OLIVIA
Behind the wall was a tunnel.
It was wide, with a low ceiling, and the walls sloped, exposing rock as if it had been drilled directly through the earth.
It smelled like the sea, like fish guts and rust, like rot and misery.
Naked bulbs hung from the ceiling and trailed off into darkness.
I knew without a doubt that this was the sordid underbelly of the pristine mansion, the real place encased in the fake one.
I wasn’t aware that I was moving until a hand wrapped around my upper arm and tugged me back. “I want to go,” I heard myself whine breathlessly. I didn’t think it was a lie, but my heart was pounding like I was about to jump off a cliff.
“Hang on,” Jax said. My anger sparked like flint against rock, my eyes catching his heatedly.
But then he lifted his gun and pointed it directly at our naked tour guide. My mouth clamped shut, my protest drying up. Jax had that look again, the undercurrent of violence that made his eyes wide and his finger twitch on the trigger.
“What am I looking at here, Kane?”
Kane licked his lips as his eyes swiveled over each of us. He couldn’t seem to look directly at the tunnel, as if it would somehow seal his fate. It probably would. “We call this d-downstairs,” Kane said with a timid stammer. “He k-keeps them here. They never see the inside of the mansion.”
“Any alarms?”
Kane trembled and shook his head frantically. He blanched when Madoc stepped toward him. “N-No, I swear. It’s empty right now. I haven’t—I was supposed to—shit.”
“Right now,” I repeated in a daze. Ignoring the gun now at my back, I stood in front of Kane. “How often does this happen?”
Kane blinked at me. He was becoming too fear-drugged, his eyes watery and unfocused. “There’s a new shipment every month.”
Shipment. Like they were nothing but product. Tools. Toys.
Molly had been a toy. Reduced to nothing but a warm body.
Did Kane rape her? I glanced over his body, like I would see evidence of Molly on him.
He was leanly muscled, completely hairless, pale beneath the streaks of blood.
He wasn’t very tall—in fact, they’d probably been the same height. Had Molly found him attractive?
We didn’t often talk about boys. Molly was a deeply private person, and the very topic of sex used to make her screechy and flustered.
She wasn’t a virgin—I knew that much from her earlier diary entries—but I got the sense she didn’t really enjoy it.
She didn’t crave it. The few times she’d noted had sated her curiosity enough that she didn’t want to keep exploring it.
Whoever she ended up marrying would be regimented in their routine, a sex once-a-week type of deal.
I flinched back, directly into Jax’s feverishly hot body.
The gun slotted over my shoulder, so I became the unwitting sniper.
I couldn’t stop picturing it. Molly held down.
Molly gagged. Molly drugged. Molly cracked open.
I stared at Kane with refugee eyes, and the pictures changed, so I was seeing his body over hers, between her legs, rutting, forcing. Bile burned up my throat.
I felt Jax’s voice rumble through my body. “You first.”
Callum forced Kane into the tunnel, deliberately knocking him hard into the wall so he staggered with a pained cry that echoed.
And echoed. This must be what Hell sounds like.
I shuddered, and Jax pressed harder into my back, almost like a reflex.
Silent support. His heart was still steady, but his anger was palpable.
His body was taut and spring-loaded, and it made my lower belly clench in that new, unhinged way.
Damnit. I liked his violence.
It was drawing out my own violence almost tenderly, bringing to the surface my need to break and hurt. My fist curled at my side. If it weren’t for the valuable evidence against my chest, I’d probably be clawing out Kane’s eyes from his skull. I might just do it anyway.
After Callum went Madoc, slipping into the hellmouth like a shadow warden. Then Nate and Zola followed, and Ryle with his face turned down at his shoes, and then it was just Jax and me.
“I hate this,” I said miserably into the empty basement.
Strong hands turned me around. I stared unseeingly at Jax’s collarbones.
“Look at me.”
The firm command made me look up obediently. He was no longer smirking, his eyes intent as he searched my face. “Don’t disappear yet.”
I nodded, my head feeling too heavy for my shoulders. “I’ll try.”
“You can hit me again if you want.”
That made me smile. Damn him for that. “Thanks. I’ll keep that one in the bank.”
His hand grazed the back of my neck, squeezing it. It was too much—too intimate, too familiar, too everything—so I stepped back, putting some much-needed distance between us. His hand dropped away.
“I still hate you,” I said, because I needed to say it. I needed to keep the distance.
He smirked, but it looked tired. “You don’t lie as good as you cry.”
I glared at him. “Shut up.”
“You ready?”
I wasn’t. I nodded anyway.
The tunnel was empty when we walked in, the others already exploring whatever lurked ahead in the darkness. I could hear them, the acoustics making it obvious that we were in a long, cavernous place. Refusing to let my fear stall me, I marched determinedly ahead, Jax a solid presence behind me.
At the end, the tunnel split into opposite directions, which, at a glance, were mirror images of each other.
Low ceiling, bulb lights, and doors. Dozens of doors, made of cold metal with little peephole windows like a supermax prison.
On a whim, I turned left, away from the rest of the crew.
At the first door, I arched onto my toes and looked through the mail slot window.
It was a prison cell. Worse, probably. If I could speak at all, I’d ask Jax if he’d had better conditions on the inside.
In the dim light, I could just make out a single cot, a bare mattress, a bucket in the corner, a small, low table with little drawers that probably contained all sorts of nefarious things.
No windows. Just naked bulbs hanging from the low rock ceiling.
Numbly, I reached for the metal latch, unable to work the mechanism until scarred fingers reached around and slid it open effortlessly.
