Twelve steps. A bare bulb on a cord at the bottom throwing yellow light in a circle that didn't reach the walls. And underneath that, the noise continuing — a box shifted, something stacked.
God, I put my life into your hands. Please, please,please, don’t disappoint me.
I went down.
The cold hit first. It was the usual cellar cold with nothing to do with the season — just stone doing what stones did. I kept my hand on the wall. The stairs were narrow, worn in the middle from a hundred years of feet, and I took them carefully because the last thing I needed right now was to fall down a flight of stairs. Maybe break a tailbone.
Maybe lose the—
No. I stopped myself there.
That wasnota thought I was going to entertain.
At the bottom I stopped.
It was just a cellar. Now imagine my disappointment.
I don't know what I'd expected. Something worse. Something that confirmed every story I'd been building in my head since the night I'd stood at the top of these stairs. I remembered how suddenly Judah had appeared in the corridor above me and saidcome back to bed, Mercyin a voice that didn't leave room for argument. I'd imagined — I don't know what I'd imagined. Something with more... atmosphere. Something that looked like what it was.
It looked like a root cellar that had been given a filing system.
Thick stone walls, wooden shelving units — old and solid, running along two walls, packed with boxes. Cardboard, archival, some of them labeled in handwriting I didn't recognize and some of them not labeled at all. A worktable in the center with a lamp on it, the cord running up the wall to somewhere. Steel cabinets along the far wall, padlocked. A smell of paper and dust and somethingboring. The damp — the damper damp than the Louisiana stereotypical damp. Old water seeping through a hole somewhere in the wall.
And Judah, on his knees in front of one of the lower shelves, pulling boxes out. I saw his muscles work and stretch the thin fabric of the dress shirt. His sleeves were rolled up, a little past the elbows and he kept going through folders. There was a box open beside him and he was going through it with both hands — setting things aside and then reconsidering and picking them back up.
He hadn't heard me come down.
I watched him for a moment. He looked different from this angle, on his knees in the cellar light with dust on his forearms and his hair not quite right.
“Nice sound isolation,” I said, then did a little tune, testing how the sound traveled down here. My realization? It didn’t.
Judah went still.
Then he turned his head and looked at me over his shoulder.
The frown came fast. “Go back up. It's dusty.”
“I've been in dust before.”
“Mercy—”
“What are you looking for?”
He held my gaze for a moment, something moving behind his eyes, and then he turned back to the shelf. “A ledger. Green cover. Should be in this section but someone—” he pulled another box out, “—put things back wrong.” He said it with the utmost irritation.
I looked at the shelves.
There was a system, even if it wasn't obvious. The boxes were ordered — not by date, but by something. Size, maybe, or category. The ones he'd already pulled and rejected were stacked to his left in a way that was almost neat, which meant even a frustrated Judah Beaumont couldn't bring himself to just make a pile.
I went to the far end of the right shelf, the section he hadn't gotten to yet.
“I said go up.”
“Yeah, you did,” I said, reaching on my tiptoes to read the labels better — ones that were still there. Numbers, mostly. Years. “What year?”
He hesitated, watching me with that same expression he wore whenever he wasn’t sure whether I amused him or pissed him off.
Odds were 50-50.
