Merai led Lanan and Mary to the room where the other children waited. Lanan hadn't left the basement since they'd been locked away, and she expected to be taken to the bedroom. When she saw where they actually were, she froze.
Horror crawled up her spine like ice water.
"My good children," Merai purred, her voice honeyed. "You behaved so obediently, just as I asked."
The children huddled together in the far corner, cowering like rabbits cornered by a wolf. The atmosphere pressed down on Lanan's chest. Unlike the basement—where despite the dampness and darkness, life still felt possible—this place instilled something primal. Something ancient.
The walls weren't decorated with trinkets. Sharp blades gleamed in the dim light: knives, hooks, tools whose purposes she couldn't name and didn't want to imagine. A strange chair stood in the center, leather straps dangling from its arms. The air hung thick with a musty, metallic smell, as if iron had been rusting—and bleeding—here for years.
Lanan's stomach lurched. She swallowed hard against the bile rising in her throat.
"Yulma..." she whispered.
The worst sight was Yulma himself—the playful, restless Yulma—bound and slumped against the wall, exhaustion carved into his features. A cloth gag stretched across his mouth. Fortunately, other than the ropes cutting into his wrists, there were no visible injuries.
Merai leaned close to Lanan's ear, her breath warm and sickly sweet.
"Yulma is being punished for running away," she hissed, "and for failing to watch over his younger siblings."
She shoved Lanan and Mary into the room. Mary stumbled, catching herself against Lanan's arm.
"If you misbehave," Merai continued, that false tenderness still coating her words like poison in honey, "the same fate awaits you."
Despite the threat, her voice held the same lilt she used when singing lullabies at night. The disconnect was unbearable. Mary couldn't take it any longer—she burst into tears, her small body shaking with sobs.
"My dear children." Merai smiled, and the expression never reached her eyes. "You know how much I love you all, don't you? I need to fetch something. In the meantime, wait here. Sit quietly, like little mice, as if you weren't even here." Her gaze swept across each child, imprinting her command into their minds. "Understood?"
No one answered. No one dared.
The door slammed shut. The lock clicked with terrible finality.
Lanan waited, counting heartbeats, until Merai's footsteps faded into silence. Then she rushed to the door and tried the handle. It rattled uselessly in her grip.
_Locked. Of course it's locked._
Mary ran to Yulma, tears streaming down her cheeks.
"Yu-Yulma, what should we do?" she sobbed.
One of the younger orphans—a boy no older than six, his face streaked with tears and snot—shushed her frantically, shaking his head. Mary was the eldest girl present. She had to set an example. Understanding this, she nodded, clenched her teeth until her jaw ached, and forced herself silent.
Meanwhile, Lanan had pulled an enormous pair of pliers from the wall—they looked like giant scissors, their edges crusted with something dark she refused to examine. Setting aside her revulsion, she cut through the ropes binding Yulma's wrists. When she pulled away his gag, she recoiled.
Yulma gasped for air, coughing violently, his chest heaving.
"Because of me..." Lanan's voice cracked. "It must have hurt terribly. Forgive me, Yulma..."
"Ha..." He managed a weak, croaking laugh. "It's not like *you* tied me up. What's there to apologize for?"
Merai had tried to convince them that Yulma was being punished for everyone's misdeeds—a collective guilt meant to breed obedience. But Yulma had never believed in fairy tales.
"Are you hurt?" Lanan asked, helping him sit upright.
"No." He rubbed his raw wrists, wincing. "She just tied me up. Said it was punishment."
The other children immediately surrounded him, peppering him with whispered questions and offers of sympathy. Instead of accepting their concern, Yulma waved them off, muttering that they were making too much noise.
"What if she comes back and sees you untied?" one of the children whispered, eyes wide with terror. "We'll be punished even worse."
"Everything will be fine," Lanan said firmly.
She explained what she'd heard: Troy had returned to the orphanage, and he wasn't alone. Merai had been visibly agitated—almost frantic.
"She went upstairs. Maybe... maybe Troy will save us."
"*Troy?*" Yulma's voice dripped with bitter skepticism. "Don't make me laugh. What if he comes back empty-handed and Merai finds us like this?"
"Then I'll handle it," Lanan snapped.
Something in her tone made Yulma pause. He studied her face—the hard set of her jaw, the way her knuckles whitened around the pliers. He understood. If Merai returned, Lanan was prepared to use the weapons on these walls.
_Is she insane? How can she just attack someone like that?_ Even if Merai had betrayed their trust, she had still been like a mother to them for years. She had fed them, clothed them, sung them to sleep.
Lanan had always been closest to Merai. Yulma had no doubt that even if she managed to strike, her conscience would plague her for the rest of her life.
Irritated, he asked, "And where exactly are you going to take all these children afterward? To another orphanage? To Daisy's sister?"
"Do you have a better plan?" Lanan's eyes blazed. "Are we supposed to sit here and wait for something terrible to happen? Yulma, you're smart—you understand. These tools..." She gestured at the walls. "They've been *used*. They're not just decorations."
Both of them had suspected they were being sold. After their confinement in the basement, they'd continued to be fed. No one had beaten them.
But this room... This room suggested that punishment was still very much possible. And perhaps those children who had supposedly been "adopted" had actually...
