my study as she sits on the edge of the thin mattress, testing it with her palm, and then, apparently finding it not satisfying, moves to the floor instead, back against the wall beneath the window, legs drawn up, a single thin blanket from her own bag wrapped around her shoulders. She has a book. I don't know where she found it, some paperback with a cracked spine she must have taken from the library on one of her explorations, and she lights a stub of candle she has produced from somewhere, and she reads.

She reads for two hours by that thin, flickering light, in a room cold enough that I can see, even through the grainy camera feed, the faint fog of her breath.

I wait for her to give up. I wait for the moment she blows out the candle and curls into herself and lets even a single sound of misery escape her, something I could hold onto, some proof that the woman who shot me is not, in fact, made of something harder than I anticipated.

She turns the page instead.

Midnight comes and goes. I should go to bed. I have a company to run in the morning, meetings that do not care what happened at my wedding or what I have done with the woman I married in spite, and yet I sit in my study with the small grey screen glowing in the dark, watching a woman refuse to break in a room I built specifically to break her.

I hate her for it. The thought arrives clean and immediate, no hesitation behind it. I hate the particular stubbornness in the set of her jaw as she reads, the way she does not once look toward the door like she is hoping someone will come, the way she treats the cold like an inconvenience rather than a punishment, like she has slept in worse rooms before and this one does not even rank among her worst nights.

I think of my own worst night. I don't mean to. It arrives uninvited the way it always does, late, in the dark, when my guard has worn thin enough for old wounds to find their way back in. Twelve years old, hidden in the passage behind the library wall, watching through a gap no wider than my eye while a man my father called brother put a gun to his temple and did not hesitate. I remember the cold of that passage too, remember how I did not move for six hours after, how I did not cry then either, because crying required a kind of hope that the worst was over, and I already understood, even at twelve, that it was only the beginning.

Maybe that is what unsettles me about her. Not the coldness itself, but the recognition in it, some mirrored version of the boy who learned very young that tears don't summon rescue, they only announce weakness to people who will use it.

I don't like finding anything of myself in Alessandro Valdez's daughter.

Around one in the morning, she finally blows out the candle. I watch the grainy grey shape of her on the screen settle further into the blanket, curled against the wall rather than the bed, and I wait, foolishly, for some sound to carry through the microphone, some small give.

Nothing comes. Her breathing slows into the even rhythm of sleep, there on a bare wood floor beneath a broken window, and I sit alone in my study with my jaw tight and something uncomfortable sitting low in my chest that I refuse to call by its real name.

In the morning, I tell Marcus not to have the window repaired.

"Sir?" He says it carefully, the way he says most things to me when he thinks I have made a decision I will regret. Marcus has known me long enough to recognize when spite has outpaced sense, though he has rarely had the nerve to say so outright.

"You heard me."

"And the blankets? The books she's been taking from the library?"

"Leave them," I say, because taking the books would be an admission that they matter to me, that I noticed, that some part of the game she is playing has landed. "She can read all the books in this house for all I care."

He leaves without further comment, and I stand at the window of my own room, considerably warmer, considerably larger, looking out over the grounds where frost has started to silver the untrimmed hedges, and I tell myself the cold room is a lesson, not a cruelty, that she will break eventually because everyone does, given enough time and enough isolation and enough long nights with nothing but a candle and a stolen book for company.

I tell myself that.

I don't entirely believe it, and somewhere beneath the irritation, something else stirs that I have no name for yet, unfamiliar and unwelcome, the faint and troubling shape of respect.

I bury it before it can become anything more, the way I have buried everything inconvenient for twenty years, and I go down to breakfast alone, and do not ask the staff whether Mrs. Blackwood slept well.

I already know the answer. She always does.