Page 15

I glanced down. The edge of my dress had caught on something—probably when Malachi had shoved me against the wall—and a small tear ran along the seam.

“It’s fine,” I said.

“It is not fine.” She moved closer, her steps silent despite the hard floor. “The House does not tolerate disrepair. Allow me to mend it.”

“I don’t need⁠—”

“It will only take a moment.” She knelt, setting the mannequin on the floor beside her, and threaded a needle with the black thread. “Hold still.”

I probably should have run away. Should have refused and found another route through the gallery.

But something in her tone made refusal feel dangerous.

She worked quickly, her needle flashing in the dim light as she stitched the torn fabric back together. The thread was strange—too dark, too glossy, as if spun from something organic rather than synthetic.

“There,” she said, tying off the thread with a neat knot. “Good as new.”

Except it wasn’t.

The stitches gleamed faintly in the low light, and when I shifted my weight, I felt a tug—not in the fabric, but deeper, as if the thread were sewn into my skin beneath the dress.

“What did you do?” I demanded.

“I repaired what was broken.” She rose, collecting her mannequin and thread. “The House takes care of its guests. And in return, its guests take care of the House.”

“I didn’t agree to that.”

“You allowed the repair.” Her silver mask tilted slightly. “That is agreement enough.”

Panic spiked through me. I reached down, grabbed the hem of my dress, and yanked hard.

The fabric tore free with a wet, ripping sound—but the thread remained, trailing from the torn edge like a black vein. And when I looked down at the floor, I saw it: a small piece of my shadow, darker than the rest, stitched to the plaster with the Seamstress’s black thread.

“No,” I whispered.

“The House remembers,” the Seamstress said softly. “And what it remembers, it keeps.”

Then she turned and walked back into the darkness, her mannequin swinging gently from her hand.

I stared at the stitched shadow, my heart pounding, and realized with cold certainty that the House had just claimed another piece of me.

And I had let it.

The next room I entered was larger than the others, with a higher ceiling and a stage built to resemble an operating theater. Guests sat in tiered rows around it, their masks reflecting the lights aimed at the center table. The air smelled of antiseptic and copper and something darker underneath, something organic and wrong.

Strapped to the table, a man lay naked, his body already covered in half-finished tattoos that looked fresh and angry. His wrists were bound to the table’s edges with leather cuffs, his ankles spread wide and locked into stirrups that forced his legs open. He was hard, his cock flushed dark and leaking against his stomach, and he wasn’t trying to hide it. He couldn’t. Everyone could see.

A woman stood over him with a tattoo machine in one hand and a bottle of ink in the other. She was tall, her arms covered in black ink that looked carved into her skin rather than drawn, and she wore nothing but a leather apron stained with old blood and fresh ink. Her mask was made of needles, hundreds of them arranged in a crown around her face, and when she leaned over the man on the table, the needles caught the light and threw shadows across his chest.

She was tattooing him while he screamed.

Not performing a scream. Actually screaming.

“The Inkwell,” someone said behind me.

She didn’t stop. Dragging the needle across the man’s ribs in a long line, she worked while he arched off the table as much as the restraints would allow. His cock jerked, another bead of precome sliding down the shaft, and the guests in the front row leaned forward to watch.

“She’s been working on him for six hours,” a voice said, closer now. I turned and found a man in a bronze mask standing too close, his breath hot against my neck. “He didn’t ask for anesthetic. He asked for pain. He asked to be marked permanently. He asked to be changed into something he can’t take back.”