The streets wore their Sunday best.

Chloe moved like a rumour through Old Town – eyes down, hood low, breath shallow. The Vltava whispered behind her, the clink of tram lines muffled beneath damp cobblestones. Morning dew still clung to flowerboxes and propaganda posters. A milk vendor sang a hymn too sweet, too bright.

Everyone smiled. No one looked up.

She slipped through alleys and narrow turns until the cathedral loomed ahead – San Vitus, black-spired and hallowed by centuries. It stood as it always had. But something behind it had changed.

She found the hatch buried in ivy.

Half-concealed by a crumbling statue of Saint Ludmila, the metal circle was fused to the old stone wall like a tumour – bronze-rusted and reinforced with six separate latches. Not modern. Not entirely ancient either. Something in between. Along the edge, faint scripture curled like a blessing that no longer meant safety.

The lock was active.

Not electronic. Not just mechanical. It throbbed faintly – a shimmer of soul-suppressant script etched into the seams. Arcane glyphs, dulled over time but still pulsing faintly with denial.

Chloe didn't bother with it.

She stepped forward, inhaled once – slow and shallow – and passed through. Her body bent around the world like smoke through a mesh. The metal hatch swallowed her shape, held her for a heartbeat, then let her go with a whisper of displaced air.

No effort. No strain. Just silence.

The tunnel beyond welcomed her like a throat.

She walked without footsteps. Every few metres, steel braces crossed the corridor – once load-bearing, now more symbolic than functional. She phased through them mid-stride, without breaking pace. Her breath barely shifted. Her shadow didn't follow.

Stone walls flickered past. She didn't touch them. She didn't need to.

Time didn't feel slower here. Just… thinner. Like she moved outside its edges.

But then—

She stopped.

A door loomed ahead – thick, riveted, with an ancient cross carved into the centre. Her hand hovered beside it, not touching, but watching.

The hinges faced the wrong direction.

She turned.

The previous door. Same design. Same error.

These doors didn't open outward.

The latches weren't built to repel invaders. They were made to hold the inside… inside.

Her lips barely moved. "This isn't a barrier. It's a cage."

She looked ahead again. The dark curved downward – deeper into the cathedral's buried spine.

And she followed it.

…………………

The air changed as she moved deeper.

What began as a damp access shaft widened into a corridor of stone ribs and reinforced veins. Catacomb arches loomed overhead – relics of forgotten priests and ossuary builders – but bolted over them now were modern clamps, steel reinforcement brackets, soul-dampening mesh. The old church had been swallowed by something newer. Hungrier.

Every few metres, another checkpoint.

No lights. Just thick vault doors, keypads stained with dust, retinal scanners blinking with dead power. Chloe didn't stop. She passed through each barrier as if stepping between raindrops, her form folding into mist and reforming without a sound.

Her feet never touched the handles. She never once tried to open a door.

It wasn't necessary.

They'd trusted the locks.

That was the worst part. There were no cameras. No guards. Just faith in the technology. Faith that once someone was inside… they wouldn't be leaving again.

She drifted down a left passage.

The corridor narrowed. Too tight for two to walk abreast. Pipes lined the ceiling, corroded and humming faintly with heat. A door stood slightly ajar ahead, but she paused.

Something scratched at the edge of her senses. Faint. Dry.

She turned.

The wall beside her was stone, partially sealed with a concrete overlay. But just beneath that surface – near the corner where light barely reached – were lines.

Not cracks.

Marks.

She crouched, leaned close. Phased her fingers partway through the top layer.

Then she saw them.

Scratch marks. Hundreds.

Tiny arcs, shallow and chaotic – like something had scraped, again and again, from inside a pocket of stone. Fingernails, mostly. One or two had chipped clean off, now embedded like insects caught in amber. She ghosted her head partially into the wall, then drew back sharply.

Inside that thin space was a hollow. Just enough for one person to crouch. Or be shoved.

And on the back wall, gouged again and again in erratic Czech:

Podívej. Podívej. Podívej. Look. Look. Look.

Some words carved with fingernails. Some smeared with what might have once been blood.

She stood. Quiet.

Didn't speak.

And walked on.

…………………

The corridor curved unnaturally.

It wasn't just the geometry – circular, coiling like a snake eating its own tail – but the atmosphere. Stale air. Too warm. The walls were concrete wrapped in aged velvet, the kind that soaked up breath and sound. Like the place didn't want to be heard.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Chloe stepped lightly, her boots not quite touching the floor. She drifted forward, counting the doors. Ten of them, evenly spaced along the outer ring. Narrow. Steel-plated. Each without a handle. Each with a thin black slit at chest height.

