He didn't want to go down there.
I could feel it in the way his hand tightened around mine as we stood at the cellar door — that almost imperceptible tension that ran from his fingers up through his forearm, the kind of tension Damian never let anyone see. The kind he'd spent thirty-four years perfecting.
"You don't have to come," he said. Not looking at me.
"Try and stop me."
He exhaled through his nose. Almost a laugh. Not quite.
The key was on his own keyring — not hidden, not taped under a desk. Just quietly existing among a dozen other keys like it was nothing. Like it wasn't the most dangerous thing in the building. He unlocked the door and the cold air came up first, that specific underground chill that had nothing to do with the season, and then the smell — old velvet, metal polish, something almost sacred and deeply buried.
He went first. I followed, one hand on the stone wall, one on my belly, eight months of our daughter shifting gently as I descended.
