Season 1: Awakening the Viliness

  Ch 7: Gloved Hands, Bare Truths

  The morning after the tea party arrived like a bde slid between silk. There was no fanfare. No arm. Just the quiet hum of a house already in motion, servants moving like clockwork behind curtains, and Mira lying awake in Nysera’s bed, staring at the carved canopy above her like it might offer an exit sign.

  It didn’t.

  She hadn’t slept well. Not since the tea. Not since that name had been spoken. Saintess. The word still echoed behind her eyes like a temple bell rung off-key.

  It had felt like a signal. Like the story had noticed her again.

  Mira didn’t remember the exact page the Saintess arrived in To Ruin You Tenderly—but she knew what followed. Whispers of Nysera’s cruelty. The pet in chains. The final trial waiting, snarling, aching. And then Nysera’s death. Sudden. Public. The end of a prologue that was never meant to st.

  She dies by Chapter Five.

  Those words had been ringing in her head since the garden. Since she’d cracked a rose in her hand and realised Nysera didn’t just wield power—she bled it out of the world.

  So Mira had made a decision, sometime between pouring her tea and pacing her room barefoot.

  If the story was beginning, she wasn’t going to die pying the viliness.

  She was going to break the narrative before it broke her.

  Her hands, gloved as always, felt too tight around her wrists as she stepped into the hallway. The corridors were bright this morning. Windows open. Sunlight angling in clean lines across marble floors. Somewhere downstairs, she could hear the faint ctter of silverware being arranged.

  She found the steward just outside the morning salon. Mid-forties, severe, with a face like a lined parchment waiting to be signed.

  “I want him fed,” she said before she could second-guess it. “Properly. In a room with light. No shackles. No blindfold. He’ll be watched, of course.”

  The steward blinked slowly, but nodded. No questions. Just a crisp bow and the subtle twitch of one eyebrow.

  Mira turned and walked away before he could say anything else.

  She walked to the room slowly.

  Not because she didn’t know the way—she didn’t, not really, but the house had a logic to it, the kind that unfolded in marble and symmetry. A right turn at the portrait gallery. Past the hush of an empty music room with untouched instruments. Then left, where the light got warmer.

  No, she moved slowly because she didn’t know what she was walking into.

  This wasn’t a ritual. It wasn’t one of Nysera’s setpieces—the ones Mira had begun to recognise by their choreography: kneel, bow, sip, dismiss. This was something new. Not for Luceran. For her.

  She didn’t know what he would be like when he wasn’t performing submission. She didn’t know if this was mercy or cruelty—if letting him sit in sunlight would be kindness or just another illusion of freedom that would crush him harder when it was taken away.

  She wasn’t trying to train him. She wasn’t trying to tame him.

  She just didn’t want him to break.

  Not yet.

  Maybe not ever.

  The room she’d chosen—or maybe someone else had chosen it for her; she hadn’t checked—was modest by estate standards. One of the smaller parlours, with wide windows that looked out onto the east garden and soft lic walls that whispered more of grace than grandeur. The table was round, not long. No head, no throne. Just a pce where two people might sit. Equal. Human.

  Her hands were sweating inside her gloves.

  She stood by the window for a minute, letting her eyes trace the garden paths beyond. Trying to breathe. Trying to remember why she was doing this.

  Because if she didn’t try something now, she’d end up bleeding in front of a Saintess who never asked to see her die. Because Luceran deserved to see the sky with his own eyes. Because someone should have fed him before breaking him.

  Behind her, the door opened.

  She heard the soft click of the door shutting and the muffled footsteps behind her—too even to be forced, too quiet to be casual. The kind of movement that spoke of a man who had learned how to take up as little space as possible without ever seeming afraid.

  Mira turned.

  And there he was.

  Luceran stood just inside the threshold, fnked by two guards who kept their distance but never looked away. His wrists were bare—no cuffs, no leash—and that alone made him seem taller. Not freer. Just more visible. More real. The light from the window caught in the dark gloss of his hair, untied today, falling past his jaw in smooth, controlled waves. There was nothing soft about him except the lines of his face, and even those looked like they had been carved with intent rather than born.

  His skin was pale, kissed with faint gold at the colrbones, as if the sun had touched him once and never again. Shoulders broad, arms lean with strength he didn’t funt. He was dressed simply—bck linen shirt, open at the throat; dark trousers, clean but unadorned. There were no sigils burned into him today. No colr. Just the body of a man who had once been treated like a god and then like an animal, and somehow stood between the two without shattering.

  His eyes met hers—gold, rimmed in shadow, heavy with sleep he didn’t trust. Hunger lived in them. Not for food. Not even for touch. For understanding. For meaning. For something to hold onto in a world that had given him nothing but chains and ceremony.

  He was beautiful the way tragedy is beautiful. The kind of beauty you look at and ache, not because you want to kiss it, but because you want to save it. Or maybe just not be the one who breaks it again.

  He bowed his head slightly. Not a full bow. Just a tilt. Controlled. A flicker of habit, not submission.

  Mira stared at him, something tight curling in her chest.

  He had been brought into this room to eat.

  And she could already tell he’d been preparing to be punished for it.

  She gestured lightly toward the table. “Sit.”

  Her voice came out steady, smoother than she felt. Luceran moved without hesitation, crossing the room in four fluid steps and taking the seat she hadn’t indicated—but it was the one he was meant to take. Across from her. Diagonal. Not beside. Not close. Measured distance, as if he’d mapped the power dynamic before he entered the room.

