Irina’s POV

The room had started to feel smaller.

That was the thing about rooms. You stopped noticing them when you could leave. When you couldn’t, every wall became something personal.

Three days. Maybe four. I’d lost count somewhere around the second afternoon when the ceiling had become more familiar to me than my own hands.

Sofia came every morning.

That was the constant. The one thing I could anchor to. The door would open—always the same soft knock first, two taps, like she was asking permission—and she’d come in with a tray and that smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes anymore, and I’d sit up and we’d do the thing we’d been doing every day since they locked me in here.

She’d try to convince me.

I’d say nothing.

She’d leave.

Repeat.

"You look terrible," she said this morning.

"Thank you."

"I mean it." She set the tray down on the nightstand. Eggs. Toast. Something that smelled like orange juice. I hadn’t been eating much and she knew it and we both knew she knew it and neither of us was going to say anything useful about it. "You need to eat."

"I’m not hungry."

"You haven’t been hungry for three days."

"Four," I said. "I think."

She looked at me for a second. Something moved in her face.

Then she sat down on the edge of the bed, right where she always sat, and pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them and looked at me the way she’d been looking at me since this whole thing started. Steady. Patient. Like she had all the time in the world and she’d already decided what came next.

"Irina."

"Don’t."

"I haven’t said anything yet."

"You’re about to."

She pressed her lips together. "I just want you to think about it. Really think about it. You’ve been sitting in here for days and nothing’s changed and nothing *is* going to change—"

"Sofia."

"—unless you do something. That’s all I’m saying." She reached into her pocket. Pulled out the small glass vial and set it on the tray next to the untouched eggs. "It doesn’t have to be the way you’re thinking of it."

I looked at the vial.

I’d given it back to her two days ago. Or tried to. She’d just set it right back on the nightstand without saying a word.

"You said it was fast before," I said.

"I was explaining badly." She picked it up. Turned it in her fingers. The glass caught the morning light. "It’s not fast. That’s the whole point. You put a tiny amount—*tiny*—somewhere he’ll come in contact with it. His coffee cup. His glass. Somewhere on your skin." She set it back down. "He won’t notice anything for days. Maybe a week. And by then nobody’s going to trace it back to anything. It looks like illness. Like—"

"Like he just got sick."

"Yes."

I stared at the vial.

"Nobody would know," she said. Quiet. Careful. "Not Roman. Not Andrei. Nobody. He gets sick, he gets worse, and eventually—" She stopped. "Nobody would ever look at you."

"I’d know," I said.

"Yes." She didn’t argue with that. "You would."

The silence stretched out.

I’d had this conversation with myself a hundred times in the last four days. Lying in the dark, staring at the ceiling, turning it over and over like a stone I couldn’t put down. The logic of it. The terrible, clean logic of it.

He’d locked me in here.

He’d let Maxim walk into his palace. He’d approved the visit without telling me. He’d stood in his office while Maxim called me a *toy* and—what had he done about it? What had actually changed? I was still here. Still locked in. Still waiting for someone else to decide what happened to my life.

Nothing had changed.

Nothing was going to change.

"He’s not going to let you go," Sofia said.

"I know."

"And he’s not going to let anything get better. Not really. You’ll stay in this palace and he’ll—" She exhaled. "Irina. You saw what he was like. You saw the office. You know what kind of man he is. The wolves, the forty-two packs, the—he told them he summoned them there to kill them." She looked at me. "You know this. You *know* this."

I did know it.

I’d been trying not to know it, which was different.

"Slow," I said again.

"Slow. Tasteless. No pain." She said it like a list. Like she’d memorized it. "He won’t even know he’s sick until it’s too late to figure out where it came from."

I pressed my thumb against the edge of the tray.

The eggs had gone cold.

"You’d be free," she said. And then, softer—the version that always got to me, the version that knew exactly where to press: "You could go somewhere quiet. Somewhere *yours.* No palace. No packs. No one’s mate."

I closed my eyes.

I thought about Katerina’s voice saying the same thing. Different words, same promise. *Somewhere quiet. Somewhere yours.* Like that was a thing that could actually exist for someone like me. Like the world had quiet places waiting, with my name on them, just sitting there.

I’d almost believed her.

"I’ll think about it," I said.

Sofia didn’t say anything.

