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Most people thought it was an urban legend, a marketing stunt for people who wanted to feel dangerous without actually risking anything. I used to believe that too, until I found a photograph of Dahlia under that same pink sign in another city, smiling in a way I hadn’t seen in years. Three days later, she vanished.
The line moved. My stomach moved with it. I could still leave. The thought hit with an embarrassing force, considering how far I’d come. I could turn around, walk back to my car, drive home, pour something strong, and spend the rest of my life pretending I hadn’t burned a quarter of it chasing a woman who might not even want to be found.
Then I thought about the pink ink.
We know what you’re looking for.
No. I was going in.
Two men in black suits guarded the entrance, no masks, which felt like a statement in itself. One held a tablet. The other held out his hand.
“Invitation.”
I gave it to him and watched him scan the silver emblem on the back. The tablet chimed. His eyes lifted to mine, and something in his expression shifted. Small, but I’d spent six years learning to read small.
“Problem?”
“No.” He handed it back. Before I could step past, his hand closed around my wrist. “Miss. Read the rules.”
“I already did.”
“Read them again.”
Something in his voice made the hair on my arms stand up. I flipped the card over and over, and the rules were printed in the same pink script.
NO PHOTOGRAPHY.
NO WEAPONS.
MASKS MUST REMAIN ON AT ALL TIMES.
DO NOT ENTER RESTRICTED AREAS.
DO NOT INTERFERE WITH A PERFORMANCE.
Set apart from the rest, like it mattered more than everything above it:
DO NOT TOUCH THE FREAKS.
I looked up at him and raised an eyebrow. “Happy?”
He wasn’t smiling. “Not particularly.”
His grip loosened, and the second guard pulled the door open. Warm air rolled out, incense and smoke, and beneath it all, something metallic that my pulse recognized before my brain did.
Blood.
I stepped inside anyway.
Behind me, the door shut and the world I knew disappeared with it.
For a few seconds I couldn’t see anything. Then the lights came up, deep and crimson, the kind of color that made everything look like it was already bleeding. Black velvet drapes climbed toward a ceiling I couldn’t see. Candles flickered in iron cages overhead. Performers moved through a crowd of masked strangers, some in masks so beautiful they looked carved from moonlight, others so grotesque I had to look away before my stomach caught up with my eyes.
A woman crawled across a raised platform on all fours, pearls sewn into her bare back, each one threaded through the skin and knotted. A man hung upside down from a chandelier, smiling serenely at the people walking beneath him, apparently unbothered by gravity or blood pressure. Somewhere deeper in, someone screamed, and everyone around me laughed like it was the best joke they’d heard all year.
I didn’t laugh. My eyes caught on the words painted above the archway ahead.
WELCOME TO THE HOUSE.
