Richer Than God - Amelia Wilde Page 0,11

studying me. “Come with me. I’ll show you.”

There’s no other choice, so I follow her out of the strange, liminal room and down the hall. We pass the back entrance—it’s next to a loading dock—and I keep my eyes straight ahead.

No point in asking if we’re going back for my clothes. If he wanted me to have them, then I’d have them already. Reya doesn’t slow her pace either. So I was right about that.

Everything from before is gone.

That strips me of a certain weight—maybe if there’s nothing left from where I came from, then they won’t be able to find me. It’s a sick relief. This place is not better.

I can’t let myself fall into the trap of imagining it is.

We go up, climbing a huge staircase that must be along the corner of the building somewhere. Music comes through the doorway on the first landing. It sounds like dinner music from a fancy restaurant—a nice place. The kind of place my father wouldn’t take me to. Too much money, he’d say. I don’t have to think about him now.

I might not have to think about him ever again.

Up another floor, and Reya opens a door.

I gasp, and it’s possibly the most ridiculous sound I’ve ever made. My face gets hotter. Soon, I will have no flesh left, only a skull.

And she looks at me with concern in her eyes. “Everything all right?”

“Yes, it…” I thought it would be red. “It’s nice up here.”

It’s more than nice. She leads me down a hallway that’s thickly carpeted in a blue shade that reminds me of the deep part of the ocean, where the light stops reaching and everything settles into its own comfortable darkness. The sound of our footsteps is swallowed by it.

And through open doors, there are the loveliest rooms I’ve ever seen.

Rooms—they could be suites.

It’s all I can do not to stop and lean into one, breathing in the clean scent of everything. It all smells brand-new, with a tinge of fresh paint and the flower arrangements that perch at intervals down the hall. I settle for glimpses. A huge bed here, a flash of silk sheets there.

Reya leans into one of the rooms to speak to someone I can’t see. What I can see is the bathroom—enormous. A glassed-in shower takes up most of the visible space. You could fit six people in there. Why would you need a shower big enough to fit six people? And then the images appear, one by one, of exactly what you could do with six people in a shower. I’d turn away, but I can’t. It’s too gleaming and attractive and marble tile. Clean. Things here are clean, which doesn’t add up in my brain—I’ve come here to do a filthy thing.

“Not tonight?” Reya’s talking to the hidden girl, the one in the room, some private conversation I barely understand. “I wouldn’t wait if I were you.”

Hope, with a chaser of fear. She sounds empathetic enough, but there’s steel in her voice that I missed earlier. I was too concerned with throwing myself into the lion’s den.

“Shouldn’t we go, before someone sees me like this?”

Reya turns around and finds me edging in close. “Like what?”

“In my underwear.”

She smiles, not unkindly. “What does it matter?”

We keep going down the hall.

What matters is, I’m not cut out for opulence like this. Every step reminds me of it, with the scrape of cheap lace on my skin. We pass by more enormous rooms. More flowers. A shock of red as someone passes by an open door, a spray of perfume in the air.

Expensive.

He’s going to make me into someone this expensive. And in order to become this….

I swallow hard and wrench my eyes away from the doorways. At the end of the hall, we turn a corner and come to another doorway. Two more flights of stairs, and then we come out into the attic.

The ceilings are lower here, and instead of lush carpet, the pads of my feet meet hardwood. Plain walls are the only decoration for the narrow hall. Reya stops three doors down and opens an equally white door set into the wall.

My new room.

It’s a shared room with sloped ceilings and twin beds with sheets the same color as the walls.

“This is you.” She glances back down at her notes, and I wish powerfully that I’d been paying attention to what Zeus said instead of staring at his cruel lips. “You’re to rise with the staff and eat breakfast