Chapter 72: The Council

Steve had expected something grander. A mansion, maybe. A compound behind iron gates. Not a beige two-story in a subdivision where every lawn was cut to the same height and every mailbox matched. The moment they stepped through the front door, the illusion of normalcy remained.

The living room to their left was aggressively ordinary. A gray sectional couch, a coffee table with a few magazines fanned across it, a television mounted above an electric fireplace. It looked staged, like a showroom no one actually lived in. The air smelled faintly of lemon cleaner and new carpet.

The copper-haired woman didn’t pause. She led them through a short hallway to a door Steve might have mistaken for a pantry. Behind it was a narrow stairwell, unfinished, the wooden steps creaking under their weight. At the bottom, another door. This one was metal, industrial, with a keypad that beeped softly as she entered a code.

It opened to reveal an elevator.

Steve glanced at Heather. She was already walking forward, her posture regal, her heels clicking against the concrete floor. He stayed silent, falling in step behind her. The hostess turned, gave them a tight, unreadable smile, and said, “Good luck.”

The elevator doors slid shut.

Steve looked around the small, brushed-steel cabin. No buttons. No floor indicator. Only a camera mounted in the corner, its small red light blinking like a patient heartbeat. He felt the floor drop slightly, the faint hum of machinery vibrating through the soles of his shoes.

They were going down.

“This is all very ... theatrical,” he said quietly.

Heather’s lips twitched. She stared straight ahead, her green eyes fixed on the seam of the elevator doors. “The O’Connor council maintains safehouses like this all over the world. We never meet in the same location twice in a row. Since the full council only convenes every six months, it isn’t much of an inconvenience.” Her voice echoed softly in the confined space.

Steve remained mute. The elevator continued its smooth descent, longer than he’d expected. The house above had looked so unremarkable. No one driving by would ever guess what lay beneath it.

The elevator stopped with a gentle bump. The doors slid open.

A corridor stretched before them, long and wide, with polished concrete floors and soft, indirect lighting that glowed from recessed fixtures along the ceiling. The walls were a warm gray, unadorned except for a few abstract paintings that looked expensive but deliberately inoffensive.

Two guards stood on either side of the elevator. Both dressed in tailored black suits with earpieces and hands clasped in front of them. Their eyes tracked Steve with the same cool precision Luisa’s operatives had.

Heather stepped out first. Steve followed, his shoes making soft sounds against the floor. The guards didn’t move. They didn’t speak.

They passed several closed doors, each one seamless and unmarked, before the corridor opened into a small antechamber. Steve stopped dead.

The double doors before them were a masterpiece of carved mahogany, the kind of craftsmanship that belonged in a museum. But it wasn’t the woodwork that held him captive. It was the scene rendered in painstaking, almost lifelike detail across both panels.

A young man—barely out of his teens, his body lean and taut—was depicted in the throes of ecstasy, his head thrown back, mouth open in a silent cry. Beneath him, an older woman, her hair silver-streaked and her body full and mature, arched upward, her legs wrapped around his waist. The artist had captured everything—the sheen of sweat on their skin, the strain of muscle, the raw, animal intensity of their coupling. It was explicit. Unapologetic. Beautiful, in a way that made Steve’s stomach tighten.

In the lower right corner, etched in elegant script, was a single word: Oedipus.

The doors swung open before either of them could reach for the handles.

A man stood in the threshold, and Steve’s first thought was that he was tall. Taller than Steve, who cleared six feet easily. The man wore a butler’s uniform—crisp black tailcoat, silver waistcoat, a perfectly knotted cravat—but it was the gloves that caught Steve’s attention. White, immaculate, stretched tight over long-fingered hands.

“Please follow me,” the man said. His voice was smooth, devoid of inflection. He turned on his heel and began walking without waiting for a response.