WHAT LIVES BENEATH THE VEIL
Book One: The Unblooded Lamb
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CONTENT WARNING: This series contains explicit sexual violence, human sacrifice, psychological torture, murder of innocent characters (including children and family members), ritualistic killing, and extreme horror. No character is safe. Read at your own risk.
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Chapter Two: The First Crack
Year 6 – The Autumn of Small Experiments
The kitten had no name.
This was not an accident. Liora had learned by now that named things were missed. Named things were searched for. Named things inspired questions like "Where is Snowdrop?" and "Has anyone seen the rabbit?"
Unnamed things simply vanished.
She found it behind the stables, three weeks old, gray and blind and mewling with its mouth open to the cold sky. Its mother—Ashes, the castle tom—was nowhere in sight. Probably hunting. Probably trusting that the world would not eat her young.
Liora knelt in the mud and watched it for a long time.
Her dress would be ruined. She didn't care. Clothes were costumes. This—this small, blind, trusting thing—was something else. An opportunity. A question she had been waiting to answer since her fifth birthday.
What happens if you open their eyes before they're ready?
She reached out. Her fingers were small but steady. No tremor. No hesitation.
The kitten felt her warmth and turned toward her hand, mouth opening and closing, searching for milk that wasn't there. It did not know fear yet. It had not learned that warmth could be a trap.
Liora picked it up.
It fit in one palm. She could feel its heartbeat—fast, frantic, the way all small things beat against the dark. Its fur was damp. Its body was fragile. One squeeze and the ribs would crack like dry twigs.
She did not squeeze.
That would be wasteful. A crushed kitten told her nothing she didn't already know. Death was easy. Death was everywhere. What she wanted was information.
She carried it to her private corner of the garden—the loose stone behind the wall where she had once placed Snowdrop's fur. No one came here. No one had reason to. The garden was overgrown, forgotten, a relic of a previous queen who had loved roses and died before Liora was born.
Perfect.
She sat on the cold ground, crossed her legs, and placed the kitten in her lap. It continued mewling. Continued searching. Continued trusting.
Liora took a sewing needle from her pocket.
She had stolen it from the nursemaid's basket three days ago. The nursemaid had not noticed. No one ever noticed small disappearances. That was the first lesson Liora had learned about people: they only saw what they expected to see.
She held the needle between her thumb and forefinger. The point was sharp. She had tested it on her own fingertip earlier that morning, pressing just hard enough to draw a single bead of blood.
It hurt.
She had expected that. Pain was information. Now she knew exactly how much pressure was required to pierce living flesh.
The kitten's eyes were closed. Two small seams in its gray face, sealed shut by nature for exactly two more weeks. Nature was slow. Nature was patient. Liora was neither.
She brought the needle to the first eyelid.
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Victim POV – The Kitten
There is warmth. There is a heartbeat above you, slow and steady, nothing like your mother's. You do not understand slow heartbeats. You understand milk and fur and the dark press of siblings. This is not that.
Something touches your face. It is not a tongue. It is not a paw. It is hard and cold and sharp.
Then—
Light.
It explodes behind your eyes before they are ready. Not the soft blur of the world you were supposed to grow into. A jagged, white, screaming light that has no shape because your brain does not yet know how to build shapes from signals.
You do not see the girl's face.
You see pain.
You open your mouth to cry—not mewling now, but screaming, the kind of scream that is supposed to bring your mother running—
And the second eye opens.
More light. More pain. The world is not a world. The world is a wound.
You thrash. Your legs kick. Your claws—too small to hurt anything—scrabble against the fabric of her dress.
Above you, the heartbeat does not change.
It stays slow. Steady. Patient.
You scream until your throat gives out.
And then you wait for the next thing.
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Liora watched the kitten thrash.
Its eyes were open now—wide, unseeing, flooded with light it could not process. Its pupils were pinpricks. Its body convulsed in small, jerky movements.
She had expected crying. She had not expected this. The violence of its reaction surprised her. Pleasantly.
So this is what happens, she thought. They break before they die.
The kitten went limp.
