Chapter 4
Sophia put her hands out timidly. “Will it . . . hurt?”
It took maximal effort not to let out a small laugh before Thorne cut me off.
“I know what I’m asking of you, Sirena.”
He knew it would hurt—me—because he’d seen me do it before.
I did my best to give the other woman a warm smile. “Nah. I’m a professional.”
Plus, it’d be easier if I didn’t have to argue with her mind, if all her doors were open.
Which, if her story was true, they should be.
Thorne was smart. Every other avenue he’d run down had to have come up empty before he reached out to me. He’d have had too much pride to ask me otherwise.
Because after this, he’d owe me, and he was not the type of man who wanted to owe anyone.
So I took both of her hands in my own and gave them a little squeeze. Skin on skin with the crown on was fine, and it was good to anchor myself first. Kept all the other voices a little at bay.
“I couldn’t close the club for you—doing that would attract suspicion. And I couldn’t bring Sophia to you because she hasn’t left these walls since she got here. I couldn’t take the risk of her being spotted,” Thorne continued.
Nex’s voice was softer in my ear. “You don’t have to do this, Sirena.”
“I know,” I whispered. But wisdom wasn’t going to stop me.
Plus, I was curious. Sure, most of humanity walked around with minds that might as well be blank, considering the things they thought of most of the time: work, dinner, desires—but as anxious as most humans were at baseline, very few of them had truly original thoughts . . . and none of them were “empty.”
“It’s going to be fine,” I promised both of us and reached one hand up to turn the crown hidden in my hair comb off.
My life went from one nascent headache’s worth of upset to utterly discombobulated. It was like getting caught in the churning at the bottom of a wave as every other active mind in the establishment rushed in, and I fought to put up walls at the speed of thought.
On a good day, a quiet day, my mind lived in a simple room with just a door and a window or two that I could choose to open—or not—allowing other people’s thoughts to bombard me, one person at a time.
Living in the city, I hardly ever got that level of calm, but I did my best. I lived in a penthouse, under which I owned the next two floors, to give me, and everyone else around me, some semblance of privacy.
When I was out and about, I had to train myself to concentrate on the mundane tasks of the everyday.
To keep the doors and windows shut.
Because otherwise it meant walking while listening to someone grieve their dying mother.
Or talking to someone in line for lunch without giving away that I knew they were worried about their husband and the nanny.
Or letting on that I knew there was a very good reason I should withdraw all my money from a particular bank months before someone was officially charged with embezzlement.
But here and now, everyone else’s thoughts and feelings and ways of being rushed in, filling my mental palace with needy chaos.
I took a moment to catch my breath—with large groups of people, it was always better to ease myself in, and I hadn’t gotten to do that here—and then Sophia squeezed my hand.
It was a lovely, human gesture.
Even if her mind was empty—her heart wasn’t.
I squeezed her hand back, and willed everyone else’s rambling thoughts to go away.
I didn’t have to look through every window or answer every knock.
It was possible to walk past both, even if there were breasts pressed up against the windowpane, and rhythmic thumping happening on the other side of the wood.
Instead I concentrated on finding her—or something that represented her, inside me.
The problem was, I had no idea what I was looking for—and everyone else present in Thorne’s club was living their lives insistently.
They weren’t just out buying groceries; they were doing things, demanding things, and most of them wanted to be watched.
If I let my concentration fade, the windows and doors did as well, letting their urges spill toward me like small splashes of sexy rain—but I knew none of that was coming from her, which made it easier to push aside, until I saw a tiny thread of red, beginning in the next room.
I walked toward it, which shifted my palace around me, bringing different doors and windows to bear, and it started unspooling, like Theseus’s thread in the minotaur’s labyrinth. Without thinking, I started to jog.
Concentrating on the thread made ignoring everyone else substantially easier, especially because it was unspooling at a breakneck pace.
It led me up stairs, and down long halls—my mind palace was always different, depending on my surroundings, so it was fair to say it was taking me places I’d never been inside myself—until it reached a simple white window that framed nothing but black, climbed up the wall, then dove beneath the sill and disappeared.
I hesitated—I didn’t get the sense of anything else watching me from the other side. I’d stumbled against other telepathic entities before, and not all of them were as agreeable as me.
But there was no way to “see” inside her mind until I’d opened the glass my mind had put between us, metaphorically.
I flipped the latch—how unusual that her mind was locked!—lifted the window, and the blackness I’d seen through the glass was true.
There was nothing back there.
I pushed into the nothingness with my hand.
It was just empty, with a hint of sorrow.
I let my control sink a little, wondering if I was protecting myself so thoroughly I wasn’t letting any of Sophia in.
Then I realized there wasn’t anything of her there.
If I’d done this with a “normal” person—it would’ve been like looking into a dollhouse full of dreams and chaos.
But Sophia’s mind was like a cave. Or a barren womb.
I snapped my fingers—and the only thing inside her mind was an echo.
I wrapped my hands around the sill to think.
I knew better than to go all the way in. It would hurt. And other people’s minds were sticky, like the quicksand my father told me he’d been afraid of in his youth.
There was always the chance you could lose yourself inside them.
But if this was Sophia—there was nothing to get lost in.
I rocked back in thought, still clutching the sill—and found something rough with one of my fingertips on the inner side.
I craned forward, looked down, and saw a carving in the splintered wood, with a scrap of red thread left behind, as though a fairy-tale princess had run through a bramble, and accidentally left a trail.
The carving didn’t make any sense: MIHR-097/BXΔ14.5. But I committed it to memory, closed the window, and pushed myself outside.