Chapter 37 · The Name Beneath the Mask

The bell finished ringing, but the sound did not fade.

It sank.

The last note dropped through the theater floor and kept descending, deeper than stone, deeper than the buried foundations of Saint Veyre. Maeve felt it in her teeth. In the wound along her ribs. In the hand she had clamped around Eli’s wrist to keep him from sliding off the old author’s table.

Below them, something opened.

The stage split down the middle with a groan of tortured timber. Black velvet peeled away from the floor like skin, revealing a stairwell that had not been there a heartbeat earlier. Pale lights flickered along its edges, each one shaped like a tiny, watching eye.

Orla backed away, one hand pressed against the blood soaking through her coat. “That isn’t a stage.”

“No,” said the Curator from the balcony above. His voice drifted down through the dust, smooth and pleased. “It is where the stage remembers what it was made to do.”

Eli’s fingers tightened around Maeve’s.

His palm was cold. Too cold.

The black ink he had written across the final page had crawled beneath his skin, branching up his wrist like veins filled with smoke.