CHAPTER 59: CRIMSON JUDGEMENT

Willow, unbothered as ever and somehow still poised like a goddess mid-hangover, leaned lazily against the bars as the guards came for me.

Her expression didn’t so much as twitch—except for a sultry little wink, followed by a kiss blown with all the grace of a tavern courtesan bidding farewell to her favorite client. "Try not to cry too hard, darling," she purred. "Wrath’s a terrible look on you—but you do pout rather sexily when you’re angry."

I muttered something under my breath, my voice half a rasp, half a smirk as the guards wrenched the door open and dragged me into the corridor. Their grip was like iron soaked in oil—slick and bruising. I didn’t resist. What was the point? My arms were already sore from clutching cold metal, my throat was raw from screaming Leo’s name, and my pride had taken more hits than a bard’s favorite bar wench.

They didn’t blindfold me. Didn’t need to. The halls themselves blurred together—long, dripping corridors of black stone veins and glowing red light that buzzed like a hornet trapped in the back of your skull. Every turn felt tighter, more compressed, like the Tower itself was clenching its fist around me. I tried to breathe through it. Steady. Sharp. Calm. But my heartbeat betrayed me, thudding wildly against my ribs like a prisoner with no door left to kick.

Just then I was pushed through a large, gaping corridor before passing under an arch and entering a stone chamber.

Gods, the chamber was massive—cathedral-like, but twisted, malformed, sacred only in the way murder was holy to a dagger. Black chains hung from the rafters. Metal racks, hooks, spires of bone-like sculptures jutted from the walls. Pools of some black, viscous liquid oozed underfoot. It reeked of salt, rust, and something disturbingly sweet—like perfume and old blood. A torture room? A temple? Perhaps an art exhibit from a sociopath? Who could say?

Then it caught my eye. At the center of the room stood a stark wooden doll.

Human-sized and fixed to a post.

Its arms were outstretched like a crucifixion in waiting. Its head tilted at an angle that made it look either curious or deranged. Its body was carved in simple detail, the vague suggestion of joints and muscles shown only when absolutely necessary.

Although it had no eyes, it had a mouth which has been painted shut for some unknown reason. I didn’t move closer. I wanted to, but my instincts screamed at me like a mother catching her child licking a blade. Something about it was wrong. Not evil. Not threatening. Just...waiting.

I was still staring at it when she arrived, peeling away from the shadows like the shape of a secret given legs and an attitude, slow and calculating with each of her motions. She stepped into the dim light of the chamber with the deliberate grace of someone who had been watching me far longer than I’d been aware.

Her body was robed in black—but barely. The fabric clung to her like it owed her money, trailing behind her like smoke laced with perfume and spite. Her feet were bare, silent, toes sliding across the wet stone as if the water parted for her out of respect. But it wasn’t the outfit, or the body, or even the smooth, knowing way her hips moved like a promise you should never keep—it was the hair.

Gods. The hair.

It fell like a curtain of midnight over her entire face, long and impossibly thick, veiling everything above her lips like the Tower itself had gifted her anonymity. The ends brushed her hips, her thighs, dragging behind her like shadows, coving all but her mouth and chin.

She was smirking.

Of course she was.

A slow, sensuous, terrible smirk curling at the corners like it had just heard my most embarrassing fantasy and was choosing to be delighted by it.

"Well," she said, voice low and round, every syllable dipped in syrup and sharp edges. "You made it all the way up here without snapping. That’s...disappointing."

She circled me—not quickly. Never quickly. She moved like someone measuring a sacrifice. Or perhaps like a snake giving a lecture on temptation. Her fingers trailed along the stone walls, brushing moss and iron like a past lover.

I didn’t speak.

Partially because I didn’t know what to say, and partially because my tongue had decided to perform an interpretive dance of paralysis and panic.

But she didn’t need a response. She leaned down just slightly, her mouth close to my ear, the veil of her hair tickling my cheek.

"You’re not going to like this floor," she whispered.

"Oh," I managed to choke out, "so this isn’t the complimentary spa experience?"

She giggled. Giggled. Like I was a puppy barking in a lion’s den. "Oh no, darling. This is the floor where people learn how to suffer properly.

"

Her fingers danced through the air, gesturing toward a wall where a pair of rusted metal cuffs hung from chains. Long ones. Bolted into stone. They didn’t glint—they dripped. With water. Or blood. Or both. The ambiance was less "kinky fun" and more "doomsday confessional."

"Please," she said, stepping back, "be a dear and strap yourself in."

I looked at the cuffs. Then at her. Then back at the cuffs.

"Oh, of course," I said, feigning casualness with the flair of a man who has just been asked to climb willingly into a meat grinder. "And afterward should I just hang around for tea and bloodletting?"

