She’d asked Tess about the key. Tess had explained that all the private dressing rooms had keys like the one she’d found. She’d advised Kat to turn it in to the costume matron because one of the principal players must have misplaced it.
Vic’s dressing room hadn’t been reassigned, though some of the costumes had been shifted to her understudy’s room.
The key was heavy in the pocket of Katherine’s silk pajamas tonight.
She’d played her cello in her room after leaving the orchestra pit long after midnight, when the opera house slumbered around her. Except for Severne, who had probably labored in his gym longer than she labored over her strings. Now she quietly clicked open her bedroom door and crept toward the hidden hallway beneath the stage that was lined with private dressing rooms. She’d decided against dressing in something other than her sleepwear. If anyone saw her, let them assume she was sleepwalking or headed to the kitchen for a midnight snack. She hadn’t visited the cook’s domain yet, but others who lived in the opera house treated it like the kitchen of their own home.
Severne would have given her a formal tour, but she didn’t want his audience. She couldn’t trust him not to mislead or misdirect. She was drawn to him, but it was an impulse she couldn’t safely indulge.
John Severne was the opera’s master. If a wealthy patron was involved in her sister’s disappearance, then he might not be as interested in helping her find her sister’s abductor as he intimated.
It wasn’t only l’Opéra Severne that had mysterious shadows. Its owner was shadowed in his own right.
Kat slipped through the dark opera house. She moved with silent steps on slippered feet through passages that watched her progress with wooden eyes. She purposefully avoided looking at the murals. They gamboled around her, chaotic and indistinct in the darkness.
Somewhere a hellhound prowled and a daemon brooded. She was only a silent wraith wandering in search of the truth. If only she didn’t suspect that the secret she probed was bigger and older than Victoria’s disappearance.
She came to the room she searched for, still marked with a placard bearing her sister’s assumed name. She took the key from the pocket of her silk pajamas and fumbled to insert it into the slot in the dark.
Kat cringed when the key slid home.
The rattle of metal against metal was loud in the silent corridor.
She held her breath.
Her heart pulsed in her ears, an embarrassing whoosh that mocked her. Go get back in your warm, safe bed, it said.
But her shoulders stiffened in response. Her spine went to stone. She stood her ground. She waited.
No growl. No steps. No whispering sibilance came from the sconces or the vents or the walls.
She turned the key farther, and oiled tumblers responded smoothly. In the quiet hallway, even the easy operation of the mechanism shouted her presence to a malevolent world. Here she is. What is she doing? Why is she here where she doesn’t belong?
She opened the door anyway.
The dusty cool air of the hallway met the rush of stale, closed-up air from the abandoned dressing room. Powder, freesia, hair spray...her sister’s professional persona of wigs and stage makeup and elaborate make-believe wafted out to envelop her. It was subtly different than Vic’s personal scent, but just as familiar to a beloved sister who worked side by side with a lyric soprano.
The opera was an escape for Victoria as it had been for their mother, but it was an escape that hinted at dark fantasy and the undercurrents of melodrama they lived with every day, both gorgeous and awful, both life and death, filled with lush, deadly beauty.
Their life, and the work that hid them from that life, were both music and madness.
Kat slipped into the room and shut the door behind her. Only then did she click on the lights. They sputtered to life in a flickering, unreliable glimmer from a mirror framed by glass bulbs that seemed almost as old as l’Opéra Severne itself.
Besides the dressing table, there were two lounges in the style of seventeenth-century fainting couches. Their upholstery was a faded tapestry that indicated they were authentic antiques. She jumped when the other denizens of the room were revealed. Several tall, headless dress forms stood naked to the side.
She calmed her heart, and then ignored a sudden pinch of emotion as she realized the barren forms had held her sister’s costumes that had been taken to the understudy’s room.
Kat walked over to one of the dress forms and placed her hand on its shoulder. The cage beneath its waist would have supported the heavy bustled skirts and petticoats of Victoria’s costume. Now it looked skeletal. The papier-mâché bodice felt hollow beneath her hand.
The dress form was nothing without her sister.
Victoria D’Arcy would have been the most famous name in opera if she hadn’t had to live a life in hiding. She’d taken smaller roles in smaller theaters than her talent deserved. She’d had to use assumed names, often changing her appearance and losing roles because she auditioned without her full résumé.