She phased through the first.

The smell hit her like a slap.

Dry rot. Old bleach. Semen. And beneath it all – chokingly sweet perfume, the kind that never truly faded. The kind poured on to hide something worse.

The chamber was small. Barely more than a closet. Just enough space for a bedframe – now stripped bare – and the indentation of an old mattress long since removed. But the marks remained. Stains across the walls. Handprints smeared on the viewing glass.

Some were brown with age. Some darker, drier. One was unmistakably bloody – five fingers splayed wide in a frozen act of desperation or ecstasy. Chloe couldn't tell which.

She turned toward the slit in the wall.

It was one-way glass. The chamber beyond was vast and low-lit, its far walls lost in shadow. But even through the tint, she could see the outlines – three beds, evenly spaced in a triangle. Chains dangling like ornaments from metal posts. Torn sheets half-draped across each mattress.

And mirrors.

Mirrors on the ceiling. Mirrors on the walls. Mirrors behind the beds, angled just so.

Chloe's skin crawled.

She phased out. Slipped into the next chamber.

Worse.

A camera rig bolted to the ceiling. Movement-tracking sensors half-pried from their mounts. Cracked leather restraints dangling from the corners of the bedframe, still buckled. Someone had scratched something into the glass: "nevím proč." I don't know why.

She kept going.

Another room. Torn garters on the floor. A pile of broken rosaries in the corner. The crucifix bent.

Another.

A rubber hose. Blood-spattered sheets shoved behind a panel. The words "scream louder" carved with something small into the wall.

By the sixth chamber, her hands were shaking. She didn't stop.

She ghosted into the final booth and froze.

This one was different.

The mirrors here were angled outward – not just to view, but to refract. To surround. A sensory distortion. A place where image would consume identity. Where shame had been architected.

Chloe's throat tightened. Her gaze locked on the bed beyond the glass.

The sheets had been burned. Not cut. Not torn.

Scorched.

Ash clung to the iron frame. Not just from fire. From heat – unnatural and precise.

She stepped back. Pressed herself into the cold wall. Not for stealth. For grounding.

This wasn't just a dungeon.

It was a chapel.

Not for sex.

For violation.

For ritual.

She whispered aloud – to no one. Just to taste the words. Just to confirm it was real.

"They turned it into a ritual."

And then she phased – out, away, anywhere but here – before her stomach turned.

…………………

Chloe phased in without a sound.

No door. No step. Just the gentle pressure of her atoms separating, passing through centuries of stone – then reforming in a space that didn't want to be seen.

The air here was colder. Not physically – no – it felt colder in her mind, like a soul exhaling its last breath into a vault that remembered everything it had consumed.

The room was circular. Perfectly so. That was the first wrong thing.

Too clean in design, too intentional. The geometry here wasn't for utility. It was symbolic. A sanctum for something vile.

Her eyes scanned the walls – mirrors. Hundreds. Set into the upper curve of the chamber, fused into the stone like malignant growths. The ceiling was one vast pane of angled glass. No matter where you stood, no matter how you turned – you could be seen.

You would see yourself.

Every act reflected. Repeated. Multiplied.

She stepped forward.

The floor was smooth marble, veined with pale gold. But the pattern was smeared – dragged – coated in dried fluids that cracked under her boots. Not just blood. Sweat. Oil. Semen. Things that had no business being here, all crusted into the crevices between tiles.

In the centre, the three beds waited.

They weren't hospital beds. Not standard cots.

They were ritual beds – high-framed, carved from blackwood, once elegant. Now desecrated. Torn sheets lay in knots across each one. Stained. Shredded. Chloe didn't want to guess at the shapes burned into the fabric.

Iron shackles dangled from each post, their leather linings worn to threads. Bite guards – cracked in half – littered the floor like broken teeth.

One still had a tongue ring embedded in it.

Her stomach flipped.

She stepped closer, drawn not by curiosity, but a compulsion. Something about this room demanded to be witnessed.

The air thickened. Pressure settled on her skin – not like heat, but like memory. Like the atmosphere itself remembered what had happened here and didn't want her to forget.

On the far end, two golden statues stood.

Identical. Polished. Grinning.

King Tomas, cast in shining mockery. One hand outstretched in welcome. The other gripping the hilt of a sword.

The blade was etched with scripture.

The outstretched hand – smeared. Dried blood pooled in the creases of the golden palm. Someone had tried to hold it. Or fight it.

Neither had worked.

Chloe swallowed hard and moved toward the far wall. Her palm met the stone. Cool. Smooth.

