Chapter 12

The girls had heard.

“C’mon, who was it? How rich?”

“Handsome or fat?”

“Short or tall?”

“Length of dick?”

“No, no—thickness. Thickness is more important, you know that!”

“Just tell me how long he lasted the first round. That tells a lot about a man.”

“Why are you guys assuming it was sex?!” This one could have been Amber, but they were all talking at the same time, so I had no clue who was saying what.

“Uh, hello! She has a hangover. She looks exhausted. Of course, it was?—”

“Stop talking with your mouth full, Mia!”

“Just let her talk, will you? Was it sex or not?!”

I closed my eyes and pressed my fingers to my temples. We were hanging out at the pool after breakfast, and they didn’t care how much they were shouting, even though they apparently knew I had a hangover.

“It wasn’t,” I finally said, knowing they wouldn’t be leaving me alone if I didn’t spit it out quickly. “We talked, and we had a drink, and then we lay down on the bed and just rested.”

The girls looked at one another for a second.

“Swear it on your mother’s soul or it didn’t happen,” Melahni then said, and I could have fucking laughed. They assumed I cared about my mother’s soul?

“I swear it on my mother’s soul,” I said anyway.

They were so disappointed that they remained silent for a little while, which was a blessing, until…

“Fall.”

I turned to find Assa standing behind my lounger with her hands behind her back, looking at me. Looking right into my goddamn soul.

“Yes?” I whispered with barely any voice.

“Mama Si sent me to give you a message,” Assa said, and there I went again in my head, out the mansion’s gates with the train money in my back pocket.

“Oh.” Don’t bother, I wanted to say, but I had no voice.

It’s okay, I get it. I understand, I wanted to say, but I had no courage.

It was over.

My life here had hardly begun, and it was already over.

Where the hell was I going to go now?

“She’s heard back from the client,” said Assa, and Johnny’s handsome face took over my mind’s eye. “He’s signed a contract with us to become your regular for the following month. Good job.”

The girls screamed. They fucking screamed their guts out and were all around Assa the next second.

“Is it the Premium contract?”

“How many times a week?”

“How many hours a night?”

“What are the specifics?”

I swear, they all talked at the same time. Assa raised her hands in surrender and said, “I don’t know, okay? All I heard was that he wanted exclusivity, that’s it. That’s all I got.” And she basically ran inside the mansion.

I still had no clue what to think, so when I looked across the pool and saw Hannah sitting up on her lounger, her blue eyes on me, my heart skipped a beat. She wasn’t trying to hide how she felt about me at all right now. God, she wanted to fucking murder me, and I could tell by the way she was gripping the edge of the lounger—hard. So hard that it actually cracked.

I paused for a moment.

The loungers were made out of wood underneath the mattresses, and the fucking wood cracked where her hand was. I saw it, heard the sound of it in my mind, even though the girls were already around me, jumping up and down like they were excited. Like they couldn’t see Hannah at all before she stood up, put her sunglasses on, tied her silk robe tightly around her waist, and left.

Left the fucking cracked lounger behind.

Fuck.

The memory of her pushing me against the wall that night and grabbing my wrists in her hands came over me. Her grip had been strong. Unusually strong. Impossiblystrong. A woman with a frame like hers shouldn’t have been able to crack a piece of thick wood so easily like that. Just…impossible.

A million questions left the girls mouths within the minute. I had no idea how to answer them, and eventually they let me go back to my room. I locked myself in the bathroom and threw up every bite of the breakfast I’d eaten, until all my strength was spent.

Then I lay down on the cold tiles, exhausted.

Within two days,everything changed.

The girls, the maids, the guards—everyone looked at me differently, like I was special all of a sudden, and I hated it. It’s why I spent most of my time in my room, until Amber cornered me after dinner on the third night.

“How about we go and check this place out, huh? Just the two of us. I can show you around. There are incredible places to hide in around here, not just your room.”

Butterflies in my stomach. I actually loved the sound of that. “Okay,” I said before I could give myself the chance to change my mind.

Amber winked. “Just don’t tell the others,” she whispered.

We left the dining room separately, but when we met again on the second floor, she laced her arm to mine and told me, “Are you ready to explore the Paradise?”

I smiled. “I think so.”

“Good. Let’s start with the fountain.”

