Dangerously Mine

Chapter 9

The dining room had become a tomb. I left the half-eaten lamb behind, the maid’s "shut up" still ringing in my ears like a physical blow. I didn't go back to my room. The black silk sheets felt like a trap now, a beautiful place to wait for a man who bought me like a piece of furniture.

I needed to know whose shadow I was living in.

I began to walk, my bare feet silent on the cold obsidian floors. Jacob had said the staff was gone, and while the maid had proven him a liar, the rest of the house felt genuinely abandoned. It was a museum of the dead.

I reached a long gallery I hadn't noticed before. High on the walls, framed in heavy silver, were the faces of the Mikaelsons. I stopped beneath one. It was an older man, his jawline as sharp as Jacob’s, but his eyes were different—they were cruel, devoid of the weary stillness I saw in Jacob. Beside him was a woman with a face like porcelain, beautiful and frozen.

There were no smiles. In every photo, they looked like they were bracing for a war. I looked at a younger version of Jacob, standing stiffly between them. Even as a boy, he didn't look like a child. He looked like a soldier waiting for orders. I realized then that this house didn't just hold secrets; it held a legacy of coldness. They didn't have a family tree; they had a list of survivors.

A strange chill settled in my marrow. Who are these people? I whispered to the empty air.

I moved deeper into the west wing, the light growing dimmer until I pushed open the double doors of the library. It was breathtaking—three stories of leather-bound history reaching toward a glass ceiling that showed nothing but the black Nevada sky.

I wandered between the shelves, the scent of vanilla and old paper momentarily calming my racing heart. I ran my fingers along the spines, feeling the texture of a thousand stories I would never know. I was looking for a distraction, but the house had other plans.

Near the very back, behind a shelf of heavy, law-bound volumes, I saw it.

The molding on the wall didn't line up. I pressed my palm against a sliver of wood, and with a soft, mechanical hiss, a section of the shelving swung inward.

My breath caught. It wasn't another room. It was a doorway leading into a stone tunnel.

I leaned in. The air that drifted out was different—it was damp, smelling of earth and something metallic. A staircase of rough-hewn stone spiraled down into a darkness so absolute it felt like a solid wall.

My heart hammered against my ribs. Everything in me told me to run, to go back to the silk sheets and the safety of my ignorance. But the red lights in my head flashed—the key, the boat, the dark. I felt a pull, a sickening sense of gravity calling me into that tunnel. It felt familiar. The darkness felt like the inside of my own mind.

I took one step onto the cold stone. Then another.

"The library is for reading, not for exploring."

I gasped, spinning around so fast I nearly tripped into the abyss.

The maid stood at the entrance of the secret door, her charcoal-grey uniform blending into the shadows. She didn't look angry; she looked like a statue. Her hands were folded neatly in front of her, but her eyes were fixed on the tunnel with a look of intense, quiet warning.

"I... I just found it," I stammered, my heart trying to claw its way out of my chest. "Where does it lead?"

"It leads to places you are not meant to see," she said. Her voice was flat, but there was a tremor of something—fear? Caution?—underneath it. "The master does not like his privacy breached. Especially not the parts of it that are buried."

She stepped forward, her movement stiff and mechanical. She reached out and pulled the hidden door shut. The clack of the wood sealing into place sounded like a gavel.

"You will come back to your room now," she commanded. It wasn't a suggestion. "Mr. Mikaelson is occupied. He does not need the distraction of a girl who wanders into the mouth of a grave."

"Is that what's down there?" I asked, my voice trembling. "A grave?"

The maid didn't answer. She simply stood aside, pointing toward the hallway. "Sleep, Jhannara. The morning comes early, and the life of a Mikaelson is not one for the curious."

I walked past her, feeling her eyes on the back of my neck. As I made my way back to the black suite, I looked back at the library doors.

Jacob was quiet. He was nonchalant. But as I lay back in the dark, I realized that the man who owned me wasn't just managing a business. He was sitting on top of a tunnel that led to nowhere, guarding a history that felt more like a crime scene than a family.

And for the first time, I wondered if the reason I couldn't remember my past was because someone had buried it in a place just li