Chapter 101: In the Dark

Her face became a canvas of pure, unadulterated terror. Her eyes, once sharp and calculating, now wandered aimlessly through the void, searching for a single splinter of light to pierce the sudden shroud of ink that had fallen before her. Her hands flew out, clawing at the air and grazing the furniture with a frantic desperation, as if trying to anchor her soul to a world she could no longer see.

Mathias caught her face between his palms, forcing her head still to stop the agonizing sight of her vacant gaze darting in every direction.

“Hey, hey—Olivia, stop! Listen to me, please. I need you to listen!”

“I cannot see!” she shrieked, her voice splintering with a raw vulnerability that bled through her usual armor. “Do you not understand? I don’t even know where you are standing! Everything is black!”

In a rare moment of agonizing tenderness, he lifted her cold, trembling hands and pressed them against his own face, letting her fingers trace the line of his jaw and the warmth of his skin to prove his presence. “I am here, Olivia. I am right here beside you. Do not panic. We will find a solution—I promise you. Whatever is happening, we will fix it. Just breathe.”

As her breathing slowed from frantic gasps to a ragged, hollow cadence, he gently lowered her hands. “I don’t know what has caused this, so I’m going to fetch the physician immediately. I’ll be right back. Just wait here; everything will be fine, do you hear me?”

But as he moved to rise, she lunged with a primal instinct. Her fingers clamped onto the fabric of his trouser leg, thinking it was his arm, and she held on with the crushing strength of a drowning soul.

“Please… stay with me,” she whispered, the command replaced by a broken plea. “No doctors. I don’t want anyone to know what has happened to me. This darkness… it is too quiet, too vast. Please. Do not leave me.”

The engulfing void of her world didn’t just steal her sight; it resurrected the ghosts of her past. It was the same suffocating atmosphere she had endured as a child, locked away for months in windowless cells where the dark felt like a living thing pressing against her skin. Even in her adulthood, she had never slept without the hearth’s fire roaring, a desperate tether to reality. But here, the fire had been extinguished. No matter how much she craved the light, she was trapped in an eternal tomb. In this lightless abyss, her grip on Mathias was her only lighthouse.

Mathias sank back onto the floor beside her. “As you wish. I do not understand why you insist on this secrecy, but I will honor it. I will not let a soul find out. However, you cannot remain like this. What if I send for Leila instead of a physician? Do you trust her?”

“If it is Leila… fine,” she whispered, a nod of hollow desperation. “Just take me to my room. I need to rest. I feel as though I am about to shatter.”

She attempted to stand, but her equilibrium was gone. She stumbled blindly, her hip catching the edge of the heavy oak table.

Before she could fall, Mathias’s arms were around her, hoisting her effortlessly from the floor. “Walking is a luxury your condition does not currently afford you,” he said, his voice unusually steady.

“Whatever,” she muttered, her spirit too frayed to argue. “Do as you please.”

He carried her through the silent, shadowed corridors to her chambers and set her down. The familiar scent of her room reached her—lavender and old parchment—but without the visual cues, it felt like an alien landscape.

“Where am I?” she asked, her hands clutching at the air, her mind still fractured by the sensory deprivation. She reached out, but her fingers met only empty space. “Mathias? Where are you?”

“I am right here with you, in your room,” he replied, his voice coming from a few feet away. “I am only trying to find some fresh clothes for you.”

“Oh. Right.”

He pulled a gown at random from the wardrobe, then moved back toward her, lifting her once more without a word.

“Hey! Warn me before you just pick me up!” she snapped, her old fire flickering for a brief, defiant second.

“Just adapt to the situation, Olivia,” he countered calmly, his grip firm and sure. “At least until the world decides to reveal itself to you again.”

He set her down, and moments later, she felt his fingers deftly undoing the fastenings of her jacket.

“Just because I cannot see doesn’t mean I lack feeling,” she hissed, her breath hitching. “Why are you undressing me?”

“Perhaps because I intend to scrub the filth and blood from your skin and rid you of these wretched clothes?” Mathias countered, his voice a low, steady rumble. “Even without your sight, your tongue remains as sharp as a razor.”

“And you remain as insolent, immoral, and irritating as ever.”

“Well, this ’insolent’ man is your husband,” he muttered, “and currently the only soul you can rely on.”

With practiced efficiency, Mathias slid the jacket from her shoulders. He moved to her hem, his hands working with a clinical focus that masked his own internal turbulence. “Lift your leg so I can remove these.”

He paused, glancing up, only to find her face flushed a deep, vivid crimson. She looked like a bruised rose, her cheeks burning with a heat he could feel from inches away.

He stood abruptly, startled. “Are you alright? Your face is burning—is it a fever?”

She remained as still as a statue, refusing to speak. A slow realization dawned on Mathias, his eyes widening in genuine shock. It was a sight he had never thought possible in all their years of cold warfare. “You… don’t tell me you are embarrassed?”

Olivia turned her head away, though she had no sense of where he actually stood. “A man is stripping me bare and staring at my body while I am trapped in total darkness. It is beyond humiliating. What do you expect me to do? Dance for joy?”

A faint, involuntary smile tugged at the corner of Mathias’s mouth, but he quickly suppressed it. She is in a wretched state, and you are taking pleasure in her modesty? he scolded himself silently. You are a colossal fool.

He lifted her with newfound gentleness and lowered her into the warm bathwater. As he began to wash the grime and dried gore from her skin, the silence became heavy. For Olivia, the loss of her vision had acted as a sensory amplifier; every brush of his fingertips against her skin, every ripple of the water, felt electric and overwhelming.

“I can… I can wash myself,” she stammered, her voice small.

He didn’t let go. Instead, he gently caught her wrists and rested them on the edge of the tub, away from the water. “Your hands are raw, Olivia. The skin is torn and blistered from that graveyard. If you use them now, you’ll only make the wounds worse. Now, stop this nonsense. I am your husband, woman. There is no room for shame here.”

She fell silent then, the fire of her argument extinguished by the unexpected tenderness of his touch. For the first time, the distance between them felt like it was finally, irrevocably, dissolving.

He finished her bath with a swift, purposeful efficiency, wrapping her in a silk kimono before lifting her onto the bed. As he began to wind the bandages around her raw, battered hands, she remained eerily still—a hollowed-out version of the woman who usually met his every word with a barbed retort. This absolute surrender, this total exhaustion, felt more unsettling to him than any of her schemes.

He moved behind her, drying her damp hair with a towel and drawing a comb through the tangled strands. His movements faltered as his eyes locked onto the dark, purplish bruises blooming across her throat—the unmistakable marks of fingers that had squeezed with lethal intent.

He had tried to shut them out when he bathed her, but now they were impossible to ignore—more stark and undeniable than ever.

He spoke, his voice thick with a hesitant, burgeoning dread. “Olivia… if I ask you something, will you answer me with the truth?”

“It was Elvira.”

Mathias recoiled as if struck, his hands freezing in her hair. “What?”

A sad, ghost of a smile touched her lips. “I know you have already begun to suspect the rot within my family, Mathias. There is no longer any point in hiding behind shadows. What you see… is the truth.”

A cold panic surged through his veins. He reached forward, turning her face toward him, desperate to meet her blue eyes even if they were currently blind to him. He needed to look into her soul to anchor the weight of her words.

I don’t understand, Olivia. What do you mean? Are you saying she was the ones behind these marks?

his voice dropped to a jagged, dangerous whisper.

“Your family, Have they been hurting you? Answer me, Olivia. Since when? For how long?”

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