Chapter 62: Council

Chapter 62

The golden light of the late afternoon slanted through the high windows of the North Wing, spilling in narrow bands that stretched like prison bars across the charcoal-silk sheets.

Isabella didn’t move to close the heavy velvet curtains. She didn’t move at all.

It had been three days.

Three days of the same four walls. Three days of watching dust motes drift and spin in the light, their lazy freedom a quiet mockery. Three days of listening to the distant hum of a living castle while her own world shrank to a bed, a window, and a locked door.

Three days of feeling her body turn into something unrecognizable—no longer wholly hers, but a collaborative project between a King’s blood and a witch’s fading spark.

Every few hours, the heavy lock on the door would groan open, the sound echoing through the room like a gunshot in the suffocating silence.

Clara would enter.

The witch always wore the same expression: pale, frozen, carved from resentment and restraint. She carried a silver tray with meticulous precision—one bowl of food Isabella barely touched, and the cup.

Always the cup.

A heavy vessel filled with Lucian’s blood, kept warm and fluid by a dark enchantment that hummed faintly against Isabella’s senses.

She hated the taste—metallic and thick, cloyingly sweet with a power that made her teeth ache and her tongue go numb—but she hated the alternative far more.

Without it, the blight inside her began to claw.

It started as a hollow ache deep in her marrow, a gnawing emptiness that spiraled outward until it became a cold, suffocating panic. Her heart would stutter, her breath coming shallow and sharp, as if something unseen were tightening a fist around her lungs and dragging her downward.

Lucian’s blood was the only thing keeping the anchor from pulling her to the bottom of the sea. As if summoned by the thought, the door clicked open.

Clara stepped inside, her gown whispering against the stone floor. She set the tray down on the nightstand with a soft clink, her eyes deliberately fixed on a spot somewhere above the headboard, anywhere but Isabella.

She moved with a stiff, guarded caution, as though each step closer risked triggering the draw again.

“Drink,” Clara said, her voice thin and stripped of its usual melodic bite. “Lucian is occupied with the Council. He expects the cup to be empty when I return.”

Council? Isabella wondered hazily as she pushed herself upright. His advisors? His judges? His executioners?

She felt strange—too strong in some ways, her limbs humming with borrowed vitality, yet fragile as spun glass in others, as though one wrong movement might shatter her completely.

Her fingers brushed the cup just as Clara turned and left without another word. Isabella watched the witch’s retreating form until the door shut with a heavy, final click.

She knew why Clara fled so quickly.

Every second the witch spent within these four walls was a gamble. Isabella was a spiritual leak, a vacuum that did not care for pride or history or friendship. Clara, powerless and raw, was the nearest reservoir of magic for the bond to feed from.

Yet as Isabella stared at the closed door, another truth settled uneasily in her gut. Clara’s presence here was not born of loyalty alone.

The witch was a creature of towering pride and deep vanity; to be rendered nearly human, stripped of her flame and reduced to playing nursemaid, was a humiliation she would normally burn a kingdom to escape.

She could have fled. She could have put leagues between herself and the girl who was draining her essence, allowing her magic to recover in the safety of a distant coven.

Yet she stayed.

Clara stayed because without her power, she was prey and the world beyond these walls crawled with her mother’s shadows.

Elena was still out there. A weaver of blights. A master of cruelty. And even a powerless existence under Lucian’s roof was safer than the slow, deliberate death her own mother would inevitably design for her.

Here, in the hollow silence of the North Wing, they were both hiding, one sheltered by an unwanted bond, the other with nowhere left to run.

Isabella lowered her gaze to the cup in her hands. The liquid shifted thickly, dark and heavy, carrying the scent of ancient earth and old storms.

She drank. The heat struck her throat first, a sharp, burning rush that surged into her veins and went to war with the encroaching darkness.

It settled like a dam against the blight, holding it back by sheer force. As the power spread, her senses sharpened with painful clarity, just as they always did after a sip.

The silk sheets rasped against her skin like sandpaper. The ticking clock in the hallway sounded like a hammer striking an anvil.

And then there was the scent—or rather, the scents.

Not the metallic tang of blood. Not the stale dust of the room.

It was Lucian’s… and yet not. The same dark, ancient undertone threaded through it, but fractured—seven variations, each distinct, each distant, carrying its own cold signature.

Isabella rose from the bed, leaving the food untouched and the empty cup on the nightstand.

She couldn’t go to the door so she crossed to the window and pulled the velvet curtain back just enough to peer outside.

Seven sleek black cars were lined up in the courtyard below. Her breath caught as figures emerged from the grand entrance of the main hall she was able to see from.

They moved with a grace that made her skin crawl. Seven individuals dressed in black so deep it seemed to swallow the fading sunlight whole. Their postures were sharp—lethal—radiating an air of ancient authority.

Two women, strikingly beautiful, their faces sculpted from cold marble. Five men whose broad shoulders looked capable of bearing the weight of the darkening sky itself.

They did not speak. They did not linger. Each moved toward their vehicle with the precise efficiency of a weapon being returned to its sheath.

Mesmerized and terrified, Isabella watched the engines hum to life.

The Council. The ones Lucian had been clashing with for three days from her knowledge.

The memory of the first visit surfaced unbidden—Lucian shoving her deeper into the room with uncharacteristic urgency, his voice low and sharp as he warned her not to breathe too loudly, not to let her heart race.

Clara had sprayed the room—and Isabella herself—with a scentless mist until even the air felt scrubbed clean.

Her eyes remained fixed on the courtyard as the last man reached for his car door… and paused.

He was tall, his hair as dark as the night itself. Even from this distance, Isabella felt the crushing pressure of his presence, like the atmosphere thickening around her lungs.

Without warning, his head snapped up.

His eyes—vivid, terrifying crimson—cut straight through the distance and locked onto her.

It wasn’t a casual glance.

It was a target lock.

Isabella gasped, her heart vaulting into her throat as she stumbled backward and fell hard to the floor, the cold stone slamming into her spine beneath the window.

She curled in on herself, chest heaving, the mark on her neck throbbing in a frantic, panicked rhythm.

She felt exposed as though those red eyes had pierced straight through the walls and seen every secret she carried—from the royal blood in her veins to the undeniable mark of a king burned into her skin.

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