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From the blackness beyond the threshold, a woman’s voice tore through the theater.

“Zinnia!”

Dahlia’s voice. Raw. Agonized. Stripped of humanity.

I scrambled to my knees, blood dripping down my thighs, desperate to reach the light. “Dahlia!”

Malachi caught me by the waist, yanking me backward into his chest with violent urgency. “Don’t move!”

"Let me go! She's right there!"

“The ritual woke whatever is locked down there,” Malachi hissed, his voice tight with genuine alarm as he dragged me toward the backstage shadows. “The House took your blood, but it didn’t seal the lock—it cracked it.”

The red door slammed shut with a concussive boom that rattled the balcony railings, plunging the theater into absolute, suffocating darkness.

Chapter 7

Zinnia

“HURT” BY NINE INCH NAILS

The thunderous slam of the red door still rang in my teeth as Malachi hauled me off the altar boards.

My knees gave out the second my bare feet hit the backstage sawdust. He caught me by the crook of my elbow, yanking me upright with enough torque to wrench my shoulder, giving zero consideration to the raw, torn flesh between my legs or the way the ruined white silk dragged behind me like a slaughtered shroud.

“Move,” he muttered against my head, his voice thick and gravelly, laced with an ugly, ragged edge.

“Get your fucking hands off me,” I choked out, shoving against his bare, ink-stained chest. My palms slipped on his sweat and the dried crust of my own blood.

He didn’t let go. His fingers dug directly into my hip, using his size to steer me violently into a maintenance descent behind the stage scaffolding. He wasn’t dragging me away out of mercy or sudden chivalry. His grip was paranoid, possessive, and hurried. The ritual had cracked the seal on that iron threshold; Dahlia’s scream still vibrated through the plumbing, and Malachi moved like a man terrified that whatever woke up inside the walls would snatch the prize from his hands before he could cash it in.

Yet beneath all that brutal momentum, something in him had fractured.

During those final seconds on the altar, when he’d ripped through my virginity, and that impossible flash of an unmasked boy cradling my face in candlelight had flooded my mind, I’d felt him freeze. I’d seen his jaw drop, seen the raw horror and holy terror in his eyes before he clamped his predatory sneer back on. Even now, his breathing was irregular, his pulse hammering against my ribs where he shoved me down a steep, windowless spiral of hand-chiseled limestone.

“Where are you taking me, Malachi?”

“Somewhere the foundation hasn’t completely caved in,” he snapped, not looking back. “Keep your feet under you, or I’ll drag you by your hair.”

“Try it, you miserable bastard. See what I take out of your neck.”

The air turned glacial as we descended deeper than the public galleries, below the sewer lines, down where the stone wept black moisture and bare copper bulbs buzzed behind wire cages. At the end of a low-vaulted passage, he kicked open a solid slab of reinforced iron and flung me inside.

I caught myself on the edge of a narrow iron cot, the springs screeching under my weight.

The cell was carved straight out of bedrock: a drain in the floor, a single rusted sink dripping brown water, and a wooden chair. No mirrors. No second door. Just damp rock vibrating with the steady, sub-audible thrum of the House’s gut.

Malachi slammed the heavy door shut, threw the deadbolt, and leaned back against the iron plate, panting. For three seconds, his guard dropped. His gray eyes fastened onto mine through the shadow of his black hair, wide and hunted, scanning my mouth, my throat, the blood on my thighs with an intensity that looked terrifyingly like grief. His right hand twitched, rising half an inch as if he were about to reach out and touch my bruised jaw with the gentleness of that dead boy from my vision.

Then his mouth curled into a cold, derisive line, and the Devil slid back over his skin like armor.

“You took my whole cock without passing out,” he drawled, pushing off the door with deliberate cruelty. “I’ll give you credit for that much, little flower. Most virgins choke on the first inch.”

“Fuck you.” The words were sandpaper in my throat. I pulled my torn bodice higher over my breasts, shivering from the subterranean draft. “You knew exactly what that altar was. You told me it was a stage act to buy a guest’s release, and you used me to open whatever’s locked behind that red door.”

“I told you the House required a sacrifice witnessed by the crowd.” He walked over to the rusted basin, turned the crank, and wet a rough gray rag under the sputtering stream. “You’re the one who thought you could parse syllables with an entity that invented contract law before your grandparents were born. You wanted to play the martyr for Dahlia. You got what you asked for.”

“I asked for my sister. Not a gang of masked perverts watching you rip me open.”