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“And you heard her, didn’t you?” He crossed the floor and dropped to his haunches between my parted knees. Before I could clamp my legs together, his broad palm clamped over my left kneecap, locking it in place with bruising strength. “She’s right on the other side of the threshold. You gave the House its pound of flesh, and the lock turned. You should be thanking me.”

He pressed the wet rag between my thighs, wiping away his sticky seed and the thick red smear of my broken maidenhead.

The cold water stung like lye on an open wound. I hissed, my hands knotting into the threadbare mattress, but I refused to give him the satisfaction of a whimper. What turned my stomach wasn’t just the ache—it was the filthy, traitorous pulse deep in my belly that answered the scrape of his calloused fingers. My body still remembered the heat of him buried to the root inside me. It remembered the rhythm, the dominance, and, worst of all, that split second when our souls felt welded together by something older than the blood on the sheets.

“Stop touching me,” I said, my voice dead and steady.

“You didn’t mind my hands ten minutes ago when you were clawing trenches into my shoulders.”

“That wasn’t consent, Malachi. That was survival, and you know it.”

He didn’t flinch. He rinsed the rag in the bucket by his feet, his jaw working as he watched the red swirl into the water. “Nothing in this House is about consent, Zinnia. It’s about transaction. You gave what you had to give, and I took it.”

“Then why did you look at me like you’d seen a ghost when you broke through me?”

His hands went dead still in the bucket. The water rippled, then flattened like glass.

When he raised his head, his face was carved from granite. “I looked at you like a man who just secured his leverage.”

“Liar.” I leaned forward, ignoring the fire between my legs, bringing my face inches from his. “Your hands were shaking. You said my name on that stage like you’d been choking on it for a hundred years. What did you see in that flash?”

“I saw an amateur who almost ruined the cadence of a binding ritual,” he spat, tossing the rag onto the stone floor. He grabbed my chin between his thumb and forefinger, squeezing until my teeth clicked together. “Don’t flatter yourself with fairy tales, little flower. You’re an offering that bled on cue. Nothing more.”

“Then why is my chest burning?”

His fingers loosened slightly against my jaw. “What?”

“Right here.” I pulled my collar down, ripping the white silk away from the underside of my left ribcage.

The skin beneath my breast was glowing with a feverish, violet-black heat. Etched directly into the pale flesh, raised like a brand and wet as fresh lacquer, was an intricate lattice of razor-thin black script. It pulsed in perfect unison with my heartbeat, spiraling outward in hooked, archaic glyphs that made my stomach heave just trying to decipher them.

Malachi’s breath caught. He dropped my chin, his gaze locked onto the ink. For the first time since I’d walked through the hot-pink doors of this nightmare, I saw absolute, unvarnished dread in his gray eyes.

He didn’t touch it. His fingers hovered an inch above my burning skin, trembling almost imperceptibly.

“What did your ritual do to me?” I demanded, knocking his hand aside. “What is this?”

“It’s a designation,” he muttered, rising to his full height and backing toward the center of the room like I’d just pulled a live grenade from my bodice. “The stage wasn’t just an execution of your debt. The House accepted the blood. It marked you as an initiate.”

“Initiate for what?”

“For the seat behind the red door.” He ran both hands through his black hair, pacing the narrow space between the cot and the iron door. The cold arrogance was gone, replaced by a dark, volatile fury that set the shadows jumping along the stone walls. “Every cycle, when the living anchor weakens, the House searches for a fresh vessel to feed the contracts. A Keeper. Dahlia bought six years of silence by locking herself into the threshold, trading her own autonomy to keep the entity from casting its net back into the world. But you walked straight into the foyer with an invitation in your fist, and the second you took my cock on that altar, you fulfilled the physical criteria of the first tier.”

“A Keeper,” I repeated, the word tasting like bile. “You told me the House collects spectators. It collects freaks.”

“Freaks are the teeth,” he snapped, turning on me with wild eyes. ‘The Keeper is the jaw. The one who holds the ledger, feeds the crowd’s appetite, and signs the warrants when guests default on their souls. The entity doesn’t want you in the gallery, Zinnia. It wants you on the throne.”

A cold, heavy weight dropped into the pit of my stomach. “And you helped it.”

“I used what I had to keep Rook’s hounds off your throat!” Malachi roared, his voice cracking against the damp masonry. “Rook wanted to run you through the lower tunnels until your heart burst and claim your carcass for his kennel. I invoked the altar rite because the primary sacrifice supersedes the hunt. I bought you time.”

“You bought yourself a pet with a collar made of ink!” I surged off the cot, fury driving through the pain in my hips until I shoved him hard against the stone wall. He hit the masonry with a dull thud, his chest heaving, but he didn’t strike back. “You don’t give a damn about my sister or my life. You saw an opportunity to bind a potential Keeper to your own dirty hands so you could ride her coat-tails out of this cage!”

Malachi caught my wrists in an iron grip, pinning them against his collarbones, his face descending until his mouth was a breath away from mine. His pupils were blown wide, black swallowing the silver of his irises.

“You think you’re the first clever girl who thought she could outmaneuver the architecture?” he hissed, his voice dropping to a vicious, venomous rasp. “You have no idea what's waking up down here. That mark on your ribs isn’t a trophy. It’s an anchor. The binding has three stages. You survived the blood and the altar. The second stage will demand your submission, and the third will hollow you out until there’s nothing left of Zinnia Wynn except a voice the House uses to lure in the next generation of fools.”

“Then I’ll break the contract,” I spat, fighting his grip. “Dahlia found a loophole. I will too.”