Lanan didn't finish the thought aloud. She didn't need to.
"And then there's Troy," she added quietly.
Yulma couldn't understand her faith in him. His fingers traced the raised scar on his forearm—a permanent reminder of what Troy had done. Because of that scar, his adoption had fallen through. Because of Troy, Yulma had remained trapped in this orphanage.
And now she proposed relying on the same person who constantly insisted this shelter was a "hole" that deserved to burn to the ground?
But then a thought struck him, sudden and sharp: _What if Troy was doing this on purpose?_
His return to an empty shelter. Bringing others with him. Maybe all his destructive antics had been part of some larger plan? A way to force the truth into the open?
_Too good to be true._
"Okay... fine." Yulma exhaled heavily. "Have it your way. There's really no point in staying here."
There was no other choice anyway. Once Yulma agreed, the preparations moved quickly. He instructed the younger children to hide in the corner, their backs to the room.
"Whatever happens, don't turn around. Even if you hear noise. *Especially* if you hear noise."
_No need to drag children into this._
"Yulma," Lanan whispered, pressing herself against the wall beside the door, the heavy pliers clutched in her hands. "I hear footsteps. She's coming back."
Yulma swallowed hard.
The lock clicked.
The door began to open...
---
## — The Demon's Hunger —
The children believed Merai had gone upstairs. In truth, she stood before a man chained to the wall, his wrists slick with blood where he'd scratched through his own skin.
"It's been ten days already," she said, her voice almost conversational. "You must be hungry."
"I'm *always* hungry," the man named Melek replied, swallowing thickly. "Especially when I smell blood."
"Then why won't you eat what I'm offering?"
Merai tilted her head, feigning innocent bewilderment.
"I don't eat people." His voice was a low rasp. "And *especially* not children."
"Don't eat?" The corners of Merai's lips curled upward—a smile that belonged on a corpse. Then she burst into laughter, high and wild and wrong.
"Ha-ha-ha-ha! That's the funniest thing I've ever heard!"
She laughed until tears streamed down her cheeks, until she had to clutch her sides.
"*Demon!*" She spat the word like a curse. "Twenty years ago, you devoured children alive with pleasure. You burned them at the stake. You watched them scream and called it *entertainment*." Her laughter died. Her eyes turned cold as grave dirt. "What made you abandon your sacrifices now?"
---
Twenty years ago, when Merai was still just a girl named Merai, she had been an orphan at the Ainoa Orphanage. Cunning and clever, she quickly became the headmistress's favorite. The old woman doted on her, confiding her darkest secrets.
On her first day in the basement, Merai saw the girl who—just two days before—had boasted about being adopted by a wealthy couple.
She lay near death in a torture chamber.
Other children who had supposedly "left" the orphanage were there too. Some still breathing. Some not.
Terrible laughter echoed above the groans and screams and desperate pleas for mercy. The demon the headmistress worshiped watched the scene with a smile, as if it were the most delightful performance.
The headmistress grabbed Merai by the chin, forcing her to look.
"Merai, this is a demon who grants wishes. If you entertain him, he will reward you generously. All the food you eat, all the clothes you wear—bought with the money he gives me."
After each "performance," the demon left a generous tip.
"You know I'm especially fond of you, don't you?" The headmistress's grip tightened. "Merai, you must help me please the demon."
And so Merai began assisting.
For two years.
By the end, no children older than her remained in the orphanage.
The nightmare ended only when the High Temple began persecuting sorcerers. Many were executed on charges of witchcraft or demonic ties. The Ainoa Orphanage did not escape notice.
The headmistress locked the basement door and frantically destroyed evidence.
"Merai—*did you report this?*" Her eyes were wild with terror. "Tell me it wasn't you!"
But somehow the Temple had learned the truth.
The headmistress burned at the stake.
Merai inherited the orphanage and all its remaining children. Technically, she was the headmistress's adopted daughter—the legal heir. She continued working at the shelter. The children, having lost their last protector, looked at her with pleading eyes.
She couldn't abandon them.
"Sister, I'm hungry," they whined.
"What do we do now?"
At first, Merai used the money the headmistress had left behind. But it ran out quickly. When Troy was born, everything fell apart. The children lacked food. They lacked warmth. Money grew desperately short.
In her despair, Merai remembered the headmistress. Driven by a wild, impossible hope, she opened the basement door.
The demon was gone. He hated boredom—of course he'd disappeared.
So Merai made a different choice.
She began selling children to slave traders.
She acted cautiously, secretly. The children suspected nothing. To avoid the headmistress's fate, she bribed a priest from the Temple to look the other way. Over time, she developed loyal clientele who learned of her through whispered recommendations.
With the money from each sale, Merai fed the remaining orphans. But the profit from one child lasted only six months.
And even this meager income was threatened by Troy—her own son—who constantly interfered, sabotaging deals at every turn. She never told him the truth, but somehow he'd figured it out.
As a child, his pranks had been merely annoying. As an adult, he became completely uncontrollable. Recently, he'd announced that he'd mortgaged the orphanage and demanded she pay him back. He screamed that it was time to shut down "this damned hole."
_Ungrateful son!_ Merai's nails dug into her palms. _Doesn't he understand? The children will **starve** without me._