Bound by shadows

Chapter Three: The Consent Vow

POV: Celeste

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I woke to a world with no sun.

Where am I?

Am I not dead? Or did it later go wrong?

Black stone ceiling above me. Heavy silver sheets. Four carved posts reaching toward the dark.

No sun outside the tall windows.

Just a massive silver moon. Too large. Too close. Hanging in a purple-gray sky like it had nowhere else to be.

I pressed two fingers onto my wrist.

My pulse answered.

Both pulses.

Mine, fast. The second one underneath—slower, older, running beneath my heartbeat like something enormous moving under ice.

It works.

I'm still alive.

This is the first prayer that God has answered in my whole life.

But I know I should not have trusted a stranger. That is the rule I lived by until this point—never trust anyone, never let anyone close.

And I broke that rule.

The shadows on the walls moved.

Not from wind. Not from the candles burning in their iron holders.

They shifted on their own.

One sliding across the floor like spilled ink. Another stretching along the wall at an angle that didn't match any light source in the room.

Shadows again.

But these did not look like his.

Then I understood. I had entered his world.

The shadow world.

A very dangerous world.

Don't ask me how I know. I just know.

Four of them. I counted.

The door opened.

A small woman entered. Silver-haired. Dark fabric pooling at her feet.

She spoke.

The words landed without meaning—consonants and vowels. I couldn't arrange into anything.

Then something inside my chest shifted. Like a key turning in a lock I hadn't known was there.

Her sentence rearranged itself.

The king will attend you shortly. You should not leave this room.

"How did I—"

She set a cup on the table beside the bed and left without answering.

The frozen moon sat in the window.

I stared at it.

Forty-seven seconds later, the door opened again.

---

Same face. Same black hair. Same height. Same pale skin.

But everything behind his eyes had changed.

He has collected what he wants.

He has changed.

This is not what he was before.

The man who stood in my hospital room at midnight had moved like someone carrying something breakable.

This version walked in like he owned the air.

Science doesn't work anymore.

Did I need another prayer?

"You're awake," he said.

"Where am I."

"The Underworld. My palace." He moved into the room without waiting for a response. "The bond is sealed. This is your residence now."

What.

Wait.

I can't go home?

All the love I had struggled to make so that I would matter someday. Without anyone rooting for me. What will happen to my patients? Who will save them?

Then why did I agree?

All my emotions started to crumble.

He must be joking, I thought.

"I want to go home," I said.

"That is not possible."

"You told me you could save my life." The heat in my chest was rising. "You didn't say I'd be trapped."

"You were dying." Flat. Unmoved. "Would you have refused?"

I stopped.

Because I wouldn't have.

And he knew it.

And the fact that he knew it made it worse.

I knew that I would not.

It is all I wished for. Without all the consequences.

This is what yes cost me. I have to deal with it even if I hate it.

"You owe me answers," I said. "Real ones."

"Ask."

"The language. That woman—I couldn't understand her and then I could. Why."

"The heart-bond transfers certain things. Language first. Instinct later. Life force, primarily."

"You could have told me that."

"I told you what you needed to make a choice."

"That is not the same thing."

"No," he said. "It is not."

His eyes shifted.

I watched it happen—black bleeding silver at the edges, running inward slowly, like ink dropped in still water.

He caught it. The silver retreated. Not fully. A rim of it stayed.

He took one step toward me.

Then stopped.

Stepped back.

The movement was abrupt. Wrong. Like something had interrupted him mid-thought.

"I apologize." His voice fractured slightly—the flat coldness cracking through. "I require permission to touch you. I should not have moved without asking."

"You were going to touch me."

"Your arm. To steady you." He stopped himself. "It does not matter. I should not have moved."

He held out his hands.

Not in offering.

In demonstration.

I looked at his wrists.

The scars ran horizontally across both. Wide. Systematic. Not the fine lines of old wounds—something broader, deliberate, the skin healed wrong in places, raised in ridges.

Shackle marks.

I have seen restraint injuries in the ER. Never this thorough. Never this old.

