THE TEMPLE UNDER HER SKIN
THE TEMPLE UNDER HER SKIN
Amara Reyes went to Ilharo for a photograph and came back with a god's handprint burned into her hip.
The island guide said the temple was closed. Her friends heard invitation. Amara heard the old family warning: never enter a sacred place carrying a secret you were unwilling to lose.
Rain fell through the jungle like thrown beads. Six adults in expensive clothes climbed the black stairs while their phones searched for a signal and found only the same message, repeating in every language:
TURN BACK BEFORE YOU ARE SEEN.
“Content,” Mara said, raising her camera.
“Evidence,” Amara corrected.
“Same thing with better lighting.”
At the top, the temple waited beneath strangler vines. Its gold doors were carved with mouths. The guide refused to cross the salt line.
Amara stepped over it.
The air changed. Her wet dress clung to her skin. Somewhere inside the temple, water moved against stone. She smelled jasmine, hot metal, and the unmistakable sweetness of a room prepared for a guest.
A man stood before the altar.
He was bare-chested, dark-haired, and beautiful in the precise way statues became beautiful after people had bled for them. Gold chains crossed his throat. A black tattoo curled from his ribs to his wrist like a living serpent.
“Dante,” he said.
“You’re the owner?”
“I am the reason the island has an owner.”
The answer should have sent her back into the rain. Instead she looked at the altar behind him. On it sat a gold mask with her mother's initials scratched into the underside.
Amara reached for it.
Dante caught her wrist.
His thumb pressed the pulse below her palm, and every candle in the temple leaned toward them.
“Don’t touch what remembers you,” he said.
“Then tell it to forget.”
His eyes lowered to her mouth. “It has waited twenty-seven years.”
A hot pulse moved through her body. The temple wall breathed. Amara snatched her hand back, but the mark was already there: a golden crescent on her skin, shaped like a bite.
Dante went still.
“Who gave you that?” he asked.
“Apparently your décor.”
“Your mother.”
The rain hammered the roof.
Amara’s mother had vanished when Amara was six, leaving one suitcase, three unpaid bills, and a warning never to return to Ilharo. She had not left a name for the man who appeared in Amara’s dreams whenever the moon turned red.
“Where is she?” Amara demanded.
Dante looked at the gold mask. “She is the last woman who ever escaped me.”
Something behind the altar laughed.
The temple doors slammed shut. The guide screamed outside. Amara felt Dante's body close around hers, heat and restraint, his mouth near her ear but not touching.
“If I tell you to run,” he whispered, “you run.”
“Is that an order?”
“No. It is the only prayer I remember.”
The mask cracked.
A woman's voice came through the gold.
“Amara, darling,” it said. “Your father is awake.”
Dante's face emptied of color.
Then the floor opened beneath them.
