Leaving me to face the truth. Of course I would go back into Don’s house. It was an inevitability, not a decision. I would go back for Laurel, and Clem, and the missing women whose names I didn’t know. But I would also go for myself. Maybe I could find the part of me still locked inside.
Maybe I could free her.
Part Two
Scheherazade, you cunning bitch You went in to offer yourself in place of your sisters. You went in to perform a feat of heroism.
But.
Did you not feel your skin tingle at the sight of the blade in the corner of the room? Did you not feel yourself get slick when you beheld the king, the man who would either take your life from you or fall to his knees on the bed and be conquered? Were you not desperate to know whether you could do it? Whether you were powerful enough, and in what ways?
You weave and you weave, until you can no longer tell if you are the storyteller or the story being told. And when he craves it, your paper-thin skin, when he wants to drink your blood, your living stories, do you not let him lick up every spoonful? Do you not swirl around the look in his eyes like a cup of tea, desperate to read the leaves, to parse who you are to him, who you will be to history? After all, names like yours are never etched into the books unless men like him allow it.
Did you not grow to love him, you sad, masochistic little beast?
Yes, this is an interrogation.
You had one thousand and one nights, and he never was deposed.
Chapter Eighteen
“There’s something about suburbia at night that makes my skin crawl.” Jamie glanced at me from the driver’s seat, moonlight cutting across his face. “It’s too quiet. You can feel the menace buzzing just under the surface.”
I’d gotten the text from an unknown number: Initiation, midnight, 35 Bell Pond Road. The number was a dead end, even for Jamie’s team, so whoever it was had probably used a burner. Regardless, the message was clear: whatever the Paters had managed to dig up in their background check—besides my phone number—they’d found it unobjectionable, and I was in.
Now we were parked in the slumbering suburbs so I could deliver myself for punishment. For initiation, Jamie kept correcting, as if there was a difference.
“There’s a reason they hold their parties here,” I said, looking around. “It’s the perfect cover.” I dropped my phone and wedding ring into the cup holder. “You’re a child of suburbia, anyway, Jamie. You ever direct that analytic gaze inward?”
Jamie looked up at the moon through the windshield. “You mean, have I ever asked myself whether the way I was raised led to a lifetime of me burying my feelings of desperate, feral longing under a polite surface, because that’s what you’re supposed to do? Or whether the entire reason I run a podcast called Transgressions is because I was never allowed to transgress, and now I’m obsessed with it?”
“Something like that.”
He glanced at me and grinned. “Nah. Never thought of it.”
Thirty-five Bell Pond was another grand house, like the first. A huge porch, tall white columns, and a blue sign for Alec Barry, New York’s governor. Like the first house, it was quiet and still, only a few windows glowing. No hint of what lay inside.
“Property records say it’s a private residence owned by Mountainsong, this megachurch in Kingston,” Jamie said. “Over ten thousand members, and they do a ton of streaming sermons, real modern, but what they teach is old-school fire-and-brimstone stuff. That’s all we could find.”
I shivered. All day I’d felt calm, but now that I was here, I was vibrating. “Showtime.” I flipped up the mirror. “You’ll be here when I’m done?”
“I won’t move a muscle.”