Chapter 388: The Demon Returns 2
The chamber’s air pressure dipped so sharply that Mailah’s ears popped, a violent reminder that she was standing on ground that did not belong to the mortal world. She tightened her grip on the silver astrolabe, her mind racing. She had made her grand speech, she had defied him, and she was ready to step through the threshold of the Archive to finally uncover the truth behind her imprisonment.
She turned on her heel, fully expecting to cross the final boundary.
"Nice try," Grayson’s voice murmured, far too close to her ear.
Before her foot could touch the golden light, a heavy, invisible wave of force slammed into her. It wasn’t a physical push; it felt like a wall of dense water wrapping around her chest, lifting her sneakers a fraction of an inch off the cold stone. She gasped, dropping her arms to her sides as she was forcefully pulled backward, gliding across the obsidian floor as if she were being hauled by an invisible towline.
"What—hey! Let go of me!" she sputtered, kicking her legs in mid-air like an indignant cat.
She collided directly against a solid, unyielding chest. A pair of strong, familiar arms wrapped around her waist, locking her in place. With a flick of his wrist—without even touching the massive, ancient block of stone with his hands—Grayson flicked his fingers toward the heavy chamber door.
Clang.
The massive slab of basalt slid shut with a deafening, thunderous thud, sealing off the golden light of the Archive entirely. The room plunged back into the dim, moody gloom of the subterranean corridor.
Before Mailah could even catch her breath or process the sheer impossibility of what had just happened, Grayson’s free hand swept upward, prying her fingers apart one by one from the astrolabe. The intricate silver rings ceased their spinning as he lifted the device clean out of her grasp.
Mailah froze. Her brain completely stalled.
She looked at the closed stone door, then back down at her empty hands, and finally up at Grayson’s face.
"Did you just... did you just use telekinesis on me?" she whispered, her voice deadpan and laced with utter disbelief. "Since when can you do telekinesis? You’ve never done that before! You’ve lived with me for three years, and you’ve never once cleaned the kitchen table from the couch using your mind, but you use it to tackle me?"
Grayson didn’t smile. He tucked the astrolabe securely inside his coat pocket, keeping his arm firmly wrapped around her waist to prevent any further escape attempts. "There are a lot of things I don’t do around the house, Mailah, mostly because you have a tendency to throw heavy objects when you’re startled."
"I am startled now!" she shrieked, finally snapping out of her paralysis. She tried to stomp on his foot, but he simply shifted his weight, completely unbothered. "Give that back! You can’t just magic-grab things from me like an over-glorified Jedi! Who taught you that? Did you learn that while you were supposedly out ’anchoring’ yourself in a ditch somewhere?"
"I didn’t learn it in a ditch," Grayson said dryly, his breath warm against her hair. "And stop squirming. You’re going to pull a muscle, and then I’ll have to carry you all the way back up three hundred flights of stairs."
"I would rather rot down here!" she snapped, turning her head as far as she could to glare at him. "Give me the astrolabe, Grayson! I was two seconds away from finding out why I’m a ’prototype’ and why your family treats this house like a maximum-security prison!"
"And you were two seconds away from causing a localized tectonic collapse," Grayson countered, his voice suddenly losing its light edge, dropping into a heavy, serious register. He looked down at her, his dark eyes fierce. "Do you have any idea what you’re doing, Mailah? Really? Because right now, you aren’t being brave. You’re just running away."
Mailah stopped fighting. The words hit her like a splash of ice water, burning hot and stinging. She let out a harsh, disbelieving laugh.
"I’m running away?" she echoed, her voice trembling with a sudden, overwhelming surge of fury. "Are you actually hearing yourself right now? I am running away? I was locked in a room for weeks! I was fed whatever mystery gruel Soren brought in a medical kit while you were off playing hide-and-seek in the foundation! You vanished without a single word, you left me to rot, and now I’m the one running away?"
"Yes," Grayson answered without missing a beat.
Mailah’s jaw dropped. "Unbelievable. You are actually, genuinely infuriating."
"Listen to me," Grayson said, tightening his grip slightly when she tried to wrench herself away again. "You were hurt, you were angry, and instead of facing the reality of what we are—you took a mechanical puzzle from a wall and decided to brute-force your way into a dimension of uncontained raw energy just to satisfy your curiosity. How is that different from what you accused me of doing?"