She knew exactly where she was going as we walked to the other side of the floor, a part of the mansion I hadn’t been to yet. She said nothing else until we reached our destination, and I was stuck in my head with the same questions—where was Johnny now? Why had he signed that contract? What were the specifics? Where was I going to get the courage to actually ask someone about them? Why-why-why?!

“There it is!”

I blinked and the view in front of me had changed. We were no longer walking the hallways. We’d arrived.

The water was glowing—that’s the first thing I noticed the moment Amber pushed those doors open. The water was glowing a gorgeous pinky purple, and it was spilling from the tips of fishtails carved out of white stone. It was in the middle of what looked like a balcony, and the open sky over us came alive with a million stars that I could have sworn were reflecting the same purple color as they winked at us. The railings were made out of the same white stone, and there were benches around the large round fountain, and pink roses all around it, sprouting from missing tiles on the floor here and there, while the lanterns on the wall by the door burned low.

The smell of the roses, the sound of the water spilling, the open sky over us and those gorgeous stars, not to mention the view of the ocean that looked pitch black from here—it all took my breath away and wiped my mind clean instantly. One word came to mind—magic. This was what magic felt like.

“Like it?” Amber said as she went closer to the fountain. “We throw parties here in summer. Private parties. Come, look at the water. It’s something special.”

I somehow got my body moving, and I followed her closer to the fountain, only to pause in surprise all over again. What I’d thought were statues of fish were actually mermaids.

Three mermaids were hanging onto a rock, their hands reaching for the open sky, their eyes upward, and the water was coming out the tips of their fins.

“Wow. That’s…that’s…” It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. The statues were alive, so perfectly made, every edge and every curve, every line exactly right.

“Wait till you see the other side,” Amber said as she walked backward all around the fountain, and I followed, clueless—until I saw the other side of the statue. Until I saw the other half of the mermaids.

I stopped in my tracks. “What the hell?!”

Amber laughed her heart out.

While the left half of the mermaids was perfectly done, depicting them as gorgeous females with long hair and full lips and round cheeks, the right side of them was a skeleton. The eyes were mere sockets, and the jaws, the bones of their hands, their ribcages—I saw all of it. The statue was so well done that they looked like real bones.

“Osera, Minel, and Gargannea,” Amber whispered, making goose bumps rise all over my skin. “The three siren sisters. Look.” She pointed at the engraving on the stone below the rock. The running water and the pink color of it made it almost impossible to read the letters, but it was easy when Amber had already said the names.

“Legend has it that, in a faraway realm where sirens swam the oceans and people turned into wolves and dragons reigned the sky, a dark and terrible curse was put upon the land, and these three siren sisters died in the fight to save the world,” Amber said.

“What was it?” I whispered, leaning closer to touch the fingertips of the mermaid closest to the ground, the only one I could reach. “What was the dark and terrible curse?”

“How should I know, silly? It’s just a story.” She sat down on the edge of the fountain, dipping her hand in the water. “Come on, sit. Feel it. It’s so warm.”

I automatically did, and I expected it to feel like water. It didn’t. It felt like really thin fabric against my skin instead.

“How are they doing this? How is this purple?” The glow was so beautiful I couldn’t look away, didn’t want to even blink for fear I’d miss a single second.

“It’s a special chemical concoction from what I heard. It’s in the water so it makes it glow purple, but it has to be at the exact right temperature. That’s why it’s warm,” Amber explained, just as mesmerized as me.

“It’s…it’s…” I didn’t have the word for it yet so I just shook my head.

“Magical,” Amber finished, and she nailed it. “Just like the rest of the Paradise. Come on, there’s more to see.”

A librarywith floating shelves Amber swore were being held by ropes, even though we couldn’t see them.

A room made out of white stone designed with no edges whatsoever, just smooth curves on the walls and the ceiling and the floor, with pools full of turquoise water inside.

An aquarium that was indeed bigger than my bedroom with all kinds of fish in it that scared me as much as it made me want to be swimming with them.

But the last room Amber showed me blew me away for real.

The ceiling was like a dome, with openings in the shape of triangles all over, huge openings that enabled us to see the sky perfectly fine. The floor was made out of wood cut into triangles as well, some steps lower and some steps higher, with thick white candles all over the place, burning, though the wax refused to melt. Burning, though nobody was there.

The smell in the air was perfectly balanced, the pressure, the heat, the feel of it just right. I stepped inside with a smile on my face, no longer afraid. There were no floating shelves and no fish here, just the sky that I could see through the openings on the ceiling. The uneven floor was masterfully done, and there was a single velvet couch in the middle of the room shaped like a triangle.

