Chapter 125

Anastasia felt the damp seep through her torn cloth, its clammy chill mirroring the numbness that had settled in her bones.Days blurred into nights, the only rhythm the clanging of food tray and the distant echoes of the castle life she was so brutally excluded from. Vincent and Eve, her allies, their faces haunted her dreams, their voices turned to accusatory whispers in the silence. But she wouldn't break. Wouldn't succumb to the suffocating darkness of this cell. She still had a voice, a fire that flickered defiance even in the face of Thane's suffocating shadow. The clanging of metal against stone snapped her from her brooding. Two sentinels materialized in the dim corridor, their presence a fleeting flicker of light in her desolate world. "Food time, traitor," one of them grunted, shoving a stale crust of bread through the bars. She flinched at the word, its barbed accusation carving into her already wounded spirit. "Traitor?" she spat back, her voice surprisingly steady. "I'v