That is why he asked for permission when he wanted to move closer to my hospital room.

He must have suffered so much.

"Sixteen years," he said quietly. "In captivity. What was done to me—what was taken—I swore I would never replicate it." A pause that cost him something visible. "I will not touch you without explicit permission freely given. Not for any reason."

Celeste. Celeste.

What are you doing?

Are you in a position to pity someone?

For a person to have tortured a king in his own place—who am I?

I am not safe at all.

I know I have entered a problem.

Is this a prayer or a curse? I don't even know the answer anymore.

The anger in my chest didn't disappear.

But something shifted underneath it.

"Why do your eyes keep changing color," I said.

"The curse—"

"Show me first." I nodded at his eyes. "Silver. Now it's pulling back. While you talk—it keeps moving. Why."

His jaw tightened.

"The curse fractured my soul into three aspects." he said carefully, like a man describing a wound he had long stopped being shocked by.

His eyes: black dominant. Caden speaking.

"Caden—the king. Ruthless. Strategic. Duty above everything."

A flicker. Silver bleeding at the rim.

"Varian—the lover. Emotional. He loved someone and lost her and never recovered."

The silver deepened. I watched the black pull back like a tide retreating.

"And Azriel." His voice shifted—quieter, more careful. "What remains when neither dominates. The one holding the other two together."

Both colors are present now. Neither won.

The second thing that science cannot explain has happened.

This is too much for me.

Who am I even bonded to?

Who can I trust?

Who will give me the answers to my questions?

I don't even know.

"You're three people," I said.

"Three aspects of one broken person." The silver held as he said it. "Stress triggers the transitions. I cannot always control which one surfaces."

I was watching his eyes while he spoke—tracking the shifts the way I track vitals during surgery.

The silver surging with Varian's name. The black pulled forward when his voice went formal.

Like two systems competing for the same body.

Who is he right now?

Can't he control it? Looks like he is changing every time.

"So who walked into my hospital room?" I said.

"All three." Something complicated moved through his face. "In a manner of speaking."

"And right now."

"Right now I am attempting to remain myself." The silver flickered. "It is not always successful."

My head was too full.

The room moved slightly.

I reached for the bedpost.

Missed.

"May I help you stand?"

Immediate. Quiet. Silver fully in his eyes now—black pushed to the very rim.

I should say no.

I know I should say no.

But I can't stand it anymore.

If I pretend I don't need his help and I faint, I should not meet myself in the afterlife.

I nodded.

His hand took mine.

Careful in a way that made careful feel like something else entirely. Like he had considered the exact pressure before he applied it.

His fingers were cooler than mine—but the warmth that moved through the contact wasn't temperature.

It was the bond.

I felt it pulse once, slow and deliberate, and through it something that wasn't mine arrived in my chest.

Concern.

His. For me.

Clean and unambiguous. Moving through the bond like a signal on a frequency I hadn't known I could receive.

He actually cares.

Maybe this is one good thing about the bond. I can know how he feels.

The bond is deeper than I thought.

He guided me back to the bed and released my hand the moment I was seated. Immediate. Like he had been counting the seconds and promised himself a limit.

I looked at him.

He looked at me.

I hated that his asking made me feel safer.

I should not feel safe with him.

I haven't even known him except for what he told me. And that might be a lie.

Specifically because I hadn't expected it. Because nothing about a king of the Underworld should feel *safe.*

And yet his hand had been careful. He had asked. The bond had shown me his concern like an open chart.

And I couldn't unfeel any of it.

This is how people make bad decisions, I thought. One careful hand at a time.

"Which one am I talking to right now?" I whispered.

I need to know who I am dealing with.

I can't do this blindly.

His eyes shifted.

Silver bled to black. The black pulled back. Then both moved at once—bleeding into each other at the center, neither winning, mixing into something that had no name I could give it.

Not silver.

Not black.

Something caught between.

Something that looked, for just a moment, lost.

He didn't answer.

I have made a terrible mistake.

And I don't even know who he is.

And the shadows along the walls leaned closer, as if they were waiting to hear it too.