Kat turned from the form and stepped toward the mirror. In its wavy, vintage glass, the room behind her was emptier and darker. What had this room seen? She suddenly wished the shadows could whisper their secrets. Behind her, layers upon layers of old posters and playbills plastered the walls. Like the dress form, she felt papier-mâchéd by a hundred years of dramatic make-believe. What truths were hidden behind it all?
She forced herself to sit at the dressing table and open the drawers one by one. Tons of cosmetics and toiletries rattled and rolled at her touch. Among the jumble, an anomaly stood out.
Kat’s gasp was more of a choked exclamation. She forced herself to reach out and scoop up the unmistakable charm bracelet her sister never removed. The matching bracelet on her own wrist tinkled gently like chimes whenever she moved.
But her sister’s bracelet was drastically altered. It had been blackened until the Order of Samuel medallion hanging from it was charred. The sound it made as she turned it this way and that to examine it was dead and dull.
Her fingers shook as she held Vic’s bracelet up to try to ascertain what had caused the damage. Fire? Brimstone? They had never removed the bracelets. They’d been afraid to. Just as Katherine always wore sleeves that pressed her bracelet to her skin to keep it from interfering with her bowing, Victoria altered her costumes to hide the chain whenever it was necessary.
Had Victoria removed it herself, or had someone ripped it from her wrist? And did the condition of the blackened metal tell a terrible truth about her sister’s condition? Was she hurt...or worse?
Kat held the bracelet in her fist for a long time. Tears burned behind her eyes. She willed them away. She carefully placed her sister’s bracelet in her pocket. She refused to give up hope. The bracelet wasn’t a warning or a premonition. It was only another clue. A piece in a puzzle she would solve to find her sister, safe and sound.
Victoria was fine.
Kat would find her.
The only thing the bracelet revealed was that she was on the right track. She would pick up every precious bread crumb until she finally reached her sister’s side.
She put her elbows on the powdery surface of the table and rested her face in her hands, but just as she began to close her eyes, the reflection of a name caught her eye.
Kat stood and turned.
Not only a name. She recognized a face and a particular set of eyes she’d known as well as she knew her own.
She moved toward the wall with hesitant steps.
From the vanity to the poster, she traveled back in time twenty years. Her mother had been a lovely Marthe. It was the fluttering corner of her poster that had caught Kat’s attention and drawn her eyes to her mother’s name. The paper was yellow and curled. She reached to touch the face she’d lost before she’d lost Victoria. Her sister had done the same. Kat knew she must have. Vic had stood where she stood now with her fingers trembling and tears on her lashes, with her heart trapped in the tightening cage of her chest. Had her sister remembered the full contralto swell of their mother’s voice singing lullabies to her children as easily as she sang her dramatic roles?
Victoria must have peeled back the loosened corner. Kat peeled it back, as well. The move revealed a seam in the wood that ran down to her knees. It was a cupboard, one that had been papered shut decades ago.
But it had been loosened much more recently than that.
Kat slid several lacquered nails down the seam to edge it open. Inside was a shallow enclosure built into the wall. Perhaps it had been installed for costume jewelry or other small valuables, but the only thing in it now was a small bundle of folded letters bound in a faded satin sash.
She recognized the old belt to her childhood dress.
As she reached to close her hand around the stack, she glanced at the mirror over her shoulder. In it, her reflection looked small and humble and completely dwarfed by a hulking shadow on the wall. She reached for the stack of letters, and as she did, the shadow shifted and changed. The black mass of it swelled bigger and bigger. Large wing-like projections unfurled and stretched from corner to corner of the room. In the reflection, she was sheltered or threatened beneath those shadowy wings.
Kat left the letters where they lay and whirled. She stared at the shadow to determine where it came from. A flood of instinctive energy rushed to her legs, urging her to flee. Was it adrenaline that made the room seem colder? She could see nothing that would cast the shadow, and neither dress forms nor couches had moved. The lights around the mirror flickered and flashed. The wings stretched as if they would envelop her. But it had to be a trick of the light. She was in no danger from darkness.
As she tried to calm her heart and ignore the urge to run, the tip of one wing lifted from the wall.
