"What a pity," His poisoned words echoed inside of her head. "Your mother will be deeply saddened by your refusal." They reverberated in her head, pinging from one side and bouncing back off the other. Resonating as they continued on loop crashing violently into the inner walls of her skull, and playing back over and over.
Caralee could almost hear the smirk woven through the cadence of his voice. It was not spoken plainly, but it curled slyly around the edges of each syllable—he knew he had piqued her interest, and he relished in it.
Her mother.
The word she had whispered into the winds of many childhood dreams, a phantom face she conjured amid forest glades and candlelit wishes. As a little girl, Caralee had often slipped away from her duties, wandering into the woods with nothing but leaves beneath her feet and a deep longing in her chest.
There, among the trees, she would imagine her mother as alive—elegant, powerful, cloaked in velvet and mystery. A noblewoman in exile, perhaps. A mage forced into hiding. In these daydreams, Caralee herself was never a mere servant girl. She was a hidden warrior, a daughter of a powerful guild, destined to be skilled in battle.
But fantasies were fragile, delicate little things, easily scattered to the breeze once ground into unrecognizable dust under the emotionless heel of reality.
Adel had never told her anything of substance, nothing beyond vague kindness wrapped in evasion. "Your mother was my dearest friend," Adel would always say, brushing the question away like an errant thread on her apron. "Her only wish was your safety." Then she would pivot, change the topic, return to her knitting or scrubbing or cooking, as though the past were a locked room no one dared to enter.
As a child, Caralee had pleaded, argued, thrown tantrums in hopes of loosening the hinges on Adel's silence. As she grew older, her approach evolved—subtler, strategic. She would drop questions mid-conversation, weave them between mentions of weather and errands, trying to catch Adel off guard. But Adel's defenses never faltered. Her silence was impenetrable, a fortress of will. The woman could hold secrets better than any mute and had no intention of yielding.
And now, this man—Jacabo—was speaking as if he knew her.
Caralee couldn't help but feel the icy chill from his piercing stare on the back of her head. She steadied her breath, forced her feet to move, and continued to walk toward the door. She knew—felt —that he wouldn't let her go easily, but she was determined to try. Her heart hammered violently, but her face was carved from stone. Her emerald eyes, fixed like lances on the door, refused to waver.
Step by step, she drew nearer. Her hopes, once so small, bloomed tentatively. He hadn't stopped her. Not yet. She dared to think that maybe, just maybe, she would get out of there after all.
She reached the door. Her fingers, cool and trembling, closed around the iron handle. Cara pulled, slipping through the threshold, and continued walking, listening for it to shut completely behind her. As soon as the door shut, she fully intended to run.
And she did.
The second the latch clicked into place behind her, Caralee bolted.
Her legs pumped furiously, skirts trailing behind like a phantom cloak. Her breath burst from her lungs in ragged bursts. She did not understand why this man filled her with such terror—only that he did. Something about him was wrong, off, like a violin string tuned just a hair too tight. The dread gnawed at her insides.
She reached the stables. Her hands reaching instinctively for the rope knot standing between her horse and freedom.
And there he was.
Jacabo stood in front of her, his lean frame settled in the shadows as if he had been born of them. A wry smile slithered across his face—greasy, triumphant, hungry.
A lump formed in her throat, thick and choking. She swallowed it down, but it dropped into her gut like a stone into a cold well, draining her face of all color. Slowly, with the cautious grace of a doe before the crunch of leaves, breathing deeply in an attempt to quiet her nerves, she began to back away.
One step. Then another.
Jacabo didn't move. He simply watched her, eyes glinting with an unspoken amusement, like a predator allowing its prey to exhaust itself before the inevitable.
And then, from the darkness behind him, something moved.
"Let her run, Jacabo," came a voice—silken, sinister, and chilling in its restraint. "I want to savor this."
The figure was still cloaked in blackness, impossible to fully make out. But Caralee's instincts screamed.
She ran.
She did not wait to question the voice or discern its form. She turned and sprinted as though the very hounds of Hell were snapping at her heels. The sound of her heartbeat thundered in her ears. She had no plan, no direction—only the primal urge to flee.
Tears burned her eyes. Her thoughts spiraled. Why was this happening? What did she do to deserve this? Why did they want her?
Donovan. The name shot through her like lightning.
A sudden numbness filled her veins. It made her brain feel fuzzy and her skin itched. Waves of nausea engulfed her like the ocean tides. He had betrayed her. He must have. How else would they know where to find her here?
She had trusted him, loved him. And now— now she was alone again. The despair that clutched her heart was far crueler than any physical wound. It was abandonment, raw and searing.
But she couldn't afford heartbreak now. She had to run.
The trees closed around her in a blur of black bark and shadows. She vaulted roots, ducked under branches, wove through brush and vine. Her foot caught on an erupted root that twisted up from the ground and she fell forward, arms splaying out to cushion the impact. Her palms sank into the carpet of wet pine needles, damp fallen leaves and scraped against brittle twigs.
The fall knocked the wind from her, a blessing in disguise because it meant that she did not cry out. She couldn't.
Because the forest was all of a sudden completely silent.
Too silent.
The hush wasn't natural. It was thick and painfully unnatural, like something vast and ancient had pressed pause on the world itself. No wind stirred the leaves. No insects buzzed. Even the air felt stagnant and afraid.
And then—he came.
A figure stepped forward from the abyss between trees. No moonlight touched him. No starlight dared. It was as though the shadows themselves had been ripped from the universe to form him. And within that shroud of blackness glowed two gleaming eyes—green as jade, yet burning with a crimson hue, as though set aflame by something unholy.
Caralee gasped and twisted, her ankle still trapped in the grip of the root. She clawed and kicked, thrashing against the stubborn forest that refused to release her. Still, the creature—the thing—did not advance. It simply watched.
Finally, with one last wrench, she broke free.
Through the pain of her now throbbing ankle and the vice now weighing down her heart, she ran. With nothing left in this world but the heart of hers that still beat defiantly, the lungs that refused to quit taking in the air that preserved her organs, for nothing else than her skin, and without anything left to hold her back, she ran like it was the only word she knew.
Through tangled brush, over fallen logs, panting like a hunted animal. She didn't dare look back until she stumbled into the edge of a modest settlement—a cluster of small brick buildings hunched together between the towering trees.
Caralee rushed into a narrow alley between two of the buildings, heart still pounding. Praying to any god that might listen for there to be somebody, anybody, residing within the dwelling, or working, something. Maybe at the very least, weapon could be found. She just aimed for the other end—only to be met by a dead-end wall connecting the two outer walls of the structures.
Trapped. She spun around, and there he was.
The dark figure stood at the mouth of the alley, still and silent, like a phantom painted onto the darkness. His eyes glowed brighter now, locking onto her with a terrible hunger. There was satisfaction in his posture, a languid confidence—as if he already knew that this would be the outcome.
To him, she wasn't a girl. She was a delicacy.
Her breath came in shallow gasps. Every part of her screamed to move, to fight, to do something. But her limbs only trembled.
A wave of cold seeped into her marrow. Not the chill of weather, but something deeper. A soul-deep freeze, as if her blood itself understood the truth.
There was no way out. He had won.