I didn’t spare him a look as I walked stiffly inside.
The air was stale yet somehow damp. I could smell the mattress, the cold iron of the bed frame.
For a moment, I just stood in the space, taking it in, dizzy and numb.
Jax hovered in the doorway, his arms crossed, biceps twitching with his undercurrent of violence. I walked to the bed and gingerly lay on it. The frame whined and creaked, the mattress wholly unforgiving.
“The fuck are you doing?” Jax sounded shocked, then furious. I stared up at the lights, thinking of Molly.
“She was here,” I said in a small, distant voice. I felt so far away, and I thought that was how Molly had probably felt. Not here. Somewhere else. Somewhere better.
Jax was suddenly leaning over me, breathing heavily. “Get up,” he snarled.
“She was here.” It begged repeating. After all this time, all my efforts to dig up the truth, and I was lying in her casket.
Rough hands grabbed me and hauled me up. I fought him clumsily, still floating too far out of reach.
“I don’t want to see you like that,” Jax growled in my ear. “Not as one of them. Fuck, he’s going to die slowly.”
My hands curled over his biceps, anchoring me back to the grim present. He was so solid. So alive.
A tiny flash of red above his head caught my eye. I froze, then withdrew with a slow blink, uncomprehending. A few seconds later, I pointed. “Is that what I think it is?”
Jax turned, his body vibrating against mine. We were pressed together so tightly that I felt when his heart skipped. “Shit,” he muttered. He pressed a finger to his ear. “Zola. We got eyes.”
Whatever reply came didn’t seem to surprise Jax, but it made his face downright surly.
He cursed again, then manhandled me out of the room, not bothering to shut the door behind us.
I went willingly, if not a bit shocky, my feet tripping over nothing and only his firm grip preventing me from eating dirt.
The tunnels went on forever. I lost count of the doors after seventeen. We arrived at the end of one tunnel to a set of double doors that hinged inwards, a grand opening to another cavern of Hell.
It was a bedroom, a proper one, with a plush king-sized bed in the middle, polished dark wood side tables, and another tusk chandelier hanging from the ceiling, the light warm and soft against the rough cavern walls.
I knew with certainty that this was Salvadore’s real bedroom, not the pristine showroom upstairs.
The room was still neat, but it had signs of life—the mug on the side table, a pair of reading glasses beside it, a box of tissues and lotions, and the artworks on the walls.
They were decidedly more sinister than his upstairs collection, more flesh and bone, wailing mouths and twisted bodies contorted in agony.
Whoever painted them was probably less disturbed than the reclusive billionaire who hung them up in his underground rape dungeon.
The thought, bizarrely, broke through my shock and made me laugh. It was a quiet, desperate noise that made Jax falter. The others were waiting in the bedroom, and on our arrival, they each turned and stared at me like I’d grown a second head.
I barely smothered my laughter, pushing my knuckles into my mouth. “Sorry,” I muttered.
Nate shot me an amused look. “She’s cracked.”
“She hasn’t cracked,” Jax said, at the same time Ryle punched Nate in the shoulder. “You’re one to talk, dude.”
Callum dragged our naked hostage to the bed and forced him on top of it. He had gone weak and rubber-limbed, the blood flaking where it had dried on his chest. “M’ not allowed in here,” he mumbled without prompting. “He don’t let anyone in here.”
His lids fluttered, and he started to slump over on himself. Callum caught him, and then Madoc leaned over and slapped him hard across the face. Kane jerked upright, blinking, the pain spiking his awareness.
“Not nighty night time yet,” Madoc sang. He was enjoying this. Of course, he was, the weirdo. It was probably one of the few reasons Jax kept him around. It wasn’t like his personality was winning any points.
It was then that I realized that Zola was missing. My stomach clenched hard, and as I turned to alert Jax, he said, “Zola, don’t watch it.”
There was a beat. Then Nate shot out of the room, and Jax rubbed his forehead with a resigned expression. I noticed Madoc watching him intensely. And then Madoc noticed me watching him, and I couldn’t seem to look away from his pitiless stare.
It was Ryle who broke our staring contest.
“Hey,” he said with a grim smile. “Zola found the surveillance room. There are videos. She’s watching them now.”
His gentle words doused me in ice. “Videos?”
Ryle’s mouth pressed into a hard line. He nodded to something over my shoulder. I followed it, finding a wall of TV screens mounted there, facing the bed. “The sicko liked to watch,” Ryle said.
And so the depravity continued.
“It’s a good thing,” Ryle went on, and then balked at my incredulous expression. “I mean, obviously not the videos themselves, but the evidence. It’s what you wanted, right?”
Right. I nodded robotically.
Jax inhaled sharply behind me. Ryle’s eyes flickered to him, then his brow furrowed, and he looked concerned. He always seemed to look like that when it came to Jax.
I turned to the door. “Show me.”
Ryle hesitated, still watching Jax. “I—are you sure?”
“I need to know if Molly is on them.”
“You can’t unsee that.”
“I know.”
After a moment, Jax nodded at Ryle, but seemed determined to stay in the room.
His cold blue gaze was fixed on Kane. He was going to kill him, probably the moment I stepped out of the room.
I searched my feelings, but they were a confusing tangle, too confusing to unravel. Did I care? Should I care?
Thankfully, Ryle took the lead, so I followed him dazedly out of the room. A last glance over my shoulder saw Jax cracking his knuckles, and the white flash of panic on the soon-to-be dead man’s face.