CHAPTER 6 #2
She smiled. The same sad smile from my dream. "You'll figure it out. You always do."
"Figure what out?" My voice cracked. "Who are you? What are you? Why do you look like me?"
"You know why."
"I don't—"
"You do." She took another step, and the air around her shimmered like heat rising from asphalt. "You've known since the accident. You just haven't let yourself remember."
The accident. Five years ago. The stretch of highway. The rain. The headlights. The—
Nothing. There was nothing.
"You were in the car," I whispered. "The passenger seat."
"I was."
"But the reports—"
"The reports were wrong." Her smile flickered. "Or right. Depending on how you look at it. There was only one body they pulled from the wreck. Only one they could see."
"Then what are you? A ghost?"
"Ghosts don't bleed." She lifted the hem of Cole's shirt, and there on her abdomen was a scar—a long, jagged line, the kind of scar a seatbelt might leave if it had been wrenched tight enough to cut. "But I didn't come here to talk about the accident."
"Then why are you here?"
She lowered the shirt. The scar vanished beneath the cotton. "To show you something. Something Cole doesn't know about. Something even he hasn't found."
I didn't move. The flashlight's beam held steady on her face. "Cole knows this building better than anyone."
"Cole knows what Cole built. He doesn't know what was here before." She turned and walked through the back office door—through it, not around it, her body passing through the wood like it was smoke. Her voice drifted back to me, muffled but clear. "Come on. Before he wakes up."
I should have gone downstairs. I should have woken Cole, told him what I'd seen, let him search the bar with his gun and his calm and his refusal to believe in things that didn't make sense.
But my feet were already moving, carrying me toward the back office, through the door, into the cramped space where Cole kept his vinyl collection and his tax records and a battered leather chair he'd rescued from a curb in Fishtown.
She was standing by the far wall, her hand pressed against the exposed brick. "Here."
"Here what?"
"The wall. It opens."
I ran the flashlight beam over the brick.
It looked solid—mortar and red clay and the faint watermark of a long-ago leak.
But when I stepped closer, I saw it: a seam, hair-thin, running in a rectangle from floor to ceiling.
A hidden door, fitted so perfectly into the surrounding brickwork that I'd never have noticed it if I wasn't looking.
"How do you know about this?"
"I've been here longer than you have." She took her hand from the wall, and the brick beneath her palm was glowing—a faint, phosphorescent trace that outlined a pressure plate. "Push here."
I pushed.
The wall swung inward with a sound like an exhale—ancient hinges, long unused, releasing their tension. Behind it, a narrow staircase spiraled downward into darkness. The air that rose to meet me was cool and dry, smelling of old stone and something else. Something metallic. Something alive.
"Go," she said. "I can't follow you past this point. It's not—" She paused, searching for the word. "It's not for me."
"What's down there?"
"You'll see." Her voice was fading, growing thinner with each word. "And when you do, don't be afraid. It's always been there. It's always been yours."
"Mine? I've never seen this before—"
But she was already gone. The glow on the brick was gone. The bar behind me was silent, the turntable dark, the pendant lights still dead.
I was alone at the top of a hidden staircase with a flashlight in my hand and a choice to make.
I made it.
The stairs were stone, worn smooth in the center by footsteps that must have been decades—maybe centuries—old.
The walls were rough-hewn, the mortar crumbling in places, and as I descended, the air grew colder.
The beam of my flashlight picked out details I didn't want to see: a rusted hook set into the ceiling, a metal ring bolted to the wall, a length of chain coiled on a narrow ledge.
The staircase opened into a room.
Not a panic room. Not a speakeasy storeroom. This was older—much older—and it had been designed for something Cole's clean lines and warm lighting and leather stools couldn't have imagined.
The room was circular, maybe twenty feet across, with a domed ceiling that soared high above my head.
The walls were exposed stone, but they'd been covered in places with dark velvet curtains, faded and moth-eaten but still rich, still red.
The floor was a mosaic of black and white tiles arranged in concentric circles that drew the eye to the center of the room.
And in the center of the room—
My breath caught.
A sex swing. Hanging from a heavy iron beam set into the ceiling, its black leather straps gleaming in the flashlight's beam, its stirrups dangling at waist height.
