Chapter Three #3
Knox looks back at me, but he doesn’t apologize. Not with words. But something in his face shifts. He swallows whatever argument is clawing at him and takes one step back.
It should feel like a victory, but it doesn’t. It feels like a door opening onto a room full of things I am not ready to see.
Aldron returns to his desk. “We’re not sending you into danger. But your memories matter. We need names, locations, smells, voices, symbols. Anything.”
“I remember a club,” I say.
The room goes still again.
Akasha sits forward. “You didn’t mention a club.”
“I just remembered.”
That’s not entirely true. The memory has been there, buried beneath louder horrors. A bass line through walls. Perfume. Laughter. A woman with red nails is checking my pulse and saying, “Send her downstairs when she can stand. The patrons like them frightened, not unconscious.”
My skin crawls. I wrap my arms around myself before I can stop it. Knox notices, and his hands curl into fists at his sides. I force my arms down.
“Red velvet,” I say. “Not just the room. Hallways too. There was music sometimes, but it was muffled. Not from speakers in the room. From above or below. I smelled smoke. Sweet smoke. Not cigarettes. Something herbal.”
“Opium lace,” a woman says from the doorway.
Everyone turns.
The witch in the doorway is tall, dark-skinned, and elegant in a way that makes the rest of us look assembled in bad lighting.
Her braids are wrapped with gold thread, and her black coat moves around her like smoke.
Krishka of the Obsidian Coven doesn’t enter a room so much as claim it has always been waiting for her.
Her gaze lands on me. Not pity, but assessment. I liked her the instant I met her, and the feeling hasn’t changed.
“What is opium lace?” I ask.
“A narcotic incense used in certain clubs. Illegal in most territories because it lowers inhibitions and weakens resistance to glamour.” Her mouth tightens. “Vampires enjoy it.”
Ari’s nose wrinkles. “Gross.”
“Accurate,” Krishka says.
Aldron gestures to the seal. “The Sable Vein.”
Krishka walks to the desk and looks down at it. For the first time since entering, something like disgust touches her face. “I have not seen that mark in twenty years.”
“Where?” Knox asks.
Krishka looks at him. “In a club called Crimson Door.”
The name punches through me, and my knees nearly give out. Knox moves toward me, but I hold up a hand before he reaches me.
Stop. He stops. Not happily. Not easily. But he stops.
I grip the back of the chair until the room steadies. “Crimson Door,” I whisper.
Aldron’s expression sharpens. “You know it?”
I nod. Not because I remember seeing a sign. Because I remember waking up half-carried, half-dragged through a hallway while a man laughs and says, “Careful with her, Crimson Door paid extra for unmarked skin.”
Unmarked. The word makes bile rise, but I swallow it down.
“I heard the name.”
Krishka’s eyes soften by a degree. “The original Crimson Door burned down in 2004.”
“Original?” Malichai asks.
“There are always originals and copies when blood money is involved.”
Aldron’s jaw tightens. “Do you know where the current one is?”
“No.” Krishka smiles without warmth. “But I know someone who might.”
“Who?” Ari asks.
“A banshee who trades in secrets and bad decisions.”
Cruz perks up. “I love those.”
“No, you don’t,” Knox says.
Cruz shrugs. “I might.”
Krishka ignores them both. “Her name is Moira Vale. She runs a curiosity shop in Red Hook that’s not a curiosity shop. If Crimson Door is operating again, someone paid her to keep quiet about it.”
“Then we go to Red Hook,” I say.
“No,” Knox says again.
I turn slowly, and his mouth closes. Smart man.
Aldron intervenes before I can verbally remove Knox’s spine. “We send Krishka and Cruz first. Quiet questions. No pressure.”
“I can go,” I say.
Knox’s entire body tightens, but Aldron shakes his head. “Not yet. Moira deals in fear as much as information. If you walk into her shop with memories this fresh, she’ll taste them before you reach the counter.”
My stomach turns. “Taste them?”
“Banshees are unpleasant,” Cruz says with a grin he shouldn’t have.
Krishka smiles. “We prefer complicated.”
“I said what I said.”
This should be absurd. A week ago, if someone told me I would be standing in a vampire’s office listening to a witch and a Minotaur discuss whether a banshee could taste my trauma, I might have laughed.
Now I want addresses. And weapons. And maybe more tea.
Akasha touches my sleeve, light enough that I can pretend not to notice if I need to. “You’ve already helped.”
I look at the seal. The black wax. The falling drops. “Not enough.”
Knox’s voice comes from near the door, low and scraped raw. “It’s more than enough for today.”
