Chapter 29
Violet
Damien scooped Rowan off the pavement as if he weighed nothing and headed back towards Oubliette, with Jules and me rushing to keep up.
Everything about the proprietor defied logic, defied reason.
He was mesmerizing, his presence a gravity that held my gaze.
It felt absurd to notice how beautiful he was as he carried Rowan’s dying body, but it was also impossible to look away.
If I’d had a single moment to grasp the hilarity of seeing Rowan in a princess carry, I would have snagged a picture as ammunition for later. After he awoke.
If he ever wakes.
That thought lashed through me like a whip. I had no idea if Rowan would live. No idea if whatever had just happened in that alley—being attacked by actual vampyres—had taken too much from him. If the pale blue tinge to his lips meant he was already gone, just a body that hadn’t figured it out yet.
Jules hooked an arm under mine, half-carrying me into the club as my legs trembled. My body decided it was done cooperating, done pretending I was fine, done holding it together. Every muscle shook as if I’d run a marathon.
Romeo opened the door expectantly—his massive frame filling the doorway, face carved from stone and just as expressive.
He didn’t ask questions. Didn’t react to the blood painting Rowan’s throat, to the way my hands shook, to Jules’s tear-streaked face.
He simply stepped aside, a silent sentinel to horrors he’d probably witnessed a thousand times before.
How many people has he seen carried through these doors?
Instead of moving straight towards the main floor—toward witnesses, towards normalcy, towards the comforting lie that the world made sense—Damien turned a sharp left.
He followed the wall until it rounded over to the bar and led towards the back area, away from prying eyes and questions I couldn’t answer.
I caught sight of Andy tending bar. His face blanched when he saw Rowan being carried, body slack in Damien’s arms like a broken doll.
Andy looked like he wanted to speak—his mouth opened, throat working—but thought better of it.
Survival instinct, maybe. Or experience.
He’d been at Oubliette long enough to know when to keep his mouth shut.
Not a soul dared to approach us.
Good. I don’t have words for what just happened.
I expected Damien to take us down the hallway lined in burgundy velvet that led towards his office, but instead, he walked right past it to a set of stairs I’d never seen before.
We descended those spiraling stairs down into the club’s hidden heart.
The air changed with every step—thicker, warmer, carrying scents that made my hindbrain scream warnings my conscious mind was too exhausted to process.
Incense, sex, something copper-sharp that could have been blood or fear or both.
Faint moans drifted up from below, but they weren’t only sounds of pleasure.
There were moans of pain, of surrender, of euphoria, of sorrow—the sounds of people discovering exactly how much they could take before breaking.
The quiet rasp of whispers felt like a thousand confessions brushing my ears at once, secrets whispered in darkness by people who thought no one was listening.
My fingers tightened around the iron banister, steadying myself against vertigo that had nothing to do with the stairs.
The metal was cold beneath my palm—grounding and solid—to remind myself that I was real, that this was real.
I focused on the certainty of cool iron pressed against my skin, because everything else felt like a fever dream.
At the bottom of the stairwell was a heavy-looking door, wrought from blackened metal set into the stonework of that deep underground basement.
There were words inscribed on the door in a language I didn’t recognize.
Despite its anachronistic appearance, the door was automated—it swung open as Damien approached with Rowan in his arms.
It was in that moment the absurdity of the situation struck me. “Jules, what are we doing? Rowan needs a doctor. He needs to be taken to a hospital. Where are we going?”
“Sweetie,” she said without slowing her pace or turning to look at me, “I am going to need you to trust me and Damien. I know that’s going to be hard for you, but please. . . we are going to do our best to help your friend. Now, be mindful as you step through the door.”
Anger seeped into my bones then, its fiery heat a reminder of what feeling powerless was like. My words struck out. “Where are you taking him? Why are we—”
My chest seized. Stepping through the threshold, past the heavy dark doors, struck me with an intense dizziness as my world shifted. My clothes were suddenly dry, and even Jules looked refreshed. Shit, what was that?
As she held me steady, Jules said, “Easy there, sweetie. Entering this place can be hard on you the first time, especially if you aren’t in the right state of mind.”
