Page 2 of A House of Cloaks & Daggers
If they heard me, they did not let on. And they didn’t stop; they didn’t even slow down.
Each night, they began anew. Tearing open the wounds that had almost healed from the night before, changing their tactics, breaking his body in ways I could hardly fathom.
My heart was coming undone, hanging in my chest by a thread as it strained against the agony of watching him suffer. An agony to which I quickly and shamefully became addicted.
I curled up under the covers as soon as the daylight was chased away by the darkness. I was so revoltingly eager to touch that glass wall again, to fight through the intrusive nature of the forest, and to find him still a prisoner in the dungeon.
While the origin of my eagerness was not enjoyment, it was no less disgraceful. I could offer him nothing more than some privacy, and yet I couldn’t even bear to give him that.
My punishment was simple and fitting. The more I slept, the more tired I became. And the harder I fought to save him, the louder I screamed, the longer it took for me to wake up again.
In the end, I took the sedatives and then the antipsychotics. I saved the meditation playlists, and I stopped falling asleep to Sleep Token—most of the time. I tried to talk about what I was witnessing, the things that had become so real to me despite being so impossible.
That first night, when my mother came running into my bedroom, the words simply snagged on the petrified lump in my throat. By the time I saw a psychiatrist, they had become permanently lodged there. Even when my little sister asked what was frightening me, I couldn’t give her an answer.
Every single time I opened my mouth to tell someone about the nightmares, I felt the sting of a hot silver spoon scalding my tongue. Or I had to run to the bathroom to be violently ill. Or my mind just went…
Blank.
So, I stopped trying to talk about it. But I could never give up my useless attempts at rescuing the man from my dreams. The man who didn’t exist, who had sleeves of tattoos with shapes and symbols from a language I didn’t recognise inked into his skin, and who had a body of muscle as hard as the stone he slept on after the beatings each night—when the worst part of the dream occurred, once they left him alone in his cell and invisible forces restrained me from going to him.
Coiled up, always facing away from me, he didn’t even flinch as I called his name over and over again.
“Lucais.”
I’d given my prisoner a name.
And so, he remained within the confines of my wicked subconscious, tortured by my dreams every single night.
Until my twenty-first birthday, that is. When they just…
Stopped.
Chapter two
A Hobgoblin
Dante’s Bookstore was supposedto close before dusk.
It was a small establishment on a quiet cobblestone street in the town centre, and most of its customers were regulars. I was familiar with their shopping patterns and reading habits, having spent most of my spare time at Dante’s since I was a child, and they rarely came in during the late afternoons.
Sometimes, a college student would wander through when they came home for the weekend, looking for a textbook we didn’t stock. Other times, passing tourists would be drawn inside by the dim, romantic glow from the ceiling lights or tempted by the heirlooms displayed beside books in the front window. The bookstore was a haven of tranquillity and old charm, like stepping backwards in time. Even on a street lined by quaint, gracefully ageing shopfronts left mostly untouched since the Victorian era, Dante’s allure was unique.
Conventional redbrick walled the upper level, where the living quarters had been turned into a surgery for books in need of repair. The lower level was carved from rosewood and adorned with Belgrave’s insignia—the outline of a single flame encircled by straight lines shooting outwards. The insignia dated back to medieval times, long before the modern world. It had belonged to the House of Belgrave, whose Lord had established many townships across the eastern lands as part of an ancient King’s Court.
Long gone, long dead, long forgotten. Nobody knew what had driven the nobility away.
There were very few coherent recollections from that era, and most known accounts were infused with so much wartime hysteria that they read more like fantasy novels than history books. Regardless, the insignia was preserved by the council and used to mark certain buildings protected by the Heritage Society. Most of the buildings were skeletal in their remains, so the insignia was either painted on or printed out and hung over their replacements. Dante’s, on the other hand, displayed an artful and dignified carving of the insignia in the wood above the entryway that the owner claimed was original.
“Been like that since I was a boy,” he’d told me gruffly, on the one and only occasion I had ever dared to ask. “And my father before me. He warned me not to look at it for too long lest ye see the flame start to flicker and ye lose yer wits.”
At the time, I was six years old, and the prospect of losing my wits terrified me greatly. The owner himself, John Dante, terrified me greatly too.
He was a miserable, haggard man with an unruly white beard, large hands, and dark, cunning eyes. He lived alone in a rundown cottage outside of the town limits and kept to himself beyond the basic requirements of operating the bookstore. The people of Belgrave called him a Hobgoblin, but John wasindifferent. He took no pains to present himself as anything other than the grouchy old bastard that became his natural form.
However, he was the partially estranged grandfather of my best friend, which meant I was permitted to spend my time in the bookstore’s reading nook outside of school hours—on the condition that I did not pester him while I was there.
I maintained a wide berth in the bookstore for a decade, during which time I grew up and overcame my fear of both John and the insignia on the rosewood. The marking was merely a lingering trace of history, and the owner an old man who disliked the real world.