  He sat slowly, back straight, shoulders tense but not hunched. Always composed, like someone who had been taught that even the wrong angle of a bowed head could earn pain.

  The food was already arranged—thin slices of roasted poultry, rice with saffron, a side of fruit that had been peeled and sliced with almost religious precision. A single silver fork rested beside the pte.

  Luceran didn’t touch it.

  Not yet.

  He waited.

  Mira sat, feeling the weight of it—the silence, the performance, the unbearable stillness that surrounded everything he did. She picked up her own fork, tore a piece of bread, and bit into it, just to give the moment a shape.

  Only then did he move.

  He ate slowly. Carefully. One piece at a time. Every motion precise. Not hesitant—rehearsed. He chewed in silence, eyes always lowered between bites, and every so often, he gnced toward her—never directly. Always just shy of meeting her gaze. Like he didn’t know what she wanted him to be today.

  A pet? A prisoner? A man?

  Mira watched him chew. Swallow. Pause.

  “Thank you, my dy,” he said, soft and unfeeling, before reaching for another bite. Ft. Automatic. A reflex, not gratitude.

  It didn’t sound like submission. It sounded like survival. And Mira realised, with sudden, nauseating crity, that this wasn’t peace. This was him bracing for the aftermath of kindness.

  She watched him eat in silence, every motion so careful it hurt to witness. No mess. No hurry. Like the food might vanish if he moved too quickly, or worse—like he wasn’t sure he was allowed to enjoy it. The silence between them thickened. Not companionable. Not hostile. Just wrong.

  Mira picked at her bread again, tearing it into smaller and smaller pieces, not eating. Her stomach felt knotted, like her body couldn’t tell the difference between adrenaline and guilt anymore. This wasn’t what she’d imagined. She’d thought—na?vely, probably—that giving him something normal would feel good. That she’d feel like she’d done something decent. Human.

  But she didn’t feel like a saviour. She felt like someone who had handed a drowning man a napkin.

  She looked up, his gaze flickering away just a second too te. His shoulders were still too straight. His hand hovered slightly above the table between bites, like he was waiting for the meal to disappear beneath him. Waiting for the trap.

  “Why are you so calm?” she asked. Her voice broke the air like a bde slipping into silk.

  Luceran paused, fork halfway to his mouth. He lowered it slowly, pced it on the edge of the pte, then sat still. For a moment, he didn’t look at her. Then he did. Not with curiosity. Not with confusion. With memory.

  He met her gaze fully for the first time since entering the room, and the look in his eyes was the cold, steady truth of someone who had already lived this day before—differently, worse, but close enough to bleed. “Because the st time I flinched,” he said softly, “you broke my ribs.”

  The words hit harder than she expected. Not because of the detail, but because of how simply he said it. No heat. No bme. Just a fact, recited like a line from a prayer that had already been answered.

  Mira’s hands went still in her p. She wanted to speak, to expin, to say that wasn’t me, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. Because to him, it was. She wore the same face. She sat in the same chair. And no amount of sympathy or softness could erase the memory of cracked ribs and silence treated like loyalty.

  She looked at him—really looked—and realised he hadn’t tensed when he said it. He hadn’t braced himself for her reaction. That was worse. That meant he didn’t expect one.

  She wondered how many kindnesses he’d been offered just to make the punishment hit harder.

  This wasn’t mercy. This was a test he’d already failed, waiting to see if the answer changed.

  She turned her gaze to the garden beyond the window, the words sticking in her throat like splinters. I’m sorry would be meaningless. I won’t hurt you would be a lie. That wasn’t me would make her sound mad—or cruel.

  So she said nothing.

  But the ache in her chest grew sharper.

  She wanted to help him. She really did. But for the first time, she realised that wanting wasn’t enough. She’d have to undo damage she hadn’t caused in a body that had. And if she wasn’t careful, her attempts at gentleness might just teach him that softness had teeth, too.

  She didn’t speak for a while. Neither did he. The silence wasn’t companionable now—it was suspended, thick, like the space between thunder and the shatter of gss. She kept her eyes on the window, on the garden, on anything that wasn’t him. And then, because she didn’t know what else to offer—because words felt empty and her guilt was too big to carry in silence—she said, “You may walk the garden tomorrow.”

  He didn’t move. For a moment, she wasn’t sure he’d heard her. Then, softly, “Unchained?”

  “Yes.” Her voice didn’t shake, but it felt like it should have. “Escorted, of course. But unchained. You’ll have an hour. With light. And air.”

  He bowed his head. Not in submission. Not in gratitude. It was a motion without shape, without ceremony. Just a quiet fold inward. “As you wish.”

  Mira stared at the table, at the untouched fruit on her pte, at the sheen of oil on the silver knife. The food had gone cold. So had she.

  He would take the garden. He would walk through it with guards at his heels and bruises beneath his ribs that might never fully fade. And for all her good intentions, for all her gentle words, it still wouldn’t be enough. Not yet.

  Because the truth was cruel.

  If she wanted to help him heal, she’d have to give him something he no longer believed he deserved. And healing took time.

  Time she didn’t have.

  And if she failed—if she moved too slow or too soft—the story would catch up with them both. And Luceran, once again, would be broken in a world that taught him breaking was the only way to be seen.