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“This is the House’s foundational engine,” I said, pulling a leather-bound folio from my coat and tossing it onto the stone before her. “The Room of Four Masks. This is where Evangeline Vale performed the first ritual that bound the entity to her lineage.”

Zinnia knelt and opened the folio. Her breath caught in her throat as she traced the inked registries and witnessed signatures dating back over a century. “The family tree . . . Evangeline was my aunt. She didn’t just build a theater. She made a pact that required her bloodline to supply the core with a living anchor.”

“And your sister was the replacement,” Malachi said, stepping up behind her, his voice grim and low. “Six years ago, Dahlia took the mark so the House wouldn’t come hunting for you. But the entity didn’t free her. It tore her consciousness in half.”

Zinnia looked up at him, her eyes wide with mounting horror. “What do you mean, in half?”

“The woman you heard screaming behind the red door, the one who tried to guide you through the galleries . . . that wasn’t Dahlia,” I stated, forcing her to confront the brutal truth. “That is an echo created by the House, stitched together from Dahlia’s stolen memories, voice, and flesh to serve as a decoy. The real Dahlia Wynn is preserved below this floor, locked in suspended agony inside the entity’s core chamber to keep the original contract alive.”

“The House brought you here because the original lock is finally decaying. Dahlia is too weak to sustain it,” Malachi added, his gaze holding hers with unbearable weight. “It needs the last heir to step into this circle, take the Keeper’s veil, and allow the four of us to perform the ritual that transfers the binding to you. If the four functions perform their roles—the Devil claiming possession, the Hound enforcing the hunt, the Madman recording the confession, and the Keeper accepting the sacrifice—your identity is wiped clean, and you become the new immortal battery for this fucking nightmare.”

“And if I refuse to play the role?” Zinnia challenged, rising to her feet and kicking the folio aside. “What happens if we stand on these platforms and give it nothing?”

“The House will attempt to tear your mind apart with raw force,” I answered, stepping toward the Madman’s platform. “Unless we use the ritual itself to break the circuit. We take our places, we let the House initiate the sequence, but instead of completing the cycle of ownership, we overload the core with an unresolvable contradiction.”

The chamber suddenly groaned with violent seismic force. The four iron pillars flared with blinding theatrical spotlights, and the four masks began to weep dark, viscous fluid as the ancient, layered voice of the entity thundered from the stone beneath our feet.

“The Devil has been claimed. The Hound has been summoned. The Madman has been recorded. The Keeper will be named.”

The four platforms rose three feet above the obsidian floor, iron gears grinding against the foundations as the air turned freezing cold and thick with the scent of ozone and spilled blood.

Zinnia looked at Malachi, seeing the grim resolution in his gray eyes, then at Rook’s silent, unwavering stance, and finally at me. There was no hesitation left in her posture, only a cold, ferocious defiance.

“Take your marks,” she said, her voice steady against the rising roar of the House.

Together, we stepped onto the four stones, and the House shrieked as the ritual began.

Chapter 13

Khaos

“THE GIFT” BY SEETHER

Ibecame the Madman because I wanted to own people’s secrets more than I wanted to keep my own.

That’s the truth they don’t put in the records.

Before the House, I was a blackmailer. A good one. I collected photographs, letters, recordings—anything that could ruin a reputation or destroy a marriage. I didn’t care about morality. I cared about leverage. About watching someone’s face collapse when they realized I knew what they’d done in the dark.

I was twenty-six when I found the House.

It wasn’t an accident. I’d been tracking a banker who’d embezzled from his clients and spent the money on a mistress half his age. He disappeared for three nights every month, and I followed him to a building that shouldn’t have existed—a theater hidden behind a row of condemned warehouses, its entrance marked only by a brass plaque that read House of Freaks in script so small you’d miss it if you weren’t looking.

I bought a ticket. Put on the mask they gave me. I sat on the balcony and watched.

The performances weren’t just grotesque. They were surgical. Every act peeled back a layer of someone’s psyche and displayed it under theatrical lights while the audience leaned forward, hungry and complicit. The Freaks didn’t just perform—they extracted. They made guests confess things they’d never said aloud, then turned those confessions into evidence.

I watched a woman admit she’d poisoned her husband’s medication. Watched a man confess he’d been stealing from his business partner for years. Watched the House record every word, every sob, every moment of broken resistance.

And I thought: I want that.

Not the performance. The records.

After the show, I went backstage. I found the woman who ran the place—Evangeline Vale, though I didn’t know her name yet. She was older than me, beautiful in a way that felt dangerous, and she looked at me like she’d been expecting me.

“You’re not here for the show,” she said.

“No.”