The Mistress ✓

1

Onika
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Are those footsteps?

I freeze outside my door to my locked office and stare at the handle like its tainted with anthrax.

My employees wouldn't dare. They know my office is off-limits. And my parents are seven hundred miles away in Florida, living it up as retirees on the monthly payments I send them from the dismal profits of the distillery. It's barely hanging on, even after four generations of clinging to life making Whiskey in New Orleans.

This basement isn't haunted. This basement isn't haunted.

I repeat the truth like a chant until my heart slows to a semi-normal pace. My dead husband's ghost better not be inside, or heaven help me, I'll kill Rihmeek again myself.

Summoning the same iron will it has taken to dig this company out of the trenches, I grasp the handle, yank the door open, and fling myself inside, attempting the element of surprise. Or false courage.

Or... something.

"Trying to make an entrance?"

The cold voice that comes out of the dark chills me to very marrow of my bones.

I've only heard it once before, through the battered wood of the same locked door I just barged past, but it was delivering threats I didn't understand. Not asking a question in that cool, controlled manner.

There's no way I want to be in the dark with this voice.

She's not a ghost. She's worse.

She's the fucking boogeyman, whispered about in the shadows but never mentioned in polite company, almost as if saying her name will make her appear. And no one wants that.

I've never said it. I don't even want to think it now, but my brain conjures it anyway.

Robyn Fenty.

I fumble around, slapping the concrete wall to find the light switch, but when I flip it, nothing happens.

Oh, sweet Jesus. I'm going to die and I won't even see it coming.

My antique desk chair creaks just before the dim glow of my desk lamp clicks on.

I see her hands first, then tanned forearms with white cuffs rolled up. The light doesn't reach her face.

"Shut the door, Mrs. Maraj."

Swallowing back the saliva pooling in my mouth at the fact that she knows my name, I move my hand as though directly responding to her command. I grope for the handle behind me, when all I really want to do is turn around and run.

To the police.

Maybe they could... I don't know. Save me?