The translucent shadow that was no mere shadow reached out to her and touched her cheek in a feathery slide down her face.
These black feathers would never give her freedom or happiness.
Her body went suddenly cold. Ice radiated outward from the shadow’s touch as if flowing superchilled through her veins. She cried out, and the sound escaped from hard lips in a puff of white. A tingling numbness was following the ice. Her body was freezing while she tried to tell herself it couldn’t be.
The whole room dimmed. The shadow was detaching itself from the wall. There were whispers now, all around. Urgent shushes and hushes she no longer wanted to hear.
She could think of only one person who might be able to combat the freeze.
Kat flung herself forward and away from the shadow. She wrenched open the door and began a stumbling run down the hall. It was desperate and probably foolish, but in that moment, John Severne and his Brimstone’s fire seemed a salvation.
* * *
Whatever peace he’d achieved from hours of weights was shattered when the woman he’d tortured himself to forget rushed into the sanctum of his private gym. Grim leaped to his feet from his place at the door, but he didn’t confront Katherine D’Arcy. He faced out toward the hallway instead, his hackles raised and a growl rumbling deep in his chest. The dog’s hind legs dug into the floor until his claws pitted the rug as if he expected to be met and slammed with great opposition.
Severne was lathered, spent, self-flagellated to nothing but muscle and bone.
Still, he rose.
He met Kat as her momentum brought her to his side, but he didn’t take her in his sweat-slicked arms. Instead, he faced the hallway as Grim faced it, planted, prepared, an unuttered growl filling his chest.
Kat stopped. She turned to face the hallway, as well.
“C-c-cold. S-so c-cold,” she stuttered.
It was only then that he saw she quaked until her teeth chattered as she tried to speak.
He had nothing to give her except the damnation in his veins.
While Grim guarded the door, Severne turned to the woman beside him and took her in his arms. Hours of forced separation and austerity fell away. This was what he most wanted and most feared. She was shivering, and her soft skin was ice against him beneath the delicate silk pajamas that provided no warmth. Thankfully, they provided no barrier, either. He hissed from the pain as their bodies came together. Her ice and his fire. Immediately he felt the drain as her frozen body absorbed his Brimstone heat.
More pain of a different sort flared when she touched him, both palms coming against his chest. Only strength of will kept him from dropping to his knees. The ice was agony. The contact was worse. Her reaching for him in need was torturous.
In spite of the pain, or maybe because he needed the lash of it to keep from feeling her softness, Severne pulled her closer. She’d been touched by a banished daemon, one that wasn’t fully contained in the walls. His lean form pulsed with Brimstone. Banished daemons were completely drained of fire. How had one managed to free itself, and why had it reached out to Katherine?
Kat pressed into him, seeking his warmth.
Torture? He’d been tortured his whole existence, but Katherine hungry for his damned heat was worse than any hardship he’d ever endured. He gave it to her while holding an untouchable part of himself back. Here, now, he burned for her. He saved her with hell’s fire.
He’d been right that her skin would be perfect and soft. He had reason to caress it now. Her cold was the perfect excuse to slide his Brimstone-heated hand over her skin. She trembled, but she didn’t ask him to stop. Cold, fear, desire—what fueled her shivers? He held her with a strong arm behind her back while he ran his other hand gently over her arms, each one from shoulder to wrist, purposefully ignoring the tinkle of her silver chain.
A flush rose in response to his touch. Her pale, frozen flesh was brought back to heat and life. The silk of her nightclothes was nothing compared to the softness of her.
From her arms, he slid his hand over each leg, torturing himself at the tremble of her thighs and the seduction of silk in the V between them. But he devoted himself to giving her his heat without demanding anything in return. No more intimacy than this. She would be cradled in his arms and accept the heat of his touch and him. The pleasure of nearly innocent exploration was a test for his control.
Noting how her nipples peaked the silk of her top wasn’t innocent, nor was his swelling erection.
But he ignored his ache to tend to her. She trembled in his arms. She warmed. She relaxed.
He brushed his hand against her face, and she sighed. She leaned into his palm. She didn’t stop him when he moved his hand to her bared neck. She only opened her eyes and watched through her lashes as he slid his fingers from her neck to her chest, where he spread them between the fullness of her breasts.