I look at him, and he holds my gaze this time. No command in his face. No, ‘no’ waiting on his tongue. Just something fierce and worried and almost gentle. Well, as gentle as he can manage, at least.
It hits me harder than his refusal did because I understand now. Not all of it. Not the strange way he watches me like a starving man refusing a feast. Not the black in his eyes or the way the air shifts when I step too close.
But I understand this much.
He is terrified. Not of me. For me. And maybe, in some twisted way, of himself.
I don’t know what to do with that. So I look away.
The meeting unravels into plans. Krishka and Cruz will visit Moira.
Aldron will contact old informants. Malichai will use his network.
Akasha will try to trace the symbol through magical residue, though she says it might be too old to hold anything.
Korvin will go with her because Korvin goes where Akasha goes, and anyone who objects probably values breathing less than I do.
I am told to rest. This time, no one says it like an order. That helps. A little.
When the others begin filing out, I linger by the window. Brooklyn stretches below, bright and indifferent. People move along the sidewalks with coffee cups, headphones, and normal problems. Late trains. Bad bosses. Rent. Hangovers.
I envy them so suddenly it hurts. Behind me, footsteps approach. Heavy and measured.
Knox stops several feet away. “Briana.”
My name again. Always like it costs him something.
“What?”
“I’m sorry.”
I turn because I can’t help it.
He stands near the desk, big hands loose at his sides, shoulders tense, face set in hard lines. The morning light catches the scar through his eyebrow and the darkness beneath his eyes. He looks exhausted. He looks dangerous. He looks like he means it.
“For what?” I ask.
“Saying no.”
“You say it a lot.”
His mouth tightens. “I know.”
“Do you plan to stop?”
“I plan to try.”
That’s not the answer I expected—it’s better. Less pretty, but more honest.
I cross my arms, mostly to keep from fidgeting. “Trying is not the same as doing.”
“No.” He looks at my throat, then forces his gaze back to my eyes. “But it’s what I have right now.”
The room feels too quiet around us. Everyone else is gone or pretending to be. I suspect Ari is somewhere nearby listening with both pointed ears metaphorically pressed to a door.
“You scared me earlier,” I say. Pain cuts across his face, but I keep going before he can retreat into guilt. “Not because of what you are. Because you sounded like them.”
His head jerks back as if I struck him.
“I know you didn’t mean to,” I say. “I know you’re not them. But when you told me no, as if my choices belonged to you, it felt...”
My throat tightens. I hate that.
Knox doesn’t move. He barely breathes.
“Like being back there,” I finish.
His eyes close, and for a second, the huge, brutal man in front of me looks wrecked.
“I will never make you feel that way on purpose,” he says.
“I know.” His eyes open. “I know,” I repeat. “But intent doesn’t erase impact. Akasha told me that yesterday, after I threw a spoon at Korvin.”
His brows lift.
“He deserved it.”
“I believe you.”
The corner of his mouth moves. Not quite a smile. But close enough to warm something behind my ribs. This is dangerous. I step back before warmth can become anything else.
Knox notices. He always notices. And he lets me.
“I’m going downstairs,” I say.
His jaw flexes. I wait for the no, but it doesn’t come. “For what?” he asks.
“To clean glasses or stack napkins or do something that isn’t sitting in my apartment pretending the walls aren’t closing in on me.”
He nods once. “I’ll be in the cage.”
“Punching more walls?”
“People, probably.”
“That seems healthier.”
“It is for me.”
I should leave it there. I really should. But my gaze drops to his bandaged hand. The one I wrapped badly in the dark. “Be careful with your hand.”
His eyes darken, and the air shifts. Just a little. “Are you worried about me, Briana?”
The way he says my name makes my stomach dip.
I lift my chin. “I’m worried about having to redo that bandage. My work was terrible the first time.”
The almost-smile returns. “Liar.”
My breath catches. The word shouldn’t feel like a touch, but it does.
I turn before he sees too much. Before I let the heat in my belly become something I am not ready to name. Before I forget that wanting and trusting aren’t the same thing, no matter how much my body tries to confuse them.
At the door, I pause. “Knox?”
“Yes?”
I don’t look back. “If you hear me scream, then you can come running.”
The silence behind me is immediate. Thick. Dangerous.
“And if I don’t?” he asks.
I force my hand to unclench from the doorframe. “Then trust me to stand.”
I leave before he can answer. Because if he says yes, I might believe him. And believing monsters is how girls like me get destroyed. Or saved. I am not ready to know which one Knox will be.