Season 1: Awakening the Viliness

  Ch 4: A Man on His Knees

  Luceran’s head didn’t lower. He didn’t flinch. He just… looked at her.

  Mira held his gaze like it was a bde banced on its point—too heavy to lift, too sharp to drop. Her expression didn’t waver. The room, the gown, the gloves, the silence—they became armour. She kept her posture loose-limbed and elegant, the way Nysera would. Slightly bored. Slightly dangerous. Like the man on his knees was just another part of the morning ritual, somewhere between tea and treachery.

  Inside, her body was humming.

  Not with fear, not exactly. With awareness. Her pulse beat like a drum at the base of her throat, hot and fast, but her voice had come out steady. Regal, even. She didn’t sound like a sarywoman pretending not to be hungover on the Piccadilly Line. She sounded like someone who owned this man. Someone who had bought him, kept him, tamed him.

  And he hadn’t called her out on it. He hadn’t snarled. He hadn’t said: You’re not her.

  He just looked at her. Unmoving. Waiting.

  Her hands, hidden neatly in her p, clenched around the folds of her gown.

  This was a game with rules she didn’t know, but she’d just made the first move.

  Now she had to survive the next one.

  He blinked slowly. Once. Twice. His expression didn’t change, but something shifted behind his eyes—subtle, like a thought arriving te to a conversation. His spine straightened the tiniest fraction. Not pride. Not defiance. Just... precision. As if he’d finally received his cue.

  Then he spoke.

  “You told me once that silence was its own kind of loyalty.” His voice was low, shaped like prayer and shadow. “I’m still listening.”

  Mira’s breath caught, just slightly. He wasn’t looking at her like a man looks at his captor. Not like an animal waiting to be punished. He looked at her like someone who’d been told once—maybe only once—that she was the reason he hadn’t been left to rot in a celr somewhere. That she had saved him from something worse. That her leash was a mercy.

  And maybe, for a time, it had been.

  Mira’s stomach twisted.

  He didn’t sound afraid. He sounded devout. And beneath that—raw, aching, almost imperceptible—was a flicker of hope. Small, desperate, clinging to the image of the woman he thought she was. The one who had bought him, cleaned the blood from his wrists, named him hers.

  He still thinks you’re the only thing that didn’t destroy him.

  Luceran had been taken from a worse fate—sold into something less cruel, but still a cage. He didn't remember the bargain struck above his head, only that he had been led from one set of chains into another, and taught to believe that velvet was mercy because it wasn't iron.

  She had no idea what to say next. But she couldn’t stay quiet.

  Mira exhaled slowly through her nose, keeping her posture composed, careful. Her voice, when it came, was softer than before—but no less precise. She wasn’t Nysera. But she had to sound close enough to fool the silence between them.

  “Do you dream,” she asked, “when I leave you alone?”

  Luceran didn’t react at first. Not visibly. But something shifted in the way he held himself—shoulders tightening, fingers flexing just slightly against the marble. Not fear. Not pain. A hesitation. The kind that came from being handed a question that didn’t fit the script.

  “I used to,” he said, after a beat too long. “Before.”

  Before what, he didn’t say.

  His voice had gone quieter. Rougher at the edges, as if dreaming was something he wasn’t supposed to talk about. As if it was disobedience just to remember.

  “I dreamed I was somewhere high,” he murmured, gaze fixed somewhere near her colrbone but never quite reaching her eyes. “A temple, maybe. Or a ruin. The sky was red. You were there. Or someone like you. You were burning.”

  He blinked once, slowly. “I was holding a sword, but I couldn’t see the bde. Only the names carved along the hilt. I tried to speak, but the words bled.”

  Mira’s throat tightened.

  Luceran tilted his head slightly, brows drawing inward—not with pain, but confusion. Like he didn’t know where the memory ended and the dream began.

  “There was a crown,” he said, voice low, almost reverent. “It broke. I don’t remember why. Only that it felt like it had always been broken.”

  He went quiet again.

  She didn’t know what to do with any of it. Sky-red temples. Word-bleeding swords. It didn’t sound like goals, or hopes, or anything solid. She’d been trying—awkwardly, clumsily—to ask if he still wanted anything beyond survival. But through Nysera’s mouth, the question had twisted, and his answer had twisted with it. Instead of ambition, she’d gotten ruin and swords and fire. A burning woman who might’ve been her. It sounded like something plucked from the back of a book and half-drowned in metaphor—or maybe madness. She couldn’t tell. But if he was still dreaming, she told herself that had to be good. It meant he hadn’t been hollowed out completely.

  “I see,” she said coolly, letting the words fall like judgment instead of relief. “Then you haven’t forgotten how to imagine.”

  He bowed his head slightly, uncertain if he was being praised or warned. That was fine. Nysera’s compliments had always cut.

  She let the silence stretch as she tried to word the next question carefully. Then, lightly, she asked: “If I dismissed your leash… what would you do?”

