Music Box (The Dollhouse Books, #4) Read Online Free Page A

beast.” He glanced purposely back at the torture devices occupying the spaces of the chamber.
    My mind closed in. Shaking, I stepped inside the compartment. My elbows knocked against the sides. A wooden ledge behind me was barely large enough to sit upon. Voulo closed the door and pushed the key into the lock. He stopped to admire his placement of me in the cabinet before ambling from the room. Pressing my hands against the thick glass, my mind screamed over and over and over. There was not enough room to kick or elbow the glass—and even if I did manage to crack it, a diamond-patterned metal grid secured the door.
    What if Voulo did not return ?
    What if I died here? Of every kind of death that had rushed through my mind this night, every one of them had set me free of the castle. But this death, this death would hold me here forever.
    Breaths stuttered through my chest. Voulo had told me to steady my breathing. But he had most probably never been inside such a thing as this himself. I slowed my breathing, trying to find a center of calm, anything to stop the madness that spiraled through my head. I pushed my fingers in the join between the door and the walls of my tiny prison. There was a gap—enough for a small amount of air to come through. Stale, underground air.
    On the wall opposite, the board holding the myriad keys mocked me. Each key was large and of a dark metal, but every one of them was different. If a key was lost, the matching compartment could not be opened. If the key to my door were to be lost, I would remain here forever.
    Stop , I told myself. Stop thinking such thoughts.
    My head grew heavy.
    If I slept and never woke, then so be it.
    ~.~
    I snapped my eyes open to the rattle of metal.
    Voulo stood there, staring upward, key ring in hand. He’d been watching me sleep. Every one of my muscles tensed as he scraped the stool over to the cabinets. But the door he pushed the key into was not mine. Nor the next, or the next. When he reached the compartment beside mine—Etiennette’s—he reached for a key he had on a chain around his neck.
    My nerves jangled into a twisted knot by the time he reached my door. Was it a game he was playing with me? But his eyes were mirthless.
    He inserted the key into the lock and turned it.
    Stiffly, I rose and pushed myself out. I would have fallen had he not caught me. He eased me to the ground.
    “ Non ! Thou canst not move so in such haste. Thou must take care.” He eyed the girls in the cabinet. “Just like wood. Thou limbs must not be forced. Thou must stretch and work the flesh first. Yes, work the flesh.”
    With a gasping cry I moved away from him. I’d been promised the air of the ocean and the terror struck me that he might push me back in there again before I’d had a chance to get out of here.
    He brushed a hand across the air. “The cabinets—I doth crafted them at the master’s request. But they were never meant to be made for the... living.” He eyed me distastefully. “The beauty of the butterfly is better preserved in death than in life.”
    Revulsion washed through me at his words. I turned my head. The door of the chambers was open. Wordlessly, I stumbled toward it.
    Like a starving man, I raced out and along the corridor. Wind blew across my face and I gulped it down into my lungs. The night sky beyond the ocean passage was black, but not the colorless black of Balthazar’s chambers. The sky was rich and velvety.
    Voulo appeared at my side, almost out of my line of sight. “I wilt return for thee just before the dawn.”
    Staring directly ahead, I gave a rigid nod.
    Balthazar gained pleasure in looking at all his past wives, while Voulo viewed us all as butterflies skewered in a glass case. I sensed he couldn’t wait for his latest butterfly to stop uselessly fluttering her wings.
    I stepped alongside the balcony wall, my hands scraping over the weather-roughened stone work, trying to move as far away from Voulo as possible. But when I