My feet took me to the door on autopilot, glancing once more over to the pile of fabric.I wish he’d have time to finish it. I’d worn plenty of dresses in my time, trying on every style under the sun at my mother’s dress shop. Never in my life had I worn something made specifically for me, though. We’d been too poor to be the ones wearing the dresses most of the time. Any I’d worn had been sale ones that wouldn’t sell to the rich elite, or being a size model so people could see what a dress would look like on their daughter. I’d originally met Solstice at the shop after her mom had me try on a dress as a stand in for her.
“Thank you,” I said, as I stepped out into the hallway again. “I—”
I was cut off by the door slamming in my face, startling me. When my heart rate had settled again from the shock of the loud noise, I sighed and turned to the door across the hall. Knocking twice, I waited.
And waited some more. Muffled sounds came from beyond the wood, so I knew Bennett was in there, but he wasn’t answering me. The sounds may have been grunts and groans, possibly of a sexual nature. Small frown tilting my lips, I reached out for the door handle. I might walk in on kinky ghost sex, if Bennett fucking Zan was to be believed, but what was the worst that could happen?
Curiosity killed the cat, but this cat was going to die, regardless.
“I wouldn’t,” Waylon said from behind me.
My hand had half-turned the handle. I looked over my shoulder to find him peering through a small crack in the door, looking put out. “Why not? I need to see the walls.”
“He’s not in good shape for visitors right now.”
“If he’s fucking someone in there, I can ignore it and work around them.”
Waylon snorted. “One, he’s too good at fucking to be ignored. Two, that’s not what he’s doing.”
I scrunched up my nose. “Why is he being so loud, then? Is he in pain?”
He shrugged. “In pain is one way to put it. You’ll be in far more pain if you go in there with him, though, and he’ll feel horrible about it in the morning. Not tonight. He doesn’t feel human emotions tonight.”
My finger released the handle, letting it slide back into place, safely closed. I was tempted, admittedly, the small voice in the back of my mind still asking what was the worst that could happen. But Waylon wasn’t the type to give warnings lightly, so I’d be better off listening to him.
Turning to walk down the hallway toward Kirin’s room, I resigned myself to going back later. Before I made it past the stairs, there was a slight pinch on my calf and the ground was rushing up to meet my face.
Chapter 13
Tenmoredeathslater,I was fed up with trying to solve the puzzle of the Xurian characters. None of the combinations made sense; everything was gibberish. I’d gathered bits and pieces that could be important. ‘No’. ‘Enchanted’. ‘Evil’. But there was no straightforward way to put them all together, and I was beginning to believe it was another red herring. Either that, or simply a way to detail the purpose of the barrier, which was not what I cared about at the moment.
This time, after my rude awakening, I headed straight for Felix’s office.
When I’d concluded my cataloging of the characters, I’d noticed his office differed from the rest of the house. The same writing was on the outer walls, where the barrier was, but additional characters were placed around the other edges of the room. They were heavily focused on the wall between the office and the hallway. My revealing spell had revealed them by accident, prompting me to check through the rest of the house. Nowhere else had anything but the glyphs on the outer walls.
I’d shoved the anomaly to the back of my mind at first, focusing on what directly impacted the barrier, but since my luck hadn’t appeared for that, it was time to move on.
“Kirin, can you break this lock for me?” I asked him as he passed me on his way upstairs.
His big hand covered the metal and wrenched hard, pulling out the wood as he always did when I needed to get in the office.
“Done, princess.”
He handed me the lock with a self-satisfied smirk and went upstairs.
Every time he tried to be cocky like that, he reminded me of how he’d begged me to bite his cock in the bedroom. I was tempted to try him out again, but I wanted to stay on task as much as possible.
Revealing the characters on the inside and outside of the room and its walls, I wrote them all down again. Like the others, no order made sense for a spell. It was possible they’d been hidden twice, with some kind of cipher on top of the invisibility, but my code-breaking abilities were… well, we’d seen me with the ‘directory number’. I was intelligent when it came to understanding complex concepts and memorizing anything that crossed my desk, but my critical thinking and ability to think outside the box needed work.
I worked all day on the lead, trying to discover why this room would be sectioned off, but came up with nothing. Most likely, it was only because Felix had kept this as his office, and they wanted some kind of extra protection. What kind of protection, I couldn’t tell. All the men had been inside the confines of the office with me, so the additional glyphs weren’t to keep them out.
There had to be some other way to escape this damn house, because I was coming up with nothing on these leads.
Or at the very least, some way to stop dying every twenty-four hours. I functioned much better with detailed notes to look back on, as much as I trusted my brain. Sometimes seeing things on paper together gave a much different impression.
My mind wandered back to an idea I’d thought about in passing multiple times over the last thirty-ish days.
What if I died immediately after waking up in the bathtub? Would I be sent back further, possibly to before I’d even been in the house? The theory didn’t hold much salt, admittedly. No matter what time I died currently, I always went back to the same time. Some days I’d only made it a couple of hours before being killed. And of course, I would have to kill myself to test the theory.
