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I stood motionless in the rising water, letting the cold seep into my bones, listening as her frantic breathing grew fainter as she moved toward the archives. Malachi was playing a dangerous game with an old ghost. Khaos was waiting with a deck of marked cards. The girl was running blind into the teeth of a machine that had chewed up her family for a hundred years.
“Ten.”
I drew the knife from its sheath and took a slow, deep breath through the iron grill.
“Ready or not,” I told the dark walls, “the Devil is going to have to run faster than me.”
Then I stepped into the water and started walking.
Chapter 10
Rook
“TEAR YOU APART” BY SHE WANTS REVENGE
The water reached my knees within three strides. Cold, filthy, rising fast enough to tell me the House was flooding the lower galleries on purpose. Punishment for letting her go. Punishment for speaking my own name aloud after sixty years of answering only to Hound.
My boots scraped against the submerged stone as I moved through the narrow corridor toward the archives. The muzzle made breathing difficult, each inhale pulling hot metal against my mouth, but removing it would mean admitting I was no longer hunting. The House would interpret that as full disobedience, and disobedience had consequences I'd spent six decades trying to avoid.
Ahead, the corridor split into three passages. One led to the old holding cells where guests waited before their performances. Another descended toward the furnace room and the original foundation. The third opened into Khaos’s archives, where he kept every contract, every photograph, every recorded confession the House had collected since Evangeline Vale made her first bargain.
Zinnia had gone toward the archives. Smart. Khaos would tell her things Malachi wanted hidden—things about Dahlia’s contract and the bloodline clause that made Zinnia valuable. Things about how the House turned people into exhibits and why some of them never left.
Things I should have told the last woman I hunted.
The memory surfaced without warning, dragged up by the cold water and the sound of Zinnia’s defiant voice still echoing in my skull.
Rook Harker.
Nobody had called me that in sixty years.
Nobody except Malachi, and only when the guests couldn’t hear.
1964. The basement. Before the muzzle.
Her name was Claire Ashford, and she’d come to the House looking for her husband.
He’d disappeared six months earlier after attending a private performance. She’d received a single photograph in the mail: him on his knees in front of a woman wearing a porcelain mask, his hands bound behind his back, his expression somewhere between terror and ecstasy. No note. No explanation. Just the image and an address written in red ink on the back.
The House of Freaks. Come find him.
Claire was thirty-two, sharp-eyed, suspicious, and desperate enough to walk through the front door alone. She’d paid the admission fee, refused the mask, and spent two hours searching the public galleries before someone told her that guests who broke certain rules were sometimes offered private contracts. Arrangements that let them see restricted areas. Performances that weren't advertised.
She’d asked what kind of rules.
The woman with the feathered mask had smiled and said, “The kind that prove you’re serious.”
Claire broke three rules in one night. Touched a performer during a public act. Entered a restricted corridor without permission. Opened a locked door marked with a red X.
By the time I found her, she was standing in the old furnace room, staring at a wall covered in photographs of her husband. Hundreds of them. Different positions. Different partners. Different stages of submission—a timeline of his transformation from reluctant participant to willing exhibit.
“He’s still here,” she said when I stepped out of the shadows.
I confirmed it.
“Where?”
“Below.”