It was old but well-maintained—the leather oiled, the chains polished, the buckles and carabiners showing only the faintest patina of age.
Someone had been caring for it. Someone had kept it ready.
Around the swing, arranged on low tables of dark wood, were other things.
Restraints. Floggers. A violet wand with its glass electrodes lined up in a velvet case.
Ropes of silk and hemp, coiled neatly, their colors ranging from deep purple to the soft pink of a healing bruise.
A spreader bar of polished steel. A leather hood, its interior lined with something that might have been rabbit fur. A blindfold. A gag.
A note.
The note was propped against a small chest, the paper yellowed to translucence, the ink faded but still legible. In handwriting I didn't recognize—slanted and elegant, the script of someone who'd learned to write in another century—it read:
For those who find their peace in binding their pleasure. Use with care. Clean after each use. Replace what you break. The key to the chest is behind the third stone to the left of the stair.
I looked at the stair. I counted three stones. I pressed the third, and it yielded, swinging outward on a hidden hinge to reveal a small niche. Inside was a brass key.
The chest opened with a soft click.
Inside, wrapped in silk, was a collection of glass toys—dildos and plugs and curved shapes I didn't have names for, all of them hand-blown, all of them delicate and beautiful and terrifying.
Some were clear. Some were colored—deep cobalt, emerald green, the amber of aged honey.
They were cool to the touch, smooth and flawless, and they'd been stored here for decades, maybe longer, waiting for someone to find them.
I lifted one—a curved piece of cobalt glass, flared at the base, designed for g-spot stimulation—and the weight of it in my palm was solid and real and utterly impossible.
I should have been scared. I should have been running up the stairs, screaming for Cole, demanding to know what the hell was under his bar.
But I wasn't scared. I was fascinated. I was aroused.
I was standing in a hidden chamber beneath the speakeasy where I'd been living for weeks, surrounded by bondage gear and glass sex toys and a note written by someone who'd been dead for at least a hundred years, and my body was responding in ways I couldn't control.
My thighs pressed together. My nipples tightened against the fabric of Cole's shirt. My breath came faster, shallower, fogging the glass dildo in my hand.
This is what she'd wanted me to find. This was what the woman with my face had led me to. Not the accident. Not the truth about what had happened on that highway five years ago. This. A room. A secret. A promise.
I set the glass piece back in the chest and closed the lid.
I was trembling—not with fear, I realized, but with want.
The same want that had driven me to kneel between Cole's thighs this morning, to take him in my mouth while his brother knocked at the door.
The same want that had made me offer myself to him on the bartop, knowing Marcus was watching.
The want was old and deep and hungry, and this room had been built to feed it.
Footsteps on the stairs.
"Mara?"
Cole's voice, rough with sleep and edged with worry. The flashlight beam bobbed as I turned, catching him on the bottom step—barefoot, bare-chested, wearing only the jeans he'd pulled on in his hurry. His gun was in his hand.
"Jesus Christ." He lowered the weapon, staring past me at the room. "How did you—"
"The woman." I swallowed. "The one who looks like me. She showed me the door. In the back office. Behind the brick."
He descended the last few steps, his eyes sweeping the circular chamber, the swing, the tables, the chest. "I've been in this building for three years. I renovated every inch of it. How the hell did I miss this?"
"The wall was seamless. You'd only find it if you knew where to push." I held up the brass key. "She knew."
"The woman."
"Yes."
He holstered the gun—a practiced motion, automatic—and crossed to where I stood. His hand cupped my chin, tilting my face up toward his. His fingers were warm. Steady. The same fingers that had pulled me from a burning car five years ago.
"Are you okay?"
"I'm not scared." I said it before I'd fully decided to say it. "I should be. I'm not."
"Then what are you?"
The question hung between us. I considered lying.
Considered deflecting. Considered making a joke—something about speakeasies and bootleggers and the kind of people who'd built hidden sex chambers beneath their bars.
But the want was still there, thrumming under my skin, and I was tired of pretending I didn't feel it.
"Aroused," I said. "Very, very aroused."
His eyes darkened. His thumb traced my lower lip. "This room. This—" He glanced at the swing, the restraints, the floggers. "You know what this is."
"I know."
"And you're not—"