Her smile only widened, but nothing more.

Nevertheless, I moved. Because I knew there was no choice. Because every inch of my skin felt watched, weighed, and flayed in advance. I knelt slowly, my knees dipping into the cold puddle that hugged the floor like a grave’s final kiss. The cuffs met my wrists with a metallic click far too eager for my taste. They closed around me without ceremony.

When I looked up, she was already in front of me again.

Smiling.

Gods, always smiling.

"You know," I said, shifting slightly as the cold began to settle into my bones, "I thought wrath would be more—violent. Angry. Fiery. But you? You feel more like, well...sarcasm in a funeral dress. No offense."

She tilted her head, hair rustling like silk over secrets.

"Oh, darling," she purred, her voice curling like smoke through the air, thick with knowing and too much amusement for the moment. She stepped closer, her bare feet whispering against the wet stone, her hair still veiling her face like a curtain meant to hide either beauty or ruin—or both. "You still believe true wrath is built upon screams?"

She chuckled lowly, shaking her head as if I’d just told her love was a myth and heartbreak was theatrical.

"No. That’s rage, sweet thing. Loud. Immediate. Flash-fire nonsense. Rage is a slap at a banquet. Wrath..." she exhaled, dragging the word out like a fine vintage, "...is older. Slower. It’s the bitterness that doesn’t rot. The resentment you cradle like a child. It’s the letter you never send because rereading it keeps you warm. It’s the blade you never throw away. The memory that never dulls."

Her steps circled me now, slow and deliberate, the clink of my chains keeping time like a warped metronome.

"It’s the face you still curse twenty years later while doing dishes. The voice you mimic under your breath in the shower, every syllable dipped in loathing." She leaned down, breath brushing my ear like silk dipped in venom. "Wrath is grief fermented. Hatred aged in the dark corners of your soul until it becomes something...transcendent."

I swallowed hard, jaw tight. "And you think I carry that?"

She giggled, standing upright again. "We all do. Everyone holds their own versions of wrath. Some hide it behind jokes. Others bury it under heroism. But it waits. Patient, cold, and oh so polite."

She walked back to the wooden doll and tapped it once, absently. Then turned to face me full.

"And now," she said, voice suddenly distant and ceremonial, "you get to meet yours."

Lovely.

Her voice dropped. "To pass through the Chambers of Wrath...you must face the one person in your life who embodies your hatred. Not your enemy. Not your killer. Not your tormentor. But the root. The seed. The echo you never left behind."

I swallowed, chest rising.

My brain shouted Vincent. Immediately. Reflexive. Instinctual. Of course it would be him—how could it not? The man who turned betrayal into a performance art. The smirking mouth with blood beneath his nails. The missing fingers, the cruel eyes, the midnight coat. He was the answer I’d been rehearsing for years ever since her death, the phantom I’d built my hate around like scaffolding.

But then—

Something...slipped

.

There was a hitch. A falter in the script. A misfire that didn’t make sense.

My heart didn’t burn.

It lurched.

A single, sharp jolt like the first breath underwater. Then another. Faster. Wrong. Not rage. Not even grief.

Dread.

It coiled in the base of my spine, ancient and quiet, like a long-forgotten name whispered from a place behind the bones. My stomach turned cold. My skin prickled. I reached, mentally, for the shape of the hate I thought I carried, only to brush against something...bigger. Older. Blurred at the edges like a dream cut short.

Vincent’s face wavered. Not vanished—but eclipsed. As if someone else stood behind him. Taller. Shadowed. Smiling in a way I couldn’t name.

I brushed off the thought, not daring to push forward before forcing my mouth into a grin. "Right, great. Bring him on. I’ve had so many hate-fueled fantasies about wringing Vincent’s neck, I should get frequent flyer miles."

She tapped the wooden doll in the center of the chamber again before resting her hand against its chest. The wood groaned beneath her fingers.

"This," she said, "is your anchor. The tether point. It will root the vision. Shape it. Sustain it. It’ll pull the truth to the surface like rot from a wound."

I stared at the thing—tall, humanoid, bound upright to the post with thick, iron nails. It didn’t move. It didn’t need to. I could already feel the hum of something beneath it, something that watched.

"You will not interact with the figure," she continued, "not physically. Not directly. You will not fight. You will not run. You will endure."

She moved closer again, standing over me now, tone sharp enough to flay skin.

"You are to remain in these chains. Bound and kneeling as a witness only. And most importantly..." She leaned forward, her fingers brushing the metal cuff at my wrist. "You must not break them."

I flinched.

"If you do," she whispered, lips almost against my ear now, "if you give in and reach for the doll... the vision will end. The floor will reject you and you will be force to descend the tower."

