The 48 Hours
Chapter 15 · 912 words
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He came to your room on a Thursday night. Mina was asleep. The lock on the door had been broken sometime during the day — you hadn't noticed until you reached for it and found it hanging loose.
He didn't climb through the window this time.
He opened the door.
You sat up. Your hands went to the mattress. You reached for the panic, the adrenaline, the trigger that would bring the light.
He was faster.
What follows is not described in detail.
You are a healer. You know the clinical terms. You know the taxonomy of physical violation, the categories of consent, the spectrum from coercion to force. You have treated patients who came to you after. You have documented injuries, measured bruising, recorded testimony in the flat, careful language of a medical professional who understands that precision is the only kindness left when the thing itself is beyond repair.
You know all of this.
It does not help.
The first hour is a blur.
The second hour is worse.
By the sixth hour, you stop tracking time. Your body has made its decision — the same decision it made in the forest, the night he pinned you to the tree. Freeze. Shut down. Go somewhere else.
You go somewhere else.
The ceiling has a crack in it. It runs from the corner above the window to the center of the room, branching once, like a river on a map. You count the branches. You count the knots in the wooden beam. You count the intervals between his breathing, which is harsh and irregular and punctuated by sounds you choose not to hear.
Your magic is gone. The well is dry. The adrenaline has burned through every reserve you had and left nothing — no fight, no flight, just the static hum of a system that has turned itself off to survive.
Somewhere in the distance, a thread of infernal magic vibrates. The tether. His tether. It has been singing for hours, broadcasting his emotional state — the lust, the desperation, the terrible, consuming need — straight back to a palace in Baldur's Gate where an ancient vampire sits at a desk and reads the signal the way a spider reads its web.
Cazador knows.
Cazador has known for hours.
Cazador is patient.
On the second day, Mina knocks on the door.
"Sister? Are you all right? The shop's been closed all morning."
Your voice comes from very far away. "I'm sick. Don't come in."
"Can I bring you tea?"
"No. Go to the market. I'll be fine."
A pause. The sound of small boots shifting on floorboards.
"OK," Mina says.
She leaves.
You listen to her footsteps go down the stairs and out the front door, and you close your eyes.
He stops because he runs out of hunger, not because he chooses to.
Forty-eight hours. You know this because the light through the window has cycled twice. Two sunrises, two sunsets, two full rotations of the world continuing to exist while yours contracted to the dimensions of a bed and a ceiling crack and the weight of a body that wasn't yours.
When he pulls away, he looks at you.
You don't look back. You are looking at the ceiling.
He says something. You don't hear it. The words are sounds without meaning, the way a foreign language sounds when you're very tired.
He leaves the room.
You lie on the bed. The sheets are damp. Your body is a catalog of symptoms you don't examine. You stare at the ceiling crack and count the branches.
Seven. There are seven branches.
You counted them twenty times.
On the third morning, you get up. You wash. You dress. You braid your hair. You go downstairs and open the shop. You sell three books and a set of quills. You eat half a piece of bread. You teach Mina a new word — constellation — and watch her write it in her practice book, her tongue poking out in concentration.
You do all of this with the precise, mechanical efficiency of a woman walking through a house that burned down a week ago, stepping over the wreckage with the blank, functional numbness of someone who will not process what happened until she is somewhere safe enough to fall apart.
You are not somewhere safe.
You do not fall apart.
That night, in the crawl space above the ceiling, Astarion lies in the dark and tries to understand why the shivering won't stop.
The hunger is gone. The magic in her blood has flooded his system — two days' worth, uncontrolled, unrationed, more than he's ever had. He should feel warm. He should feel sated.
He feels nothing.
He presses his hand to his chest. No heartbeat. The borrowed flush is fading already. The warmth is draining out of him like water through a cracked cup, and in its place is something he doesn't have a name for.
The tether hums. A low, satisfied vibration, the psychic equivalent of a master nodding in approval.
Astarion closes his eyes and tries to remember why he came to the window in the first place.
He can't.
The memory is there, but it's covered in something dark and sticky, and when he reaches for it, his hands come back stained.
He doesn't look at the stain.
He lies in the dark and shivers.
End of Part Three