Page 88 of Shattered Empire (Shattered World)

Then he kissed me.

Soft and slow. Full of sorrow and affection. He’d never kissed me like that before. Like I was precious. Like he loved me.

Nope, I wasn’t ready to analyze that just yet.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“I’ve been searching this barn since Kenzi left.” I stiffened when he said her name. If he noticed, he didn’t say anything. “She made it sound like there would be something here, but so far, I haven’t found anything.”

“What did she say?” I asked, pulling away from him slightly. It didn’t get me far since I was still blocked in on one side by the car.

“She said this place had memories. Painful ones,” he repeated. “Then she told me to dig up the past while I could.”

“Did you find anything?”

“Other than it being a normal horse stable,” he huffed. “Nothing.”

Stable.

That term still sent a shiver through me whenever I heard it. It was sad how such an innocuous word could have such a dark and powerful impact on someone.

Wait—stable.

Elias wouldn’t have been the only one to have a horse stable set up to traffic women. From the look of the barn before me, this one was far older than the one he had set up.

Matthias wouldn’t have known to look for a hidden door because he’d never been to the stable back home. Striding past him, I made my way down the center of the dilapidated building and counted out the beams where the horse stalls would have been. If this was a place where they held trafficked women, then they would have placed the door at one end of the barn, most likely in the last stable. There was only ever one exit and entrance to make it harder for women to escape.

Elias’s had been larger than the one we stood in now, but the length of the barn had been tripled to hold more women.

I stepped into the last stall on the right and moved the hay around with my feet, ignoring the mice and spiders that scattered at the motion. When I didn’t find what I was looking for, I moved to the other side.

And bingo.

It was barely noticeable, even after all these years. The boards had been cut to look exactly like their surroundings, and the handle looked to be nothing more than notched wood from horses’ hooves. Grasping the underside of the wood-carved handle, I grunted as I lifted the heavy door.

The smell of mildew and rotting eggs filled the air. We coughed, the scent strong, even with the fresh rain.

“Let me grab a flashlight,” Matthias said.

“Don’t worry about it.” I shook my head and flipped a small metal switch that rested where the stairs began to descend. The whirring of a generator filled the cramped space below our feet before the lights crackled, flickered, and then turned on. “Gross.” I pulled a face as I stepped down onto the rotting wooden stairs.

They creaked with my weight, and I took my time as I descended into the first hallway, taking it slow. The steps were covered in a thin layer of mildew, and I didn’t want to trip. Looking around, I let my eyes take a moment to adjust to the dim lighting. The concrete walls were covered in mold, and combined with the warm yellow of the lights, it had the space feeling cramped and dark due to the tinge of green.

“This place looks like it has been abandoned for years,” Matthias noted.

“How did Kenzi even know of this place?” I wondered. “In fact, how are the two of you so chummy?” I pushed forward, refusing to look back at him.

“Mark had been monitoring dark web chatter,” he admitted. “Not much goes on without him knowing, especially when it pertains to theBratva.There were several dark web pings about a possible assassination attempt.”

“So someone leaked the information?” Who would do that? Or even know? Did that mean that the Dollhouse had a leak?

“Kenzi did,” he told me. “She wasn’t the docile little assassin they thought she was.”

“I wasn’t the target, was I?” I asked.

“No,” he assured me softly. “There was no way anyone would believe that an assassin would get the drop on me directly. Not when I am so well protected.”

“I was your weakness,” I whispered, mostly to myself.

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