My phone has no signal. Of course it doesn't.
I pick a direction and walk.
The corridor leads to another corridor, then another. Stone walls, iron sconces, those endless serpents. I pass doors—some locked, some slightly ajar. I don't open any of them. I don't want to know what's behind them.
But I can't help seeing through the gaps.
A room with candles arranged in a pattern on the floor, shapes that might be symbols. Masked figures standing in a circle, their heads bowed. A library where a man sits alone, staring at nothing, his hands covered in something dark.
I walk faster.
My mother's voice echoes in my head, the conversation we had three weeks ago when I told her about this job.The Ambrose family. They're very powerful.The way she said "powerful" like it meant something else entirely. The fear in her voice that she tried to hide, but couldn't.
Just be careful,she said.Promise me you'll be careful.
I promised. I thought she was being paranoid, the way she's always been paranoid, jumping at shadows that exist only in her mind. I thought I was the rational one.
Now I'm lost in a labyrinth that shouldn't exist, and I'm starting to think my mother knows things she's never told me.
I turn a corner and see a door at the end of the hall. It's slightly ajar. Candlelight flickers through the gap, warm and golden, and I feel a wave of relief so intense it almost makes me dizzy.
Someone's in there. Someone who can tell me how to get out.
I approach the door. Raise my hand to knock.
And then I smell it.
Copper. Thick and metallic, coating the back of my throat.
I know that smell. I've cut myself enough times with wire and scissors to recognize it immediately.
Blood.
I should turn around. I should walk away, find another route, pretend I never came down this corridor. That's what a smart person would do. That's what a person who wants to survive would do.
Instead, I look through the gap.
The room is a study, lined with bookshelves and heavy furniture. Candles burn on the mantelpiece, casting long shadows across the floor. An antique rug covers the center of the room, deep red with gold patterns.
The red is spreading.
There's a body on the floor. A man, face down, one arm twisted at an angle that makes my stomach lurch. The blood pools beneath him, soaking into the rug, black in the candlelight.
And standing over him, perfectly still, is the man from the ballroom.
He's removed his mask. It sits on the desk beside him, that elaborate serpent in black and gold, discarded like it no longer matters. Without it, I can see his face.
He's beautiful. That's the first thing I think, and I hate myself for thinking it. He has sharp cheekbones, a jaw that could cut glass, dark hair pushed back from a face that belongs on magazine covers. I've seen this face before. Not just tonight, across the ballroom.Everywhere.Charity galas, society pages, the side of a hospital wing.
Gabriel Ambrose. The philanthropist. The saint.
His hands are red to the wrists.
He's looking down at the body with an expression I don't have words for. Peaceful. Satisfied. Like a man who's just finished a difficult task and is pleased with his work.
Like a man who feels no guilt at all.
Then he looks up.