Not dead. Not yet. Its chest still rose and fell. Its heart still hammered against her palm. But something in it had stopped fighting. The screams had become whimpers. The whimpers had become silence.
Liora waited.
She wanted to see how long it would take for the body to give up completely. She wanted to know if the eyes would close again, or if they would stay frozen open, staring at nothing.
They stayed open.
She counted. One hundred and forty-seven heartbeats—her own, not the kitten's, because the kitten's was too fast to track—before the chest stopped moving.
Then she sat in the silence and thought.
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Year 6 – The Second Lesson
She did not bury the kitten.
Burying was for things you wanted to remember. She placed its body behind the loose stone, next to Snowdrop's fur, and let the earth and insects do their work. By spring, there would be nothing left but bones.
She would keep the bones.
Not as a trophy. That was sentimental. She would keep them as data. She wanted to see how long it took for flesh to rot, for marrow to dry, for teeth to loosen from their sockets. Death was a process. She intended to understand every stage.
That night, she stood before her silver mirror and practiced her expressions.
Eyes slightly wide. Innocence.
Mouth soft. Gentleness.
Head tilted. Curiosity.
She held the mask for a full minute. Then two. Then five.
No one knocked on her door. No one checked on her. The castle slept, and Liora Veyne, age six, learned her second great lesson:
No one is watching.
Not really. Not closely. They saw the surface and called it depth. They saw the smile and called it joy. They saw the little princess in her clean white dress and never asked where the mud on her hem had come from.
She smiled at her reflection.
The girl in the mirror smiled back.
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Year 7 – The First Human
The serving girl's name was Mira.
She was twelve years old, too old to be interesting to most of the castle, too young to be trusted with anything important. She cleaned the lesser halls. She carried water. She emptied chamber pots. She was, by every measure, forgettable.
Liora noticed her immediately.
Not because Mira was special. Mira was not special. Mira was available. She worked alone. She slept in a closet under the east staircase. She had no family in the castle—her parents had died of fever two winters ago, and no one had bothered to send her home because no one remembered where home was.
Mira was invisible.
Perfect.
Liora spent three weeks watching her.
She learned Mira's schedule: up at dawn, work until midday, eat a single meal in the kitchen corner, work until dusk, sleep. No friends. No visitors. No one who would ask questions if she stopped showing up.
She learned Mira's weaknesses: hunger (she gave half her bread to a younger orphan, a boy of six who followed her like a shadow), loneliness (she talked to herself while she worked, soft murmurs about the weather and the guards and the hope of spring), and a small, secret cruelty (she had once slapped the boy when he cried too loudly, then apologized for an hour afterward).
That last one interested Liora most.
She feels guilt, Liora thought. She hurts someone, then regrets it. Two impulses in conflict. Weak.
She began the approach slowly.
A smile in the hallway. A soft "good morning" when Mira passed. A question about the weather, then about Mira's day, then about Mira's name as if she didn't already know it.
"You're the princess," Mira said, startled, the first time Liora spoke to her directly.
"I'm Liora," she replied, tilting her head. "Just Liora. You can call me that."
"No, I couldn't—"
"I insist."
Mira blushed. She was not used to kindness. That was the third lesson Liora had learned: hungry people devour kindness like bread. They do not question it. They do not inspect it for poison. They are simply grateful.
Over the next month, Liora became Mira's friend.
She brought her small gifts: an extra piece of bread, a ribbon she claimed she didn't want, a warm cloak that had "fallen" behind a trunk. She listened to Mira's stories about the boy—his name was Finn, he was six, he had nightmares—and nodded with appropriate sympathy.
"You're so sweet," Mira said once, tears in her eyes. "Everyone says you're so sweet."
Liora smiled. "I try to be."
She was not trying to be sweet. She was trying to understand something: What does it feel like to kill a person?
The kitten had taught her about flesh. The rabbit had taught her about patience. But a person—a person with thoughts and memories and a boy named Finn who would cry when she disappeared—that was different.
She wanted to know how different.
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The Day of the Disappearance
Mira did not scream.
