Nonetheless, I asked, “Where are you taking me?” after falling into step beside the teenager.
She gave me a scathing up-and-down look, as if I should already know. “To your owner. Where do you think?”
I jerked my head back, all my hackles rising.
“My owner? Are you kidding me…?” I started to ask before stopping myself. She was obviously trying to get a rise out of me, and I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction.
“Does this person you’re taking me to see have a name?” I asked instead in a facsimile of the voice my mother used with service people who had displeased her.
Her snicker sliced through the air, mean and nasty. And instead of answering, she grabbed me by the shoulders and turned me to face her. “Here’s a window you can use as a mirror. Take a look at his name.”
There was indeed a window built into the hallway’s wall. It showcased what appeared to be a dance club beyond it—the kind locals went to, not tourists. It was filled with mostly young people, and the music blasting overhead was that new Colin Fairgood-Roxxy Roxx duet—not some mainstream party classic from the last century.
And the teenage girl was right. The dark club made the window just as good as a mirror. I did as I was ordered and took a look…only to immediately wish I hadn’t.
My entire back was covered in a tattoo.
PROPERTY OF was written out in huge gothic letters across my shoulder blades, and someone had inked the name HADES just above the dress’s short skirt.
The chemical calm wasn’t enough to contain the horror that flooded through me.
What is this? What did they do to me?
I thought it.
Then I screamed it. “What is this? What did you do to me?”
Forget the pill. Forget not giving the teenager the satisfaction of seeing me upset.
Blood rushed into my ears, and a new pain lit up the top of my back as someone babbled and pleaded in the distance.
That someone was me. The new pain was also me.
Me trying to scratch the heinous tattoo off my back as I cried, “Get it off! Get it off!” and demanded to know who this Hades was over and over again.
Both my request and my question received the same answer. The burly guard appeared and pulled my hands away from my back.
He bound my wrists with the kind of zip-tie handcuffs I had only ever seen on television, then he dragged me, kicking and still babbling, through the double doors into a room I could only describe as...
Actually, I didn’t know how to describe it. And my eyes had to adjust again just to take it in. The space was dark and cavernous, illuminated not from overhead light, but rows of old-timey gas lamps in sconces along each of its side walls.
Awful desperation worming through me, I looked around. When I was around twelve, our next-door neighbors tried to commission a renovation of their carriage house to turn it into a separate guesthouse for the husband’s mother. But the process turned out to be way more fraught and complicated than they’d bargained for. The city inspector had insisted that every single thing needed updating to pass inspection. My mother, the mayor’s wife, and all the other people on the Lake Front Heights Historical Preservation Board had threatened to bury them in fines if they even so much as breathed on the original doors the inspector insisted had to be completely replaced.
In the end, the neighbors ended up putting the guy’s mother in a home as opposed to having to jump through all the often-conflicting hoops the Preservation Society members and the city permit office had held up in front of their goal.
This room struck me as that kind of conflicting space. Preservationists wouldn’t have wanted the owner to change a thing. But a building inspector would have declared it a fire trap for the lack of lighting alone.
I’d seen the nightclub, crowded with carefree people dancing and drinking the night away. This room might have served as an additional club space at some point in its history. A place for patrons to spill over. It was large enough and mostly empty, save for one piece of furniture and one person.
A man lounged on a large black throne in the middle of the room, his face mostly obscured by shadows.
Hades.
I knew it was him without having to be told.
The teenager pushed down on my shoulder, and my knees banged against the wooden floor, adding two more jolts of pain to my throbbing back.
“You want me to duct tape her mouth?” the mean teenager asked the man.