A beat passed.

Then I laughed, hollow and too-loud in the echoing space. "Sounds simple enough."

She smiled faintly before placing a single, pale hand on my forehead.

Her touch was soft. Cool. Reverent.

I felt nothing. No spark. No tingle. Just silence.

Then everything swam.

My vision stuttered—flickered like the last candle in a cathedral, wind whispering threats at its flame. Reality slipped. Something in my head convulsed sideways, not a physical motion, not truly, but like my thoughts had been ripped from the timeline and hurled down a wet, endless corridor made of breath and static.

I felt pressure everywhere and nowhere at once—gravity failing, thoughts unraveling. My spine arched as though the air itself had teeth, and the chains around my wrists began to hum—not with magic, not with force, but with memory. Like they remembered what was coming. Like they were vibrating with warning.

Then—

Black.

A silence so thick it had texture, stretching wide and infinite around me. The kind of black you don’t see—you taste. The kind that presses into your eyes and steals the concept of light.

I blinked.

The world returned like a mistake.

I was still kneeling, still bound. The chain draped heavy over my shoulders, anchoring me to the stone behind me like I was an inconvenient chandelier. My knees were wet and burning from the cold floor. For a moment, I thought it hadn’t worked. That the spell had failed. That I was still in that wrath-stained chamber with the doll and the mysterious judge.

But then I heard it.

Breathing.

Not mine.

It was close. Too close. Shallow, labored, hitching just at the edge of control. Not the sound of sleep, fear, or even rage—but something worse. It scraped at the air in brittle fragments, rasping like sand dragged through a throat raw from screaming.

I lifted my gaze slowly.

And in that moment, the world inside me shattered.

Because it was her.

Elias.

My only sister.

The first hand I ever held. The first laugh I ever trusted. The only thing in this world I ever loved without condition, without pride, without armor.

And she was bound right across from me, chained like a relic and displayed like a warning.

Her arms were spread wide, lashed in steel and leather, her chest rising in slow, strained gasps. Her hair—long, black, tangled with dried blood and shadow—hung over her face in greasy ribbons. Her skin was pale, mottled, bruised in shades of violence I recognized all too well. There was a gash above her lip. A purple smear beneath her left eye, her body hung in suspension, too still, too quiet, like someone had pressed pause on her life at the worst possible frame.

She looked young.

So young.

An unyielding cry caught in my throat.

I knew where we were. I didn’t need a sign. I didn’t need the scent, but I got it anyway.

The air smelled like cinnamon oil and iron. Blood, masked by sweetness, the scent of sterilized cruelty. I was back in the place where nightmares weren’t born—but carefully, lovingly constructed. The place that crawled into my nightmares for years on end.

Vincent’s workshop.

Elias’s grave.

"No," I croaked. It wasn’t a word. It was an exhale tied into the shape of a refusal. "No, no, no—"

My wrists pulled on instinct, trying to escape reality the same way I’d tried that night. My whole body surged forward with the desperation of someone who believes that maybe, this time, if I just scream louder, pull harder, bleed faster, something would change.

But the chains didn’t budge. Not even an inch. They were iron carved from inevitability, not metal.

I screamed. A hoarse, snapping sound. "ELIAS!"

She didn’t stir, didn’t move, didn’t breathe fast enough. I could already hear him approaching from just beyond the door.

Vincent.

The chains burned into my skin as I pulled, yanked, and begged into the void. "LET ME GO!" I howled, throat tearing on every syllable. "LET ME GO! LET ME TRY AGAIN!"

I knew the rules. I knew what this floor wanted. I was meant to resist the hate. To keep the chains intact. To survive the memory without giving in. To hold my rage, not let it consume me. To master the emotion that had shaped my life like a sculptor with a chisel dipped in flame.

But I didn’t feel cold.

I didn’t feel enlightened.

I felt fire.

My heart roared with it. My chest swelled with it. My ribs were a cage too small for what wanted out. I wasn’t meditating on my sins. I was reliving a crucifixion.

And the worst part?

She was waking up now. I saw her stir—soft, sluggish, her head twitching like her soul was remembering how to inhabit her body. Her lip quivered. She gasped.

And I couldn’t take it.

Not again.

My body lunged, but the chain snapped taut, dragging me backward like a dog choking on its own collar. I coughed, bile rising in my throat, but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop yelling.

"DON’T WAKE UP, ELIAS, PLEASE—STAY ASLEEP—STAY SAFE—STAY ANYWHERE BUT HERE—"

Her eyes fluttered open, met mine with a soft, distant smile—and just as my heart cracked down the center—

Vincent stepped into the room.