Page 72

“Below.” Sitting down across from me, she folded her hands on the desk. “The House is processing her confession. Deciding what to do with her.”

“And me?”

“You performed the founding act.” Her gaze was steady, unreadable. “The House accepted it. Now it’s your turn.”

“My turn for what?”

“To become the Madman.”

She handed me a file. Inside was a contract written in ink that looked too dark to be real. The terms were simple: I would organize the House’s records, categorize its confessions, and ensure that every piece of evidence was filed correctly. In exchange, I would have access to every secret the House had ever collected.

“What’s the cost?” I asked.

“Your identity.” Leaning back in her chair, she crossed her arms. “The House will edit your memories, rewrite your history, and turn you into the function. You’ll still be Khaos Brant, but you’ll also be the Madman. And the Madman belongs to the House.”

“What if I refuse?”

“Then you leave.” Her expression didn’t change. “And the House will find someone else.”

I signed the contract.

The transformation happened in the archive.

Evangeline led me to a chair in the center of the room, surrounded by filing cabinets that seemed to stretch into infinity. She strapped my wrists to the armrests, my ankles to the legs, and placed a metal band around my forehead.

“This will hurt,” she said.

“How much?”

“Enough.”

The lights went out, and the House began to feed.

I felt it crawling through my skull, peeling back layers of memory and identity, rewriting everything it touched. My childhood. My first blackmail. The woman I’d loved and betrayed. The secrets I’d collected. The people I’d ruined.

The House took it all and filed it away.

Then it gave me something new.

I saw every confession the House had ever recorded. Every secret. Every lie. Every moment of weakness. I saw Margaret’s affair, Claire’s bargain, Malachi’s betrayal. I saw Evangeline’s first contract, the one that had created the House and bound her bloodline to it.

And I understood.

The House didn’t collect secrets to preserve them. It collected them to own the people who’d spoken them. Every confession was a contract. Every truth was a claim. And I was the one who would organize it all.

When the lights came back on, I was the Madman.

The first thing I did was falsify a record.

It was small. A mislabeled file. A confession attributed to the wrong guest. A date that didn't match the performance log.

Evangeline didn’t notice.

The House didn’t notice.

But I did.

And I realized something: the House was powerful, but it wasn’t perfect. It could rewrite memories, manipulate confessions, and turn desire into ownership. But it couldn’t catch every contradiction. It couldn’t process every gap.