My thoughts were thick, but I was still able to ask the obvious. “Where are we? What is this place?”
“Mi gatita,” Damien called over his shoulder, “it brings me pleasure to welcome you to my Second Circle. Although I do obviously wish you were here under more auspicious circumstances.”
Second Circle? I made it. The thought was a bitter one. I had hoped to uncover the entrance of this place, to see if it was even real. I was convinced Edward was frequently within the Second Circle—convinced that was where he’d hidden himself away.
And there were plenty of places to hide.
Long straight hallways of polished obsidian stretched out in three directions—before us, to our right, to our left—and those halls were lined with a diverse variety of doors.
The scope of it seemed impossible. The corridors shrank to small pinpricks of darkness on the distant horizon, with both sides of the hallways littered with doors.
Between each door were torches of blue-tinted flames, giving off a clean and brilliant light without any hint of smoke.
“What happens behind those doors? What would I find if I opened them?” I asked, suddenly afraid to know the answer. I struggled to keep my senses, but the rage inside gave me the strength to poke at the world I was entering.
“It’s complicated,” Jules replied as we kept walking.
I realized then that I didn’t want to know.
Couldn’t afford to wonder. My brain was already fracturing under the weight of too many impossibilities: vampyres existed, Natalia was one of them, Alice might be too, Jules knew far more about all of this than she should, and I was following a nightclub owner into his secret sex dungeon as he carried Rowan’s dying body.
Oh god. . . Natalia is a vampyre.
That thought was relentless, and it unsettled me in ways I couldn’t articulate. She’d been in my dorm room. She’d seemed normal—bitchy and beautiful and perhaps a little cold. But cold in the way college girls were so often cold, not in the way monsters were outright cruel.
And she was cruel. Heartless. She’d stood in that alley and watched the twins drain Rowan.
Watched me fight, beg, scream, and break myself against their indifference.
Watched like it was entertainment, like we were performances staged for her amusement.
Asked me to debase myself at her feet for her pleasure.
All of that before she’d brutalized the twins with violence so casual it bordered on comedy.
Is Alice a vampyre, too? The question ate at me.
Sweet and kind Alice. Alice, who seemed so demure and thoughtful.
If her story about the two of them growing up together and sharing a wet nurse was to be believed, then it was certainly possible.
If Alice was also a vampyre, if she’d been lying to me all that time, it would be just one more lie built on foundations of bullshit and blood—
Can’t think about that now. Focus on Rowan first. Everything else later. Besides, I laughed at the absurdity of the thought, things can’t get much worse, right?
As we continued down the hall, we passed doors of wood, of frosted glass, and of shimmering metal.
I opened my mouth to ask how much further we were going when a wind rose from nowhere—no vents, no open windows, just a fierce wind buffeting against us.
It fluttered our clothes, pulling at fabric with invisible fingers.
My hair lifted, strands catching in my mouth, and I tasted copper and salt.
Damien stopped at a pair of tall doors carved from crimson wood. Like the previous doors we walked through, these too were automated and opened before him. The sound the doors made as they swung open was like a sigh of relief. Like a welcome.
The room was a gothic study out of a movie or dream.
Shelves lined with ancient books climbed the walls, spines cracked and faded, titles I couldn’t read in languages I didn’t recognize.
Some looked older than anything I’d seen, even in university archives, covers of vellum and leather and possibly human skin, binding knowledge I was willing to bet should have stayed forgotten.
A great fireplace hissed with green and blue flames that threw shadows across a wide oak desk scattered with papers.
Upon the desk, serving as a hideous paperweight, sat a large bust of a boar-faced man with massive tusks.
The scent of cinder and wine clung to the air throughout the room, thick and almost narcotic, making my head swim.
This is where Damien really works, not the office upstairs.
Damien crossed the room with unhurried grace, each step measured and deliberate, laying Rowan onto an immense settee. It was wine-dark velvet, a piece of furniture that probably cost more than my entire tuition.
Rowan looked small on it. Fragile. Two things he’d never been in all the years I’d known him.
Don’t die. Please, don’t die. Not like this.