Then—

Her soul shivered.

Not from cold. From echo.

She inhaled – sharp and wrong. It wasn't just pain that lingered here.

It was identity.

Shredded. Scattered. Like broken prayers caught in stone.

There had been people here. Whole people. Names. Histories. Fears. Some of them had hope when they entered this room. She could feel the residue of it – not warm, but clinging. The way old blood never quite leaves the fibres.

Now she can feel only fragments. This was Chloe's curse. Her edge.

She didn't read minds. She wasn't psychic like Liz – couldn't pry open thoughts or tear truths from silence. But she saw ghosts of what had happened. Echoes in walls. Soul-traces burned into rooms like fingerprints left in fog.

She'd learned to use it. Refined it.

In Kyoto, it had kept her one step ahead of the yokai patrols. In Munich, it let her track a Contractor by the smell of old terror trapped in lift cables. Here, in Prague, it bled through the seams of every building like rot.

That's what made her a ghost herself. Not just the phasing. But this. Knowing where pain had happened. And never being able to unsee it.

Her heartbeat slowed – not from fear, but something sicker. A reverence she didn't want.

The room was still. Dead. But it expected her. Like it was waiting for someone to resume the liturgy.

She stepped back, fingers brushing the wall. Her mind buzzed. Not adrenaline – something black.

The mirrors began to shimmer. Not with her reflection. With others.

A face bent backward, screaming – mouth open wider than it should go.

Hands bound. Legs kicking. No sound, just the gesture of agony.

Another face, dulled and vacant, body limp beneath a camera rig. Staring into a mirror they couldn't look away from, because they were told not to. Because they were told it was love.

And another – smiling. Confused. Reaching for the shackles like they meant salvation.

The worst part?

Some of them had volunteered.

Not knowing. Not fully. Just wanting something. Blessing. Power. To be seen.

They were seen. And then ruined.

Chloe clenched her fists. Her breath trembled.

This wasn't sacrifice. It was erasure.

"They brought people here," Chloe whispered. Her throat was raw. "Not to kill them."

Her voice cracked.

"To ruin them."

She stood there a moment longer – letting the silence smother her. Then she phased out. Not quickly. Not desperately.

But carefully.

As if stepping out of a church.

…………………

Chloe didn't speak on the way back.

Not to the guards she slipped past, not to the child who smiled too wide at the tram stop, not even to the drunk man curled in the alley, whispering prayers to King Tomas like he was God and father and warden all at once.

She moved like a shadow cast in reverse. No weight. No noise. Just purpose.

The Aria Hotel loomed ahead, its glass whispering back her reflection – a smear of motion, a woman-shaped absence. She entered through the service stairwell, climbed the three flights without a sound, and slipped into her room without so much as a door creak.

Then straight to the bathroom.

No pause. No breath.

The taps screamed metal. She twisted the dial to red – full heat – and stepped under it still clothed. Water slammed her back, too hot, blistering.

She stripped in pieces. Shirt. Gloves. Pants. Skin next, if she could have.

Not enough.

The blood wasn't hers. Neither was the filth. But it clung like a film.

She scrubbed. Palms against shoulder. Elbow. Jawline. Again and again. Steam coated the mirror. Her fingernails left streaks on her own thighs. She didn't cry. But when she finally stopped, the towel came away smeared with red – from her own skin, scrubbed raw.

Still not enough.

She dressed in silence. Loose black. No weapons. Just her.

Then walked down the hall to Ying's war room and closed the door behind her.

The map was still glowing. Soulfields, patrol grids, suppression zones blinking like dying stars. Chloe didn't sit. She just spoke.

Straight.

Clear.

Every detail.

She told Ying about the tunnel layout. The reversed locks. The chambers. The smell. The stains. The mirrors. The statues.

She told her about the beds.

About the way the room remembered.

Ying didn't interrupt. She stood by the display, palms flat against the table, not moving. Only when Chloe stopped did her fingers curl slightly – knuckles white.

"We're not telling the others," Ying said finally. Her voice was level, but the air around her buzzed faintly with restrained psychic static.

Chloe raised an eyebrow. Not sarcastic. Just tired.

Ying met her gaze. "We need proof. Names. Context. We still don't know what we're dealing with. Not really."

Chloe stared at her for a long moment. Then nodded, slow.

"Whatever this is," she said, "he's not a king. He's a pervert. And his god is depravity."

Ying didn't reply.

Outside, muffled through the blackout curtains, the bells of San Vitus rang for noon mass.

Chloe flinched. Just once.

And then went to sharpen her blade.

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