  The change was subtle, but Mira caught it. A muscle jumped in his jaw; his breath hitched, shallow and sharp. His hands flexed against the marble, the faintest whisper of tension breaking the illusion of perfect obedience. His gaze flicked up to her—quick, cautious—and in it she saw a flicker of something raw. Like he thought, for a moment, that this was a test he couldn’t afford to fail, a trap baited with kindness too sharp to touch without bleeding. She held perfectly still, letting the moment stretch, giving him nothing but her silence to answer.

  “I don’t know,” he said finally.

  Mira inhaled slowly. She hadn't known what answer she expected—defiance, fear, anger, maybe even the desperate eagerness to please. She had braced for him to say he would run, cower, strike out, or vanish into himself. Anything she could categorise, understand. But he’d given her something far worse. Honest uncertainty—a raw, trembling truth.

  Her chest tightened.

  She took a measured step closer, slow enough that it felt intentional, not hesitant. “Do you remember who gave you that colr?”

  His eyes flicked to hers and away again. “You did.”

  It wasn’t a lie. But it wasn’t fully true either.

  The room felt colder.

  “And if I asked you to remove it?”

  This time, he looked at her longer. Not with confusion, not with worship—but with quiet calcution. With the kind of focus that said I’m trying to understand what game you’re pying—and whether I want to win.

  “I would ask if it pleased you,” he said at st. “And if it didn’t, I would keep it on.”

  Mira inhaled slowly. That was loyalty. That was conditioning. That was everything the book had hinted at and never fully expined—how someone could be kept in chains and still choose the leash, not because they loved it, but because they were made to love the one who put it there.

  She should have ended it there. Dismissed him. Closed the door on the strange, sad softness of his answers and let herself have a long, silent panic in private. But she didn’t.

  Instead, the question slipped out before she could stop it.

  “If I touched you,” she said, her voice was low and curious, “would you flinch… or lean in?”

  For a moment, he didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. Then something in him shifted.

  Not violently. Not dramatically. Just a flicker of tension—like a muscle pulling tight. His mouth parted slightly. His spine straightened. His knees slid half an inch forward, unthinking. His tongue wet his bottom lip as if anticipating a command.

  Her gaze dropped—only for a second.

  His trousers twitched. Not a full shift. Not obscene. But a pulse. A betrayal. A very human, very needy ache.

  And Mira suddenly remembered what kind of story she was in.

  High-spice romantasy. Divine power fed by affection, by connection, by the body. Touch was worship. Desire was magic. And he—this broken, colred, exquisite man—was starving for both.

  Her mouth went dry.

  He hadn’t answered with words, but he didn’t have to. Everything in his posture screamed it. He wanted. Capital W. And not just sex. Not just contact. Closeness. Companionship. Something to anchor him before he forgot what being human felt like.

  He was begging, silently, to be touched in a way that meant more than ownership. And it was that denial—not the chains—that would break him.

  Mira exhaled slowly, voice low. “That wasn’t a command.”

  His eyes flicked up, hungry and aching and sharp all at once. “I know.”

  She didn’t know how long they stayed like that—him on his knees, gaze burning holes into her, need wrapped so tightly in obedience it looked holy. Mira stood above him, cloaked in silence and silk, pulse fluttering like a caught thing beneath her ribs. Her body hadn’t moved. Her thoughts hadn’t stopped.

  He wasn’t gone. Not fully. The cracks were showing, yes. The hunger. The hollow. But he was still here. Still watching her like she might give him something no one else had.

  A hand. A word. A reason.

  And maybe… maybe she could.

  But the story she remembered didn’t offer second chances. It only offered failure. Luceran was a trial. A man meant to be saved, then when it failed, killed. A weapon the Saintess couldn’t wield, so the Goddess destroyed him. His downfall was baked into the plot like a poison fruit, and Nysera—she—was the one who lit the fuse.

  Now she was here. Before it all broke. Before he snapped. Before he realised love wouldn’t save him.

  She could stop it. Maybe.

  But she also knew what that would cost.

  To save him, she would have to touch him. Not once. Not just his body. She would have to reach into whatever still ached inside him and say: I see you. You’re not a weapon. You’re not a thing. You’re wanted. And he would believe her.

  Because he already did.

  Mira’s heart beat once. Hard.

  She swallowed and stepped back, the hem of her gown sighing across the floor. His expression didn’t change. But his body shifted, just slightly—forward, involuntarily. Like he thought, for half a second, she might touch him. She didn’t.

  Mira needed space. She needed to think through how she could fix him—or help him. She needed to be far away from this handsome man begging to be held.

  “Enough,” she said, carefully, almost gently. “That will be all.”

  It wasn’t cruel. But it wasn’t what he wanted. The silence that followed wasn’t obedience. It was grief. He bowed his head. Not because she commanded it. Because that small moment of almost had undone something in him.

  He said nothing. He didn’t plead. He simply turned, slowly, hands to the floor again, and began crawling away like a secret retreating into shadow. He looked back, once, as if he was waiting for her say it was all a test and order him to stay.

  And Mira—Saintess of absolutely fucking nothing—stood there in silence, watching the man she might’ve just started to save fracture behind his retreat.

  She didn’t move.

  Because she didn’t know what to do.

  Every choice felt like another crack.

  And gods help her, she was starting to understand why no one had saved him before.