I squeeze my eyes shut.
You’re fine. You want out, but you’re okay.
I open them and the door is back. Not just back, open. Swinging gently, just wide enough to show the hallway beyond. It wasn’t locked. Was it listening? The thought makes my stomach turn. I step toward it, testing. I’m half convinced it’ll slam shut again, but it doesn’t. I step into the hallway. Stumble a little. The shift from velvet air to cool stone is abrupt.
The corridor is empty. No one’s watching. No alarms. No flickering sigils or sudden bursts of magic. Just a long stretch of hall, torchlit and still. I glance behind me. The door is still open. Still there. It looks exactly like it did before. Which means either I imagined the whole thing or something is reading me. And responding. I stand there for a long moment, breathing like I’m waiting for the air to give me permission. Then, slowly, I step back inside. This time, the door closes with a sound.
Just a whisper of stone over stone.
“Thank you,” I say, feeling ridiculous talking to a door, but this time the outline remains, and I can finally pull a full breath into my lungs.
I walk farther into the room, slower now. Watching everything. The space is beautiful. Of course it is. Amber light spills across soft red fabrics. The bed is huge, the linens lush. A carved basin steams gently in the corner, and on the table by the window there is a tray of food that was not there a second ago.
I’m starving. My stomach is performing some growling percussive solo as it consumes itself, but I don’t touch anything. I don’t trustanything. My mother would crawl her way out of the grave and beat me over the head with a book of Greek myths if I did. She didn’t read me the stories at bedtime only for me to take a bite without thinking. That’s what got Persephone trapped in the underworld.
Or, my brain reminds me,what bought her freedom with the shadow daddy of the underworld.For some reason, I doubt trapping myself in this place—this realm—will come with my own prince of hell. Caziel certainly isn’t volunteering, which is good. He’s a hallucination after all. Not that I’m thinking of him for even a moment. It’s Stockholm syndrome or some version of it that has my chest heating at the thought of him. It’s adrenaline coalescing into a spark of heat that wings up my limbs. So far he’s just a nice guy in hell. Not the love of my life. Not some fated mate. Just a regular man.
There are clothes in the wardrobe that look like they’d fit me perfectly. Things that walk the line between fantasy costume and comfort wear. Soft. Beautiful. Intentional. Everything in this room has been chosen to make me feel calm. Which means none of it is for me. I cross to the bed and sit on the edge, back straight, hands in my lap like I’m trying not to disturb a ritual. The mattress shifts gently beneath me.
I reach into my pocket and pull out the obsidian shard. The edge is duller now, chipped from where I dug it out of my boot earlier. But it’s still mine. I slide it under the pillow. Just in case. Then I lie back. Eyes open. Hands folded over my stomach. I think about the way the door vanished the moment I felt like a prisoner. How it returned the second I asked.
This room isn’t a cell. It’s something worse. It’s a place that wants me to believe I’m free
I lie still for a long time. Not because I’m tired even though I am. Bone-deep. Soul-deep. Whatever. I’m afraid if I move, the room will try to soothe me again. Offer me another warm towel. Or a bath drawn with floating petals. Or whatever it thinks human women like when they’re unraveling. And I am. Unraveling. Not dramatically. Not loud. Not even visibly. But underneath the quiet, my brain is buzzing like a dying lightbulb. Flashes of thought. Static. All the things I’ve avoided thinking about because there were too many eyes on me.
Now there are none. So of course, the first thing that pops into my head is George. My cat. My fluffy, clingy, chaos-goblin of a cat whothinks laundry is a nesting opportunity and cardboard boxes are a divine right.I picture him sprawled across the top of my dresser, blinking slowly like I’m the one being weird.
If he’s alive.
Stop that.
He’s fine. I told my coworker to check on him while I was away. Left a whole list of instructions. Labeled the food. Hid the treats so he wouldn’t bully anyone into second dinners.
Still. What if I never go back? What if this is it?
I reach down and curl my fingers under the pillow until they find the shard of obsidian. It’s smooth on one side, jagged on the other. Still warm from my body. Still mine. The only thing I have from before. That’s what scares me the most. Not the guards. Not the whispers. Not even Caziel’s unreadable, steady gaze.
It’s how fast my old life is sliding out of focus. Like a dream I forgot to write down.
I close my eyes and try to picture my apartment. The chipped tile in the kitchen. The books on my nightstand. My raincoat still damp from that morning walk to the clinic. The creased family photo from my eighth birthday at a theme park. It’s not that my life was wonderful, or anything like that, but it was mine. It was familiar. It was something I’d honed and built and worked for, even if that something was a seedy landlord who still won’t fix the bathroom lights, and too-many hours at a thankless job. None of that feels real. Here feels real. Too real.
Real like stone. Real like fire. Real like consequence.
I roll onto my side and stare at the door. It doesn’t shimmer. Doesn’t flicker. Just waits. Everything in this room waits. And I don’t know who I’ll be when they decide to come back for me. I don’t know what they want me to be. I curl in tighter, wrists bent under my chin, knees pulled up. My voice is too small to say the words out loud, but I think them anyway:
I don’t want to be alone.
CHAPTER SIX
KAY
When I open my eyes, I’m back in the hotel.
The light filtering through the curtains is soft and gray, the kind that comes after a storm. My body feels heavy, limbs sunk into the mattress. The sheets smell faintly of detergent and cat hair. George is curled against my knees, purring in that deep, broken-engine way that means he’s content.
For a few slow heartbeats, everything is normal. The hum of the mini fridge. The uneven whir of the ceiling fan. I can almost convince myself none of it happened—the fire, the mark, the man with ember eyes.
“Kay.”
