37. Amal
AMAL
The chapel quiets as double doors are opened and I watch cloaked, masked men enter, their shoes loud on the stone floor, footsteps reverberating off the walls.
My heart races as they take their places to form a circle around me.
Their masks aren’t those worn by the men in the Great Hall.
These are polished porcelain with slits for eyes, two holes for the nose and a third slit for the mouth.
And they’re creepy as fuck.
I kneel on the floor shivering with fear, and I count them. Eleven in total. Eleven cloaked, masked men encircle me. They fold their hands before them, each resting a cane with a polished brass knob for a handle although none needed one to walk.
Once they’re in place, the doors close and the chapel falls into complete silence once more.
Senna stands outside the circle. I recognize him because he’s not wearing a mask, not yet. And he’s watching this strange ceremony like it’s the first time he’s seeing it. He’s American, not a member of the Scottish order, so maybe it is.
He pulls his mask down over his face. It’s different than the others.
His is gunmetal black, the expression stern.
Dark glass covers his eyes and on the forehead is a red smear and some part of me knows it’s blood and even through all that’s happening, this detail is the eeriest. He takes his place in an empty space in the circle to make twelve.
Jameson, who has been standing to the side, gives a nod and a moment later, organ music crashes through the chapel, the sound startling and so loud it drowns out the pounding of my heart.
My mother was here, made to kneel in a circle of men similar to these. My mother somehow managed to escape them.
But too late. She was pregnant with me by the time she got away.
Pregnant.
I sweep my gaze over the circle of faces around me and my brain begins to piece a terrible puzzle together, one I can’t face just yet, because I recall some of her diary entries. The strange plural wording. The thing that couldn’t be real because my brain refused to let it be so.
The cloaked masked men begin a chant, and the organ becomes an accompaniment, background noise to something darker, more sinister.
The men look down at me, watching me. Even behind their masks, I feel their gazes burning into me.
A familiar scent begins to fill the space. Incense. It’s followed by the sound of the doors opening again. It’s like I’m in a fucking horror movie. I’m the fucking star of the show.
The circle around me opens to reveal the back of the chapel and from those same doors in this unholy place, two boys appear dressed as altar boys. I recognize one as the waiter from the restaurant. They’re carrying processional candles on long brass poles, and they begin to walk toward us.
The priest of earlier is next. He’s chanting, too, and swinging the thurible leaving puffs of incense to float to the ceiling and vanish.
Behind him comes Master Robertson. Once he is in sight, each of the masked men lower their heads in deference.
Robertson is unmasked and I watch as he chants. The altar boys stand back and once Robertson enters the circle, the others close it around him. Robertson’s eyes never leave my face as he walks around me, coming to stand behind me.
The organ music drops away at the same moment the chanting ends and we are plunged suddenly and irrevocably into a silence thick and heavy and final.
Robertson’s hand lands on top of my head. I flinch but he carries on as if I haven’t.
“Let the chosen step forward,” he says.
And from the circle of men, one steps forward, coming to stand before me, looming tall and dark and terrible.
“Do you, Callum Stewart, accept the role of husband?”
My world goes sideways, my brain trying to keep up, to make sense of what is senseless.
“I do.”
“Brother,” Robertson says, clamping his free hand around Callum’s arm in a brotherly greeting. “They key is yours.” He hands the literal key to my chain to Callum. He then turns to the collected men. “Let us begin.”