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Then the carnival’s wooden timbers groaned.

The canvas overhead split down the center with a sound like ripping sails. The sawdust pit opened up like a maw, swallowing the iron posts, the ledger, the crowd, and the screaming performers whole. Brick and mortar surged from the blood-soaked mud, drank the spectators’ agony, and hardened into towering foundations, subterranean vaults, and endless red-velvet corridors.

The carnival died, and the House took its first breath—a living parasite forged from the witnessed appetite of human cruelty.

My vision snapped like a severed wire.

I hit the concrete floor of the cellar on my hands and knees, choking on air that tasted of sulfur and iron. Cold sweat drenched my skin as my heart hammered against my sternum.

I was back in the locked room. The buzzing bulb flickered weakly above me.

On the floor in front of my hands, the crumpled white silk lay spread across the stone. The dark bloodstains had shifted, the crimson fluid reknitting into thin, deliberate strokes of fresh black ink that seeped straight through the fibers.

Beneath the jagged tear where Malachi had ripped the gown from my hips, four words gleamed wet against the pristine white fabric:

The last heir returns.

Beneath my torn bodice, the brand on my ribs flared with blinding, agonizing heat, the black script extending a fraction of an inch deeper across my chest, clawing straight toward my heart.

Deep beneath the bedrock, through miles of iron pipes and sealed vaults, the foundation let out a low, shuddering groan.

The House wasn’t waiting anymore.

It was awake.

Chapter 8

Malachi

“FERAL LOVE” BY CHELSEA WOLFE

Locking the door behind me, I leaned against it, breathing hard.

The mark on Zinnia’s ribs was already spreading. Years ago, when Dahlia first walked through the red door, I’d watched the same thing happen—black ink crawling across her skin in patterns that looked like contracts written in a language nobody could read. By the time she realized what was happening, it was too late to leave.

Zinnia had maybe two days before the mark finished its work.

And I’d put it there.

The narrow passage to my private room was empty. The House gave the Freaks little, but it gave us places to hide when we needed to remember we were still human. Mine was a small space carved into the foundation, with a cot, a sink, and a locked trunk that held the only things I’d managed to keep from before.

I opened the trunk and pulled out the leather-bound ledger at the bottom.

Yellowed pages. Brittle. The ink faded in places, but Evangeline Vale’s handwriting was still legible. The woman who’d made the first bargain and created the House. Zinnia’s ancestor.

Flipping through until I found the entry I was looking for:

The last heir will return when the House requires a new vessel. The bloodline cannot be severed until the debt is paid in full.

That line had haunted me for a hundred years. Every time I read it, I told myself it didn’t matter. Zinnia was just another guest. Another woman who’d walked through the door looking for something she shouldn’t have.

But the moment I saw her in the corridor, I knew.

The House had been waiting for her. Her face was familiar before she ever touched me. I knew her voice before she ever spoke.

Yet I’d brought her here anyway.

Slamming the ledger shut, I threw it across the room. It hit the wall and fell open, pages scattering across the floor.