She knew what that meant. She’d heard *I’ll think about it* four times now and she knew it meant *stop pushing for today* and nothing else. She picked up the tray—didn’t push me to eat, didn’t comment—and she took it to the small table by the window instead of leaving with it. Set it there, where the light was better.

"Eat something," she said.

"Maybe later."

She left.

---

The afternoon was the worst part.

Morning had Sofia. Evening had the distant sounds of the palace settling into night. Afternoon had nothing. Just light moving across the floor in a slow diagonal, and the sound of my own breathing, and the vial on the nightstand.

I’d stopped putting it in my pocket.

I wasn’t sure what that meant. I kept telling myself it didn’t mean anything. It was just—easier. Leaving it there. Not carrying the weight of it against my hip all day.

I thought about his face.

That was the problem. That was the thing I kept coming back to no matter how many times I tried to look away from it. His face in the office. The way the room had gone cold without him doing anything at all. The way Maxim—Maxim, who’d spent a year making me believe I was nothing—had taken one look at Nicolas and gone quiet.

I thought about the garden. His voice. *I will never let you go anywhere. Never.*

He’d meant it as a threat.

I knew he’d meant it as a threat.

But there had been something underneath it. Something that wasn’t threat. Something that sat in my chest when I thought about it and did something I didn’t have a name for.

I picked up the vial.

Small. Cold. The glass smooth under my fingers.

*Tasteless,* Sofia had said. *Slow.*

A little at a time. Nothing dramatic. Nothing that could be traced. He’d get sick, and then he’d get worse, and then—

I set it back down.

Pressed my face into my hands.

I was so tired.

---

Sofia came back in the evening.

She didn’t have a tray this time. She came in and she sat down and she looked at me and something in her face was different. More certain. The patience was still there but underneath it, something had shifted.

"What?" I said.

She took a breath.

"He’s coming tonight."

The words landed in the center of my chest.

"Nicolas," she said, like I needed the clarification.

I didn’t need the clarification.

I stared at her.

"I heard from one of the other staff. He’s been asking about you. Andrei said—" She stopped. Started again. "He’s coming tonight, Irina. To your room. That’s all I know."

The room felt smaller again. Instantly. Like the walls had moved.

*He’s coming.*

I looked at the nightstand.

The vial.

"Irina." Sofia’s voice was very quiet. Very careful. "This is the chance. You understand that? You won’t get another one this clean. If he comes here—if he touches you, if he—" She looked at my face. At whatever she found there. "You can end this tonight."

"I know," I said.

My voice came out strange. Flat.

She waited.

I didn’t say anything else.

After a moment, she stood up. She moved to the door. Stopped. Turned back.

"The tray’s on the table," she said. "There’s water. Try to eat something." She paused. "I’ll check on you in the morning."

She left.

The door clicked shut.

I sat with the silence.

He was coming.

I thought about every possibility in order, the way I always did, the way I’d been doing since I was old enough to understand that thinking three steps ahead was how you survived. He’d come in angry. He’d come in controlled. He’d look at me the way he’d looked at me in the office—that unreadable look, green going dark at the edges—and I’d have no idea what came next.

I’d never had any idea what came next with him.

That was the problem. That had always been the problem.

My hands were steady when I picked up the vial.

I didn’t let myself think about it. Thinking led to the part where I talked myself out of it, and I’d been talking myself out of it for days, and look where that had gotten me. Locked in a room. Waiting. A person things happened *to* instead of a person who decided things.

I was so tired of being a person things happened to.

The stopper came out smooth.

I tilted the vial. A small amount—*tiny*, Sofia had said, *tiny is enough*—onto my fingertip. The liquid was clear. Almost nothing. The kind of nothing that was easy to believe was harmless.

I looked at my reflection in the dark window.

My own face looking back. Pale. Tired. The bruise from Maxim faded now to something yellow-green.

He was going to come in here. He was going to stand in this room. And whatever came next—whatever he said, whatever he did—he would touch me the way he touched me sometimes. The way that was different from every other touch I’d ever learned to brace for. The way that landed somewhere I couldn’t explain and didn’t want to think about too hard.

He would touch my neck.

He always did.

His mouth against the mark. The specific warmth of it. The thing the mate bond did when that happened—that stupid, useless, warm pulse—

My jaw tightened.

I lifted my hand.

And I pressed my fingers, slow and steady, against the side of my neck.