The Room Beyond

Chapter Two

The hallway smelled like beeswax and cedar. Wren's heels sank into carpet so thick it swallowed her own footsteps, and for one second she understood why her source refused to describe this place above a whisper. Some rooms don't survive being talked about.

Nine's hand stayed wrapped around hers the whole way, warm and unhurried, like he had nowhere else in the world to be. It should have unsettled her. Instead it made her want to lean into it.

Get it together. You're here for a story. You're Seven. This is research.

The door at the end opened onto a room that made the grand hall look restrained. Low light. A wall of glass over a skyline she didn't recognize from this angle. A bed she made herself not look at directly. Real silence, the kind that made her aware of her own pulse.

"This is the part," Nine said, letting go of her hand and facing her fully for the first time since the pillar, "where I tell you nothing happens in this room you don't want. Say the word, any word, and I walk you back to the party myself. No explanation needed. No offense taken."

Wren studied him. The plain mask, the composed stillness, the way he'd made an exit sound as easy as a door opening. It occurred to her that most men in his position wouldn't bother offering an exit at all.

"And if I don't say the word?" she asked.

Something in him sharpened. Not aggressive. Focused, the way a man focuses on the only thing in a room worth his attention. "Then I'd like your name," he said. "Not the one on your invitation. The real one. Just for tonight. Just between us."

Every instinct told her to lie. She'd built a year of her life on never handing over more than she took.

"Wren," she said anyway.

He said nothing for a moment, like he was testing the shape of it in his mouth. "Wren." Low. "I'm not telling you mine. Not tonight. Is that a problem?"

It should have been. It was the entire reason she walked into this building — to find a name, a face, proof she could use as a weapon.

Standing in front of him, she found she didn't care nearly as much as she should.

"No," she said. "Not tonight."

He kissed her like he'd been waiting longer than the twenty minutes they'd actually known each other. Slow at first, one hand cradling her jaw with a gentleness that sat strangely against the hunger underneath it. Wren's hands found his lapels before she'd decided to reach for him at all, and when he made a low sound against her mouth, something in her that had been wound too tight for too long finally gave.

"Tell me if I go too fast," he murmured against her throat, working down with a patience that made her knees genuinely unsteady. "I don't want fast. Not with you."

Not with you. Like she was already different from whoever usually stood in this room with him.

His hands took their time on the zipper at her back, drawing it down slow, deliberate, like he wanted her to feel every inch of fabric loosening before he let it fall. She shivered when the cool air hit bare skin, and his mouth curved against her collarbone.

"There she is," he said quietly, and she understood he wasn't talking about the dress.

What followed wasn't what she expected from a room built for anonymous pleasure. Nothing rushed about the way he learned her — low questions about what she wanted, what made her breath catch, careful attention to every answer like it mattered more to him than his own need. When he finally laid her back and settled over her, mask still on, dark eyes locked on hers, he touched her like a man memorizing something he was afraid he'd only get once. His mouth found her skin everywhere, unhurried, deliberate, until she stopped thinking in words at all and started thinking only in his name, the fake one, the one she'd give back to him in a moan before the night was through.

He said her real name — the one she'd handed him instead of a number — right as she stopped being able to think in sentences at all, rough against her ear like something he intended to keep.

Afterward he didn't retreat to the far side of the bed. He stayed close, one arm over her waist, breathing slowly evening out against her shoulder, and Wren let herself exist in it, unguarded, further from the story she came here to chase than she'd been in a year.

"Can I ask you something?" she said eventually, tracing a line along his arm.

"You can ask."

"Do you do this a lot? Bring someone back here?"

He was quiet long enough she thought he wouldn't answer. "No," he said finally, and something in his voice had gone careful, like the honesty surprised him. "Not like this. Not ever, actually."

Wren turned her head to look at him. At the mask still hiding everything but his mouth and jaw and the watchful line of his eyes. She felt the first real crack form in the wall she'd built around this whole night.

"Then why me?" she asked.

His hand stilled on her waist. For one second something moved behind his expression that looked close to guilt, gone before she could be sure.

"Because the room noticed you," he said, echoing his first words to her, "and I've spent a long time not letting myself want anything the room notices."

It should have sounded like flattery. It landed like a confession he hadn't meant to make, and Wren — reporter's instincts alive even now, even tangled in sheets with a stranger whose name she didn't know — filed it away with the rest of the night's evidence.

Something about this isn't as random as it should be, she thought, right before his mouth found hers again and every careful thought in her head dissolved.

It was nearly four when a soft knock came at the door, a reminder the night's masks needed to come off soon, the club's one absolute rule, no exceptions. Nine rose first, dressing with the same unhurried precision he did everything with, and at the door he turned back and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, tender in a way that sat strangely on a man who'd spent the whole night refusing her his name.

"Same time, next month," he said. Not quite a question.

Wren, still breathless, still furious at herself for how badly she wanted to say yes, heard herself answer before she'd decided to.

"Same time," she agreed.

He left first, gone down the hallway without a backward glance. It wasn't until the door clicked shut that Wren noticed, glinting on the nightstand where his hand had rested minutes before, a heavy gold signet ring he'd forgotten to put back on.

She picked it up, turned it over, and felt her stomach drop through the floor.

Engraved into the flat gold face, small and unmistakable once she knew to look, was a single letter, V.