Twice Tempted: Between Two Alphas (Mia and Cameron) novel Chapter 85

Chapter Eighty-Five

I take the steps down. At the darkest point, the faintest crack shows from beneath the door in the kitchen. It’s like a shard of light. Below, as I keep descending, it gradually lightens. The flicker of torches casts a golden orange glow against the stone walls. I smell the torches first.

At the bottom of the tunnel is a giant open room. It’s domed and stalactites and stalagmites dot the ceilings and floor. The room is awash with a minerally scent. It isn’t pungent like sulfur or briny like the ocean, although there is a touch of each. It’s something older. I don’t know that I’ve ever encountered this scent before.

Torches ring the walls and at least a dozen ‘sisters’ are spaced around a bubbling pool. The water has rings of different colors, like you might see in a hot spring.

Valaria smiles.

Something in her expression makes me leery.

I want to cross my arms but instead I stand still.

“Well,” she says bemusedly, “in you go. What are you waiting for?”

The water is murky in the middle. There are no stairs or ladder. I don’t know how deep this pool goes or what else might be living or lurking in it.

And it’s bubbling. I’m not real keen on being boiled alive.

I hike up my white gown and dip a toe into the pool.

It’s hot, but not uncomfortably.

I step one foot in–

“Lose the gown,” she says.

Of course.

I peel it over my head and one of the sisters accepts it. She drapes it over her arm.

The women watch me. I’m not terribly self-conscious about my body, but I can’t say I’m comfortable with their attention either. There is something in the way they study me that makes tendrils of foreboding dance along my skin.

I move quicker, thinking it’s better to just get this over with.

Once I step off the ledge, I don’t feel a ‘bottom’. I float. I actually feel extra buoyant. It must be whatever salts or minerals are in this water.

“Get comfortable,” she tells me.

The pool is probably thirty feet across. Around the room, I see tunnels, presumably leading upward into different homes or parts of the island. There are no other markings, none that I can see at least. With only torchlight and my wolf eyes to go by, I can make out shapes and depth and movement, but I’m not entirely sure what else I should be looking for.

If this is a sacred space–and I sense that it is–it seems like there should be more elaborate markings.

One by one, the women come and extinguish their torches in the pool before turning and walking back out one of the many tunnels. As the room gets darker, I feel my anxiousness ratcheting up.

“How long will I be here?” I ask.

Valaria shrugs. “As long as it takes.”

She extinguishes her torch and I count the sounds of her footsteps as they retreat.

After a time, the darkness is absolute.

There is no light. Not from above or below.