Chapter 5

The walk ends shortly after, spent primarily in the same stilted, awkward silence as the trip there. 

Brendan leads them to the east wing, where the royal families’ bedrooms are located, and now, Alcina’s. 

Alcina’s room is a spacious, lavishly-furnished room, of velvet drapes and wide windows, with a small but ornate chandelier glittering from the center of the ceiling, in essence, the same as the bedroom she’d just left behind.

She can’t help the mild surprise, at how normal it all seems, how similar, to her own home.

She knows it’s a ridiculous thought, but-- 

She doesn’t know why or rather, she does, but she’s ashamed to admit it, but the truth is she’d been imagining something less... something less like home.

Something that resembled the dark lair in which she’d be kept, imprisoned until the shadowed beast found a use for her. 

As Alcina stands still, a vaguely stupefied expression on her face, in the middle of the room, Brendan angles a sharp brow. “Is something not to your liking?”

Alcina whirls around, startled. She hadn’t realized Brendan was still present. Cheeks pinking, she shakes her head.

With something like amusement shimmering in his eyes, Brendan walks over to the sidewall of the room, where Alcina only now notices a closed door.

But given that both the en suite bathroom and closet doors are open and located elsewhere, Alcina cannot figure out where that particular door leads.

Alcina watches as Brendan pulls open the door... revealing another bedroom on the other side. The layout, visible from over here, mirrors her own room almost exactly, though it’s definitely larger than her's. 

“This is my room,” Brendan explains, blinking sedately back into Alcina’s shocked expression.

“I’m not entirely up to date as to what the plans are for after we are wed, but until then, presumably, we are free to maintain our separate spaces,” Brendan says looking right at Alcina.

He sounds as if these decisions are out of his hands.

Alcina is struck, once more, by the similarities, she shares with the man they call a dreadful beast, that for all the vile and wretched things he commands, he is somehow, just as helplessly directed by the whims of others, as Alcina is. 

“But as I’ve had a lock installed on your side, you should be able to lock it, such that it cannot be opened from my side.”

Alcina stills. As she looks up at the man at the door which will separate them from sharing the same space.

“I’m sorry?” she asks. “You- you ordered the commission of a lock?” She asked bewildered.

A week before Alcina was to depart for the Western Plains, Her brother Nordin had pulled her aside and Gifted her a small, but heavy dagger.

Alcina had recoiled in horror, but Nordin had, expression grim, forcibly closed her fingers around the hilt. 

“He is the one they call the shadowed beast, Alcina,” her brother had murmured.

“I do not know if this will do much against his power, but.” Nordin’s eyes, Alcina still remembers, had burned with a loathing that she had never seen in her brother’s gaze before.

“If you need to, you must use it. Do you understand me? ”

And yet, Alcina arrives, to find that Lord Brendan has apparently commissioned a lock on the door that separates their bedrooms, such that Alcina can prevent his entry into her room.

It evokes the faint impression of a beast, willingly slipping into chain restraints of its own accord, and handing the keys to his captor.

And yet, the accompanying image is not of a beast, but of Lord Brendan - of Lord Brendan, a person, slipping an iron collar over his own head and locking himself behind bars.

She does not understand.

Brendan steps coolly into the side of his room, gesturing towards the door. “You are free to test it out yourself if you’d like to ensure its effectiveness.”

Alcina blinks. “Why are you…”

Brendan’s lips quirk into a ghost of a smile, sallow and humorless. “Is your reaction not because you doubt the integrity of my claim?”

Alcina stares.

She realizes, now, that Brendan must believe that Alcina doubts him, as to the lock’s effectiveness.

That Alcina feels the need to ascertain, for herself, whether she is able to lock Brendan out, using the lock that Brendan had himself ordered the installation of.

And now, he invites Alcina to test it out herself, as if it were a matter of course, that Alcina should find him doubtful, when, already, he has assumed that Alcina would want the ability to lock the door, to begin with.

As if he were wholeheartedly embracing, and assuming, that he is the shadowy specter that he is known as; that Alcina would regard him in such a way. 

That he is something that must be locked away. It makes something uncomfortable curl in her stomach.

“It’s alright,” Alcina forces herself to say, despite that it would, in fact, give her much comfort to be able to confirm whether the door truly locks.

She cannot bring herself to do so, in a blatantly offensive manner to Brendan to his very face. 

Brendan glances at her appraisingly. And then, he shrugs, a tiny, almost imperceptible movement of his shoulders.

He moves as if to close the door between them, but pauses; and for a moment, Alcina can swear she can almost see hesitance in the way Brendan lingers awkwardly in the doorway in that second, despite the fact his expression remains perpetually unchanged.

In the end, the young lord merely dips his head in a polite bid goodbye. “Sweet dreams,” Brendan murmurs in that low, rumbling voice of his. 

Alcina straightens as if a jolt of electricity had wound up her spine.

And just as Lord Brendan closes the door, in that spare second, Alcina catches the fleeting glimpse of a small, amused quirk playing on his lips.

Sweet dreams, says the man who wields the nightmares as his birthright.