Mailah blinked, momentarily derailed. "What are you talking about?"
"When things got hard between us," Grayson said quietly, the raw vulnerability in his voice punching right through her anger, "when our arguments turned into a war zone, what did I do? I ran. I stayed away because I was too cowardly to face the friction. I thought distance would fix it."
He looked down at her, his expression tight with a profound, aching regret. "And what are you doing right now? When the marriage broke down, when you felt trapped and abandoned, you started pulling at every thread of this estate, trying to find a way to blow the whole thing up just so you wouldn’t have to deal with the pain of being left behind. You’re trying to escape us, Mailah. Through a door."
The silence in the corridor grew so heavy it felt physical. Mailah stared at him, the sharp retort dying on her tongue. The anger didn’t vanish—it was still there, hot and prickly under her skin—but it was mixed with a terrifying, uncomfortable truth that she didn’t want to admit.
She swallowed hard, looking away from his intense gaze. "I didn’t have a choice, Grayson. You left me with nothing."
"I know," he murmured, his thumb gently brushing against her hip, a subconscious gesture of comfort that felt painfully familiar. "And I am sorry. God, Mailah, I am sorry. I spent every day down in the sub-levels terrified that I had broken something in you that couldn’t be fixed."
Mailah narrowed her eyes. "Oh, wonderful. Do you want a gold star? Should I bake you a congratulatory pie in the haunted kitchen?"
Grayson let out a dry, breathy chuckle, the corners of his mouth twitching upward despite himself. "A pie would be nice, actually. Preferably one that doesn’t try to bite my hand off."
"Keep dreaming," she snapped, though the venom had drained out of her voice, replaced by an exhausted, stubborn fatigue. She crossed her arms over her chest. "So we’re back. What now? Do we just pretend the last month didn’t happen? Do we go back upstairs, sit on opposite sides of the living room, and politely ignore the fact that you abandoned your wife to go commune with the bedrock?"
"No," Grayson said firmly. He gently turned her around so she was facing him fully, though he still kept a careful, respectful distance with his hands. "No more ignoring things. No more running. No one should ever access the foundation of this estate because disturbing it can cause catastrophic problems, but I’ve managed to secure the area. And now that’s settled, it’s time we work on reconciliation."
Mailah let out a loud, theatrical snort of disbelief. "Reconciliation? Are you hearing yourself, Grayson? You can’t just slap a ’reconciliation’ label on a marriage that you blew up with a tactical abandonment grenade! That’s not how trust works! Trust isn’t a VCR that you just unplug and plug back in!"
"It’s an astrolabe," Grayson deadpanned.
"Don’t you dare joke with me!" Mailah poked him hard in the chest with her index finger. "You left me! You didn’t leave a note! You didn’t leave a text! You didn’t even leave a Post-it on the fridge saying, ’Hey honey, going somewhere dark, back in a month, love you!’ Nothing! Just absolute, deafening silence while I fought off a guy in a medical coat who looked like he wanted to harvest my spleen!"
Grayson flinched, the poke hitting its mark. He caught her finger in his hand, holding it gently between his palms. "Soren was supposed to keep you safe."
"Soren gave me a side-eye and told me I smelled like a thunderstorm!"
"Which you do, by the way," Grayson muttered, half-smiling.
"Grayson!"
"I’m serious, I know I have to earn your trust back," Grayson said, his voice dropping all defensive barriers. He stepped closer, looking down at her with a quiet, devastating sincerity. "I know an apology doesn’t fix weeks of terror. I know a single conversation doesn’t erase the fact that I left you alone in this house. But I am not going anywhere else, Mailah. I’m here. And I am ready to do the work. However long it takes."
Mailah looked into his eyes—those impossibly deep eyes that she had spent time loving, and weeks hating. She wanted to stay mad. She wanted to cross her arms, turn her nose up, and demand a formal written contract detailing every single flaw he needed to fix before she even considered sharing a couch with him again.
Instead, a heavy sigh slipped past her lips, carrying away the last remnants of her manic energy.
"You’re an idiot, Grayson," she whispered, her voice cracking slightly.