For a moment, the world fell away completely and all I saw was myself sitting on that couch with a book in my hands, surrounded by candles, reading under the starlight, detached from everything and everyone.

“Come closer,” Amber said, and her voice echoed in the high ceiling. She’d gone farther away and was descending stairs I didn’t realize were even there. They started in the middle of the room and went lower for possibly more than a floor, and the wall at the bottom of them was made out of glass, which showed a goddamn jungle beyond.

A jungle that ended with the ocean right there.

A jungle that didn’t seem to be high up a cliff like the mansion was supposed to be.

“But…but we’re on the third floor,” I said, looking up at the ceiling again, at the sky beyond. “How are we so low? How did we get off the cliff?!” There was no way we could be so close to the ocean. No way.

“We didn’t, silly,” Amber said as she moved farther down the uneven stairs. “Come see this. It looks so scary out there.”

“But the ocean is right there.” I could see it now as I stood on the top stair. I could see it beyond those trees just fine.

“It’s not. It’s just dark, so it looks that way,” Amber insisted. “Come on, Fall!”

Fuck.

A little light from the outside reached me the farther down the stairs I went. Amber was right, it was just dark. The ocean was down the cliff, far below the mansion. It wasn’t beyond this forest—of course it wasn’t. It was just the night and the twinkling stars and my excitement that was making me see things, that’s all.

But the forest on the other side of the glass was indeed scary as hell.

“Look. There are animals out there. You can see them moving if you stand really still for long enough,” Amber said, pressing her hands on the glass and blowing her breath on it before she drew a heart and kissed the middle, leaving her pink lipstick on the surface.

“Wow,” I said, shaking my head. “I didn’t know there were so many trees on the property.” Just how big was this place? Because I’d seen a lot of the outside, and most of the yard was filled with pools, dining spaces, bars, and party areas, and I’d never seen more than palms lining a space or a bunch of much, much smaller trees separating pool areas. Nothing even remotely close to what I was seeing here right now.

“It’s a big mansion,” Amber said, stepping back to sit on one of the uneven stairs. She must have been here a lot of times before because she walked backward and sat down without even looking where she was going. I joined her, still a bit shaky.

“Have you ever been out there?” I asked.

“Nope. No idea how to even find this place from outside this room, to be honest. There are no doors that lead out,” she said. “Still, there’s something about it, right? It’s dark and scary, but sometimes there are butterflies sort of floating in the dark, and then there’s fireflies, too. In pinks and purples and greens. I swear I’ve seen them,” she said, looking at me like she expected me to call her a liar any second. “I’m not crazy or anything,” she then added.

“Oh, I believe you,” I said, laughing—and I really did. “This place. This whole place…” The air itself in the Paradise was different. I sighed. “There’s something about it.”

“Of course, there is,” Amber said. “Why do you think they all come back for more? Why do you think people pay so much money to come here? They can’t get enough.” She shook her head but she was smiling. “Why do you think the idea of leaving the Paradise makes you sick to your stomach?”

As if to prove her point, my stomach twisted and turned uncomfortably. “Exactly,” Amber said.

“I was actually—” thinking about that, I was going to say, but then something moved behind us, and I all but passed out. We both turned to the top of the stairs to see a maid standing there, so silent until she cleared her throat that we hadn’t heard a single thing.

“Holy shit, you almost gave me a heart attack,” I muttered, holding onto my chest as if to stop my heart from flying out.

“I’m very sorry to bother you, but Miss Amber, your presence is required in the Medusa,” the maid said, and her voice seemed to be carried down the stairs by the air differently. Slower. Almost in waves.

Yeah, the Paradise could fuck with your mind even better than I ever thought possible.

“Oh. That’s a surprise,” Amber said, jumping to her feet, perfectly composed already. “I’ll be right there.”

The maid was already leaving the room, and Amber was already climbing up the stairs, but I found I couldn’t even get up. I didn’t want to.

“Coming?” she called.

I looked at the forest beyond the glass. “Actually, I think I’m gonna stay here a bit longer. I’ll find my way back.”

Amber shrugged. “Suit yourself. See you in the morning.”

“Thank you, Amber. Have fun.”

She laughed. “Oh, I will.”

Her footsteps kept me company until she was at the door and out.

Then I was all alone.