//CLARA//
The darkness wasn’t just an absence of light anymore. It was a wide, rotting maw waiting for the exact second I closed my eyes to swallow whole.
"More, Hattie," I rasped. My throat felt like it had been scrubbed with sea salt and gritty sand. "Light the ones on the mantle. All of them."
"Miss Eleanor, the room is already glowing like a cathedral," Hattie murmured.
"I don’t care. Just do it. Light them all," I snapped, the words coming out sharper than I intended.
I saw her flinch, and a pang of guilt twisted in my chest, but the fear was louder and it was bludgeoning against my ribs like a sledgehamr.
Her eyes were rimd with red, her apron wrinkled from hours of sitting by my side. But she didn’t argue. She moved from one corner to the next, the rhythmic scritch-scritch of matches the only sound in the suffocating silence.
One gas lamp. Two. Five.
The room beca a kiln. The heat was stifling, the light a harsh, unforgiving yellow that burned my retinas, but I needed it. I needed the shadows hunted out, driven into the cracks of the floorboards where they couldn’t reach for .
"That’s... that’s better," I breathed, pulling the heavy duvet up to my chin.
The truth was, I didn’t know how I had even gotten to this bed. The journey back from the harbor was a fractured mosaic of pain and cold—flashes of a jolting carriage, the sll of damp wool and Casimir’s skin, and the distant, rhythmic clatter of hooves on cobblestones.
Everything since the pier had been a blur.
Three days had passed since the rescue. Or maybe it was four. Hattie said I had been in and out of consciousness, burning with fever, crying out in my sleep. I did not rember any of it. I only rembered the cellar. The ropes. The harbor.
I had no idea how Casimir had tracked to that godforsaken place the exact mont when Silas was dragging toward the boat. I did not have the strength to ask. The questions would still be there when I was better. If I got better.
But the silk felt wrong.
It was too smooth—too much like the slick, oily surface of the harbor water. Every ti the fabric shifted against my skin, I felt the phantom ghost of the hemp rope sawing at my wrists.
I looked at them. They were wrapped in clean white linen, but I could still feel the bite of the fiber. I could still feel the way Silas had hauled up like a trussed animal.
"Move, or I’ll leave your head in this cellar..."
Suddenly the gas lamps weren’t lamps anymore—they were the swinging lanterns of the docks, casting sickly yellow arcs across Silas’s grinning face. I felt the water rising. I felt the hemp rope dragging down.
I bolted upright, a strangled gasp tearing from my lungs. My limbs flailing, fighting the phantom weight pressing down on . My heart hamred a frantic, uneven rhythm against my ribs.
Imdiately, hands were on . They pinned my shoulders to the mattress, trying to still my thrashing, and I lost it. I was screaming, I wasn’t in my bed. I was back on the wooden planks, a human shield with a knife at my throat.
I could sll it.
The scent of rancid grease and moldy bread filled my nose. It didn’t matter that the room slled of expensive beeswax and lavender. In my mind, I was back on that filthy floor, and the air was sour with the breath of a dead man.
"No! Don’t you fucking touch ! Get off!" I scread, the sound tearing at my raw vocal cords. I shoved at the weight, my palms hitting a chest that felt like a stone wall. "Don’t touch ! Please, Silas, don’t—"
"Clara! Clara, look at ."
The voice was a desperate rumble. The hands shifted instantly, losing their grip, pulling back as if I’d burned them. I scrambled toward the headboard, my breath coming in jagged, wheezing hitches, my eyes wide and unfocused as I stared at the man by my bed.
It was Casimir.
His hair was a ss, his shirt unbuttoned at the collar, and his expression was a mask of pure, agonizing gentleness. He looked like I had just driven a blade into his heart. He stayed on the very edge of the bed, his hands raised in the air, open and empty—showing he wasn’t holding a knife. Showing he wasn’t him.
"It’s ," he whispered softly, coaxing. "It’s only . You’re ho. You’re safe."
"Don’t touch ," I sobbed, hugging my knees to my chest. My skin felt like it was crawling, a million invisible insects biting at the places where Silas had gripped . "Please... I can’t... the air is too tight."
"I’m not touching you. See?" He moved further away, giving a wide, lonely berth on the mattress. "I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere, but I won’t touch you until you ask. I promise."
I wanted to reach for him. I wanted the safety of his arms more than I wanted my next breath, but my body wouldn’t allow it. It was like I was trapped in a glass box. I could see him, I could want him to take , but the second he ca close, the glass shattered.
Casimir stayed exactly where he was, his expression a fractured map of restraint. He didn’t push. He simply drifted back into the amber glow of the gaslight, becoming a silent, sentinel-like statue at the edge of my vision. The distance between us felt like a canyon, carved by Silas’s hands and widened by my own screams.
The heat of the room pressed in as the tempo of my heart began the slow, grueling crawl back to a normal rhythm.
I just sat there for hours, propped up, watching the clock tick toward four a.m. like a girl terrified of her own shadow.
I must have drifted off to sleep again while sitting, and when I woke. The burning sensation started crawling under my skin. My nightshift was soaked through with sweat, and my head throbbed with a dull, pounding ache.
I tried to move, but pain started shooting from my foot. It was throbbing deeply that radiated up my calf, past my knee, settling into my bones.
I peeled back the duvet, a fresh wave of panic rising inside my chest.
In the harsh, unwavering light of the gas lamps, my foot looked like a nightmare. The skin around the splinter wound was no longer just red, it was a deep, angry purple, swollen so tight it looked ready to burst. And there were dark, thin streaks climbing toward my ankle.
"Casimir," I choked out, the heat making my head spin.
He had been sleeping on the floor beside my bed, his back against the fra, his coat folded beneath his head. He sat up imdiately, his eyes finding mine.
"What is wrong?"
"My foot." My voice cracked. "Sothing is wrong with my foot."
His gaze snapped downwards and I saw the blood drain from his face, leaving him deathly pale. He moved instinctively toward the injury, his hand reaching out to check the heat, but he stopped mid-air.
He hovered there, his fingers shaking, torn between the need to save and the fear of breaking further.
"Clara, I have to look," he breathed, his eyes searching mine, pleading for permission. "The fever... it’s spreading. I have to touch you, little bird. Please."
The pain was a white-hot spike now, a jagged line of fire shooting toward my heart. I looked at the black lines, then back at his devastated face. I could feel the poison turning my blood into sludge.
"O—Okay," I whispered, a single tear tracking through the salt on my cheek. I took a deep breath and gripped reality. "Okay..."
He leaned in, his touch lighter than a breath, but as his fingers grazed the inflad skin, the world tilted. The heat from the lamps blended with the fire in my blood, and the room began to dissolve.
"It is alright," I heard him whisper, though he sounded like he was telling it to himself. "It is going to be alright."
His hands ca up to cup my face. His palms were framing my cheeks as if he could physically hold my soul inside my body. He leaned in until his forehead pressed against mine, his breath hot and ragged against my skin.
"It’s going to be alright. I am begging you, Clara. Stay. Please... stay with . I am not strong enough to lose you twice."
The vulnerability in his touch was more terrifying than the fever.
I tried to hold onto the sight of him, but his face was blurring. I was slipping, falling back into that liquid velvet darkness where the pain couldn’t reach .
"Higgins! Get the physician. Now!"
The roar of his voice was the last thing I heard.
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