I thought of Gideon, younger, desperate, and furious. What version of him had crossed this threshold the first time?
The door waited.
Up close, it was bigger than it had looked from the bottom of the path. Maybe it had grown a little, too, because of course it had. The wolf-head knocker’s purple eyes seemed to glow faintly, tracking me as I approached.
I stopped just short of the stone step.
The air here was thick enough to chew. Magic pressed from all sides, layer after layer of spellwork laid down over years, maybe decades. I could feel where different eras overlapped: younger, sharper sigils under older, heavier ones; remnants of Ward patterns, brittle and cracked, beneath my grandmother’s tangled web.
I placed a hand over my butterfly mark.
“I’m not yours,” I whispered—to the house, to the magic, to the woman who’d built everything on owning people. “I’mneveryours.”
Then I lifted my chin, stepped onto the final stone, and reached for the iron ring on the wolf’s jaw.
The metal was cold.
It bit into my palm.
I drew breath to knock and let the search for Gideon begin.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The wolf-head knocker never got the chance to do its dramatic booming.
The moment my fingers brushed the iron ring, the door unlatched itself with a soft, smug click and swung inward on silent hinges.
Of course it did.
Shadow pressed outward from the opening, cool and heavy, carrying with it a faint scent of old stone, damp, and something faintly sweet like wilted roses left too long in a vase.
“Come in,” a voice purred from somewhere deep inside the house.
Not the priestess. The voice belonged to the place itself. It reeked of old magic with opinions.
I stepped over the threshold.
The first thought that hit me was this was what the inside of a nightmare would look like if nightmares hired interior decorators.
A great hall stretched before me, longer than could possibly fit inside the building I’d seen from outside. The floor was polished black marble veined with silver, so perfectlyreflective that for a disorienting second, I felt like I was walking on a pool of ink. My own reflection followed along beneath my feet, pale and ghostly, slightly delayed.
Tall, narrow windows lined one wall, their glass so dark I couldn’t see whether they looked out on anything real or just more shadow. Heavy curtains of deep wine velvet framed them, embroidered with subtle, twisting sigils that gleamed faintly when I glanced sideways.
On the opposite wall, portraits hung in stiff, imposing rows. People, mostly women, in severe black and jewel-toned robes stared down at me. Some looked straight ahead, some slightly to the side; all shared a certain hard line to their mouths, a coldness in their eyes. Every few frames, a man appeared, never alone, always off to one side, like an afterthought or an accessory.
I did not look too closely for family resemblance.
Crystal chandeliers hung from the high, arched ceiling, dripping with teardrop prisms that caught what little light existed and fractured it into thin, anemic rainbows. The candles in them burned with a strange, bluish flame that gave off almost no warmth.
Gargoyles weren’t just outside.
Smaller ones, half my height, perched on stone pedestals along the edges of the hall, wings folded, mouths open in silent snarls. Their eyes glowed faintly, tracking me with the same unnerving attention as their larger cousins on the roof.
“Homey,” I muttered. My voice disappeared into the cavernous space like I’d dropped it into a well.
“Gideon?” I called, louder.
The sound bounced back at me, slightly distorted.