Her heartbeat was rapid but steady.
Not frozen.
Not anymore.
His Brimstone was a blessing for just this night. He was no daemon. But he was also no saint. He lightly teased his palm over and under one heavy breast, and she gasped, but she didn’t pull away. He tested the weight of her in his hand, but only for a moment before he slid his palm to her stomach.
There, beneath her ribs, she was still far too cold.
He gathered her closer. He pressed his hand tight. He willed his heat into her. He wasn’t afraid. His fear had been burned away long ago, but he was suddenly desperate to warm her.
“You’re safe,” he said. As he held her and healed her, he would have accepted eternal torment rather than let anything hurt her. He would hurt her. One day soon. He would betray her. But he held her now and helped her. He gave her all, if only for a few moments.
“That’s a lie, but I’ll risk it. I don’t want to freeze to death,” Kat said.
Too soon, but not soon enough, she flushed in his arms. He sensed when her body temperature was closer to normal. Her shivers stopped. She sighed.
“Is l’Opéra Severne haunted?” she asked against his shoulder.
“No. There are no ghosts here that I’ve ever seen, and I’ve walked these halls a long time. There are only souls doomed to a limbo even the damned don’t deserve,” he replied.
“The walls...the murals,” she said. She no longer shivered from the cold, but she did shudder as she comprehended one of the opera house’s darkest secrets.
“Don’t look. Don’t touch. There’s nothing you can do for them. This is a war that began before you were born. Before I was born. They’re casualties of war. Gone but never forgotten,” Severne said.
“They’re suffering,” Kat said.
She trembled now. His body felt every subtle reaction to his touch. She was no longer cold. She didn’t need his Brimstone heat. There were other needs shifting into focus.
* * *
She was warm now.
His body beneath her hands was a living furnace. Her shivers had stopped, but she still trembled. Severne was back in his workout shorts. His black hair was damp against his forehead. His muscles beneath her fingers were honed and hard.
She tilted her chin to look up at his face. His cheeks were flushed from exertion, from Brimstone, but also, maybe, from her touch? He’d shielded her from the door with his body. Grim had crouched down, warily watching the hall, but silent now. The icy threat had been burned away by Severne’s fire.
It was momentary. This truce. This shelter. This shield. But she gave in to appreciation anyway.
Kat lifted her hand from his chest to his face. Such a perfectly chiseled cheek and jaw. No softness. Had immortality worn it away or had he been nothing but hard and harsh from birth? Yet...he tilted down. He leaned over her. He cradled her body in his arms. How could she not take advantage of the curve in his spine? She rose on tiptoe before he knew what she intended. That had to be the explanation for why he allowed it. First she pressed her lips to his hard jaw, and then it was only a whisper of movement to taste his mouth. Sweet, salty, smoky skin. Full, firm, slightly open lips. Once. Twice. She brushed her mouth against his. Again, then deeper again.
He sighed, but it was an exhalation of protest. More like a moan. As if her hesitant lips hurt him. Still, he sank into her. He met her hesitation with the sudden dip of his tongue. It was a stolen moment. He pulled back from her too soon. Never really softened. Tasted but not fully touched. At least, not for long enough to last.
“Don’t be grateful. I don’t deserve it,” he said. “Grim, show us the way.”
He took her hand and pulled her out the door. The way was shadowy and long. At times she thought they were no longer in the opera house at all. There was a strong scent of crushed pine needles beneath their feet and the rush of cold air from a coniferous forest at night. There was the soft nip of snow, warm compared to the ice she’d felt before.
But Grim responded to Severne’s commands. Stop. Go. Run.
Finally, after a long journey, much longer than if they’d taken the normal route, they stood at the door to her room. The corridor was blissfully too dark for her to see the faces.
“We’ll guard your door until morning,” Severne promised. “I said you were safe, but you aren’t. You’re in danger. Never more so than when you willingly step into my arms.”
“I’m not cold anymore,” she responded.
He watched as she stepped into her room. She slowly, slowly shut the door against him. She leaned into the wood, feeling his heat from the other side.
He said she was in danger. But she was warm again.
In many ways, she felt warm for the first time.