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“Dahlia is rotting in an iron closet beneath the foundation, screaming your name through a keyhole while the walls drink her sanity!” His grip tightened until my bones ground together. “You don’t have the leverage to negotiate with the Devil, little flower, let alone the thing that created me. If you try to run before the second stage is answered, that ink on your ribs will boil your blood inside your veins until your organs cook to ash.”

Malachi shoved me backward. I stumbled, catching myself on the cot’s iron frame.

He stepped toward the heavy door and threw the deadbolt with a harsh metallic clang.

“Where are you going?” I demanded, panting.

“The red door cracked,” he said without looking back, his broad shoulders taut as drawn bowstrings. “Rook is already sniffing around the perimeter, and Khaos is probably burning pages in the archive to cover his tracks. The House is accelerating the timetable because it tasted you, and I have to buy us enough room to breathe before the bells start ringing.”

“Us?” I mocked bitterly. “There is no us, Malachi. Just you and the mark you put on me.”

He paused in the doorway, the dim hallway light catching the razor-sharp contours of his unmasked face, the ink swirling up his neck like black briars.

“Don’t leave this room,” he said, his tone devoid of heat, hollow and absolute. “Don’t touch the lock. And whatever you do, don’t put that white dress back on.”

He stepped into the corridor. The heavy iron door slammed shut, and the lock turned from the outside with a final, sickening click.

Silence descended. Heavy, cold, and absolute.

I collapsed onto the edge of the cot, trembling from head to toe, holding my throbbing ribs. The black script beneath my breast was still pulsing, radiating a deep, magnetic heat that seemed to hum through my marrow.

On the concrete floor at my feet lay the ruined white silk garment he’d stripped from my body during the performance. The fabric was shredded, soaked through with sweat, sawdust, and the dark crimson stain of my virginity.

Don’t put that white dress back on.

I reached down and picked up the silk.

The instant my fingertips brushed the stained hem, the room’s temperature plummeted below freezing. The buzzing copper bulb overhead flickered, went black, and the concrete walls around me dissolved into an icy, rushing void.

The smell of damp stone vanished, replaced by the suffocating stench of rotting canvas, woodsmoke, horse manure, sawdust, and sour whale-oil lamps.

I wasn’t in the bunker anymore.

Instead, I stood in the freezing mud of a century-old autumn night beneath a vast, billowing tent of patched canvas. A crude wooden sign hung from frayed hemp ropes above a sawdust pit, its faded red paint peeling in the wind:

THE VALE CARNIVAL OF CURIOSITIES.

A crowd of men in heavy wool overcoats and crude, carved wooden masks stood shoulder to shoulder, their breath pluming in the dark air as silver dollars clinked rhythmically into iron buckets.

On a raised timber platform stood a woman in high-collared black silk, her posture immaculate, her dark hair pinned into a severe crown. A dark-haired woman. Her porcelain skin was pristine, her hands unblemished by work or grease as she held a thick, leather-bound ledger and turned the parchment pages with clinical detachment.

Below her platform, performers were bound to iron posts.

A contortionist whose shoulders were being cranked backward by iron ratchets until the ligaments tore with wet pops.

A weeping young man strapped flat to a butcher’s trestle. At the same time, iron needles dipped in soot and lampblack were driven directly through his skin into the periosteum of his collarbones, his screams turning into wet, broken gasps as the crowd laughed and tossed coins onto the blood-spattered boards.

At the woman’s side, half-submerged in the deep shadow of the stage drape, stood a man.

He was massive, his broad shoulders bare, dark ink crawling up his forearms in jagged, fresh lines that bled through his skin. He carried a heavy iron mallet at his side, his posture lethal, coiled, and predatory. When I tried to look at his face, my eyes slid away—his features were an unrecognizable blur of gray ash and drifting smoke, completely erased from memory.

Yet my pulse spiked with the same violent, suffocating recognition that had hit me on the altar.

The man turned away from the woman’s platform and slipped quietly toward the canvas flap at the tent’s edge. Near the exit, standing in the freezing mud, was a young woman in a threadbare wool shawl, her arms crossed over her chest, her posture rigid with defiant fury.

She had my hands. My stance. My dark, stubborn eyes.

The blurred man stopped before her. His heavy, ink-stained hand reached out of the dark and pressed a crude silver ring into her open palm. He leaned down, his mouth brushing her ear, whispering something lost to the roar of the wind.