Page 4 of The Monster of Hotel No. 7
When she realizes, despite our proximity and the passing we had at parties and rituals and on our childhood street and the ways she stared up at my bedroom window as she played with Cosmo and Von and Isadora and others, she doesn’t really know me?
Tonight she’ll know enough.
And I suppose I'll find out how well I like the sound of her screams.
Chapter4
Karia
“Idon’t know how to mix drinks, but I can pour vodka into cranberry juice?” Cosmo offers his services with a grin as he stands behind the luxurious bar of Septem.
This place may be in a basement, but it’s an immaculate one with high, arched ceilings and tones of silver and blue lights from inset lighting and battery-powered candles flickering along the edges of the bar top, gleaming in marbled black. The walls are exposed stone and the stool I’m perched atop is inlaid with smooth crystals that dance with the strange lighting every time I shift in my seat, my legs crossed so very properly like I’m not thinking of fucking Cosmo right now inside my head.
The scent of wild lavender and the old pages of a book linger down here, and in fact, deeper into the bar, a few steps down, there are leather couches facing a low table filled with volumes of obscure texts alongside empty champagne glasses and black dessert plates. I assume Writhe will descend here after their meeting in the ballroom and have a twisted little afterparty I may not want to witness, what, with my dad involved and all.
But for now, I only smile at Cosmo and nod my head as he gets to work behind the bar, pouring cranberry juice over ice, then a shot of vodka, all very haphazard and unofficial. I’d prefer a piña colada, but I don’t think he’s skilled enough for that.
He garnishes my drink with five cherries, and I laugh as he pushes it over to me with a smile.
I reach for the short glass immediately and our fingers brush. Lifting my blue eyes to his green ones, I bite down on my bottom lip and try not to think of Sullen Rule.
It always seemed to me he silently appeared more often when I was flirting with Cosmo. He wouldn’t say anything if he happened down the street where I walked with my friends, but his silent, disturbing presence was enough to make me step a little away from de Actis.
Everyone hushed when he drew near.
The son of Writhe’s leader, mysteries and rumors about him spread like a disease around our street, oozing as if from a wound.
It was strange to me that he was born the same year I was, and we had known each other our entire lives through our connection to Writhe, and yet I felt I was closer to Cosmo, whom I only met in high school, than I was Sullen.
In some ways.
In others, when he so much as looked at me on Ritual Drive, deep brown eyes glinting with pieces of amber, it was as if he could see into my soul.
And he never stared at the others in that way.
All the same, he became the butt of inside jokes; the monster and freakshow and isolated kid of our family’s organization. Sometimes Von would tease that maybe my arranged marriage would be to him, a sacrifice for my duty to Writhe. Considering he rarely spoke to me, I think he would fight against an arrangement like that.
Because when hedidspeak to me, it wasn’t very nice.
Once, at a Writhe meeting in which we were cloistered with the other kids inside a cathedral lobby, he told me I was stupid when I suggested we play truth or dare.
“Then you come up with something,” I snapped back to him, my heart galloping inside my chest as I stared at him watching me from a high-backed chair tucked into the shadows of the room.
He sat up straighter, gloved hands on his thighs, wearing long black sleeves and jeans. Every inch of him from the neck down was covered.
Everyone was silent, riveted by us.
He never spoke, and yet he had just antagonized me.
“No, let’s do yours.” His voice was low and rough, deep for our age—fourteen then. “I dare you to take my knife and drag it across one eye.”
My breath caught in my throat.
Then Von cleared his own and said, “Anyway, moving on…” But he wouldn’t address Sullen directly.
No one would.
He was a psychopath, some said. He didn’t speak, others claimed, although I knew that wasn’t true. His father beat him, many whispered—I could believe it. His mother had committed suicide when we were both seven and everyone on the street heard the gunshot that night. Stein Rule was as quiet around me as his son and I sometimes wondered, when I was alone in bed and staring out my window toward his black, shuttered house across the street and two homes down, if Mercy Rule shot herself in the head because she was married to a man like him, and mother to a son like Sullen.
