Chapter 3 : The Cage

Serena POV

They drag me so far into the castle that the air inside has forgotten the taste of sunlight. The stairs narrow, the rock slick with water. Torches blink blue and hungry. The ropes at my wrists scrape bare skin already scabbed over from last night. Each jerk of the guards’ hands grinds that heat into raw flesh. I don’t speak. Wolves hunt by sound before they hunt by scent.

The stairwell opens into a cavern lined with an iron door runed with veins of magic. Each rune flickers faintly, the old words pulsing like some caged heart. When the guards shove me up against the wood the cold of the metal seeps through my clothes and into my bones. One of them presses the latch and the hinges groan thick and alive.

The room breathes cold. Hooks dangle from the ceiling beams like ripened fruit. Chains uncoil across the floor in silver snakes. A workbench hewn from rough stone stands in the center, claw-scored and dirty. On the far wall, the skulls of wolves and humans and other things that might have spoken hang on a shelf like fruit from a tree. The air smells like old oil and iron, smoke embedded in rock.

I fall to my knees and the impact punches through bone. I push upright until my spine cracks straight. The guards draw back and the room is silent except for the swish of leather. The door slams behind them and the sound hardens the room into stone.

Footsteps come then. Slow, measured, patient. Each step counts my heart for me. He doesn’t need to rush. Predators never do. Luca’s shadow stretches out to me first long and certain. When he stops the heat from him floods out and burns the chill from my skin.

“Kneel,” he says.

“I already am.”

He walks the length of the room once, his steps measured and long. “Not like that. You’re kneeling because you fell. I want you to kneel because you choose to.”

I laugh, the sound scraping in my throat. “Then you’ll wait forever.”

He crouches behind me, hooks the rope at my wrists and tugs. My shoulders stretch until they burn. His breath ghosts my ear. “Every creature has the shape of its cage. This is yours.”

“Then break it.”

He lets go of the rope. The slack in the pull aches worse than the tug. Metal shifts, a chain dragging against stone. When he turns back to face me, an iron collar swings at his wrist, the runes down its rim catching the torchlight, bright as teeth.

“Put it on,” he says.

“No.”

He crouches until his breath mingles with mine. His eyes are the color of winter lightning. “You’ve made a life on the word ‘no.’ I respect that. It means there is something here worth teaching.” He sets the collar in my palm. It’s heavier than it looks, colder than it should. I could throw it, could fling it so hard the sound of it shatters like glass. But his eyes pin me to the stone.

“A cage,” he whispers, “does not hold the body. It holds the will.”

“My will won’t fit in your hand.”

“We’ll see.”

The silence between us stretches long and thick as smoke. Somewhere a drip of water echoes from above. My heartbeat pounds through the sound, loud and traitorous. The torches spit sparks and their light etches runes across his cheek.

“Look,” he says.

I turn. The wall at wrist-height is covered in scratches, some deep, some faded with time. A language written in survival by whoever came before. “You keep trophies,” I say.

“Memories. Every queen begins as a story told in someone else’s blood.”

“I am not your queen.”

“Not yet.” He rises, leaving me in the cool shadow of him. “Tonight you will learn this room. Tomorrow you will learn to be silent.”

“I will keep the first and break the second.”

He tilts his head and I know he sees the shudder of my shoulders. “You’re shaking.”

“I’m cold.”

He steps forward and the heat of him swallows the lie like it was my breath. The brand at my collarbone flares to life in answer, a heartbeat not his, but listening to him anyway.

“You think hate will protect you,” he says quietly, “Hate is a leash you pretend you’re holding.”

“You want gratitude?”

“I want truth. Truth comes from breaking.” His eyes flick to the collar still clenched in my fist. “And breaking always begins small.”

He takes a step back and the coat whispers against itself, leather on leather. Then the quiet rasp of a buckle sliding away. The sound cuts through the silence like a knife through cloth.

I don’t move.

He doesn’t look back. “You thought fire was the oath.” The belt slides free with a whisper of sound. “Fire is only the door.”

The collar slips from my hand, rolling slowly away. A metallic ping that seems to echo through the room and through time.

“By dawn,” his voice is a whisper now, steady as a heartbeat, “you will understand the shape of obedience.”

“And you will learn the shape of mine.”

He laughs once, a sound too warm to trust. “Sleep if you can.”

The belt drops. Leather meets stone in a finality so quiet it seems not to exist. The torches flicker and dim, shadows stretching tall across hooks and chains, as though the room itself is breathing in.

The door opens. The air outside bites at my skin. He does not turn. The lock slides home—one slow, single click.

Silence pours back in. My breath fogs in the air before me, once, twice. The skulls stare like judges, patient and blind. The collar lies against my knee, colder now, as though it has already claimed me.

I listen for his retreating footsteps and hear nothing. Only the faint whisper of leather on the other side of the door—hands working a buckle into place—and the dark pressing close like it’s hungry for the lesson I swore I wouldn’t learn.