That surprised Liora. She had expected screaming. The kitten had screamed. But Mira—Mira, who had slapped a crying child and apologized for an hour—Mira simply went silent.
They were in the forgotten garden. Liora had asked Mira to meet her there after dusk. A secret, she had said. A gift. Something special that she couldn't show anyone else.
Mira had come. Of course she had come. She trusted the sweet little princess with the tilted head and the soft voice.
"You're my only friend," Mira had whispered, hugging her.
Liora had hugged back.
Then she had stepped away, picked up a stone—a good stone, heavy, with a sharp edge—and brought it down on Mira's temple.
Not hard enough to kill. Hard enough to stun.
Mira fell to her knees. Her mouth opened. No sound came out. Her hand went to her head. When it came away red, she stared at the blood as if it were a language she did not speak.
"Why?" she finally managed.
Liora knelt in front of her. She placed the stone on the ground and took Mira's bloody hand in both of hers. Held it gently. Like a friend.
"I need to know something," Liora said.
"What?"
"What it feels like."
She picked up the stone again.
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Victim POV – Mira
You are twelve years old. You have survived fever, hunger, and the cold indifference of a castle that does not know your name. You have fed a boy who is not your brother because no one else would. You have told yourself that the world is hard but not evil.
You were wrong.
The princess is holding your hand. Her grip is warm. Her eyes are the color of weak tea. She is six years old. She cannot hurt you. She is a child.
The stone comes down again.
Pain. Not the clean pain of a cut or the dull pain of hunger. A wet, spreading, wrong pain that fills your skull like rising water.
You try to pull away. Your body does not listen. Your legs have forgotten how to run. Your arms have forgotten how to push.
The princess tilts her head.
"Does it hurt?" she asks.
You cannot answer. Your mouth is full of something hot and copper-tasting.
"I want to know," she says, "if it hurts differently when it's a person."
The stone comes down again.
You think of Finn. You think of his small hands reaching for you in the dark. You think of the bread you gave him this morning, the last piece, and how he smiled.
You try to say his name.
The stone comes down.
And then—
Nothing.
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Liora sat back.
Her dress was ruined. Blood had soaked through the front, warm and thick, already cooling in the night air. Her hands were red to the wrists. Her face was spattered.
She looked at Mira's body.
The face was still recognizable. That was a problem. Recognizable bodies were found. Found bodies inspired questions.
She would need to learn how to cut.
Not tonight. Tonight she was tired. Not physically—the act had required almost no effort—but mentally. She had learned what she wanted to know.
It felt different.
The kitten had been an experiment. Mira had been an experience. The kitten's death had taught her about flesh. Mira's death had taught her about something else. Something she didn't have words for yet.
Power, perhaps. Or the absence of consequences. Or the quiet thrill of watching a person realize, in their final moments, that the world was not hard but evil.
She stood up.
She would bury Mira behind the loose stone. She would wash her dress in the fountain. She would go to bed and practice her smile in the mirror and wake up tomorrow as Princess Liora Veyne, the sweetest child in the castle.
No one would know.
No one ever knew.
She dragged the body across the garden, leaving a dark trail in the grass, and felt nothing but satisfaction.
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Year 7 – The Mask Holds
The next morning, Liora ate breakfast with her family.
"Good morning, Father," she said, curtsying to the empty chair where King Aldric should have been.
"Good morning, Mother," she said, kissing Queen Elara's cheek.
"Good morning, Theron. Good morning, Kael. Good morning, Darian."
She smiled. Her brothers grunted. Her mother patted her head.
"Aren't you a sweet girl," Queen Elara said.
Liora lowered her eyes. Demure. Modest. Innocent.
"I try to be," she said.
And she meant it.
She was trying. Every day, she was trying to be sweeter, softer, more forgettable. Because the sweeter she seemed, the less anyone looked. And the less anyone looked, the more she could learn.
There was a servant boy named Finn. He was six years old. He had been asking about Mira all morning.
Liora made a mental note.
Soon, she thought.
But not today. Today she would be patient. Today she would be good.
Today she would practice her smile.
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End of Chapter Two
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