Page 40 of Ravished By the Revenant

Aldric sleeps beside me.

Correction: Aldric sleeps under me, because at some point in the night, I apparently claimed him like a body pillow. My cheek rests on his tattooed shoulder, my leg thrown over his thigh, and his arm curls around my back like it grew there.

I lift my head carefully and just… look.

He sleeps like a statue, still and quiet, no snoring, barely breathing. His black hair spills across the pillow, and the shard in his eye socket glows faintly even now, a nightlight from hell. The crystal in his chest pulses slowly and steadily through the exposed ribs, blue light washing over the bare walls. Scars everywhere. Stitches. Places where the flesh gave up centuries ago.

And my stomach does a full gymnastics floor routine.

Oh no.

Butterflies. I have butterflies. For a dead man. A seven-hundred-year-old warlord with a crystal for a heart and a body count that predates the printing press, and my insides are fluttering like I’m fourteen and he just passed me a note at school.

“You absolute disaster,” I whisper to myself.

Because that’s what this is, right? I’ve gone and fallen in love with the monster. Not lust. Let’s be real, lust I could file under understandable, have you seen him. This is worse. This is watching him sleep and cataloguing the way his lashes rest against the ruined cheekbone and thinking words like mine and always and what if I just stayed.

I mean, it’s not like I’m giving up some glittering life out there. My life outside these walls is a dead phone, a mafia fiancé with a search party, eleven foster homes’ worth of nothing to go back to, and an apartment in Bern I probably can’t afford anymore. The castle has fresh strawberries and a man who carries bathwater up staircases and looks at me like I invented sunlight.

But.

But.

Hair dryers exist. Streaming services exist. Modern dentistry, tampons, antibiotics, oat milk lattes, heated floors… Civilization exists, and I refuse to choose between the love of my life and indoor plumbing. That’s a false binary. That’s quitter talk.

So the answer isn’t leaving him. The answer is breaking the curse and dragging this castle—and its lord—into the twenty-first century, where I will personally introduce him to the concept of a water heater and watch his medieval brain melt.

Which means I need to see the thing he’s been hiding from me.

The goblet.

I slide out from under his arm one centimeter at a time, freezing every time the mattress creaks. Aldric makes a low sound and turns his face toward my vacated pillow, and my heart squeezes so hard it’s frankly embarrassing. I pull on his shirt—borrowed, thank you—then my jeans, and carry my boots to the door like a teenager sneaking out past curfew.

Shmoo is waiting in the hallway.

Sitting. Facing my door. Tail wrapped around his paws like he’s been expecting me.

“Okay, that’s not creepy at all,” I whisper, easing the door shut behind me and setting my boots down.

He stands, stretches, and trots off down the corridor without a backward glance. Toward the stairs. Toward, I realize three turns later, exactly where I’m going.

“You know where I’m headed,” I hiss at his upright gray tail. “How do you know where I’m headed? I decided four minutes ago. Are you reading my mind? Blink twice if you’re the witch.”

Shmoo does not blink twice. Shmoo leads me through the kitchen, past the pantry, to a low arched door at the end of a passage I’ve never explored, tucked behind a rack of copper pots like the castle was hiding it on purpose.

The cellar door. Heavy oak, iron bands, and a keyhole big enough to fit my thumb in.

Locked. Obviously.

“Great.” I rattle the iron ring anyway, because hope springs eternal and dies immediately. “Fantastic. Any other tricks, Gandalf? Cough up a key.”

Shmoo sits and stares at the keyhole.

The keyhole. Giant. Old. Shaped like⁠—

Wait.

I’ve seen a key like that. Big, black, ornate, lying in the shallow drawer of the library desk under a magnifying glass and a broken quill, back when I was ransacking the place for revenant lore. I remember picking it up and thinking it looked like a prop from a haunted house.