I knew so little about what Belinda, Astrid, and their agency intended for me and Kyrine, but I would do everything I could to ensure that the mansion and the beautiful woman at the heart of it would be safe.

Turning my attention back to the inside of the mansion, I drew my focus down to the bedroom directly adjacent to Belinda’s room. It was as different from Belinda’s room as possible. Upholstered in shockingly bright pink, it almost hurt my eyes to look at it. Cushions were tossed haphazardly across the carpet, and items of clothing were discarded at random. The enormous bed was unmade, and the chair by the window was heaped with magazines. A work desk near the bed seemed to be groaning under the weight of discarded papers.

As she had mentioned earlier, a gleaming chrome stripper’s pole had pride of place in the center of the room, and a white lace bra dangled from the chandelier. I couldn’t help wondering whether Astrid—who was clearly the room’s occupant—had garnished the chandelier with lingerie on purpose.

Both Astrid and Belinda’s respective bedrooms fit the personalities of the women who resided in them, down to the finishings. From what I could gather, Kyrine must have built them especially for the two Outworlder women. However rough relations had been for them at the beginning, I thought, they must have a fairly good relationship now. Perhaps Kyrine had tried to make up for trying to kill them initially by creating custom-made bedrooms for them?

Curious about the rest of the mansion, I looked at the third bedroom, a little further down the hallway. I shouldn’t have been surprised to find an almost identical replica of Selena’s room from our apartment above the convenience store in town. There was a simple bed and a 75-inch monitor hooked up to a gaming PC, along with posters of the various Outworlder punk bands she listened to, many of whom seemed to be fronted by good-looking cat-Outworlders, like Selena.

Seeing Selena’s room made me wonder when I would speak to her again. We got on well, having been housemates for over a year. In all that time, I’d never once suspected that she was anything more than she said she was; a college graduate with a passion for gaming and a boring job in an office downtown. She’d often spend weekends away, and I figured she had some boyfriend that she never spoke about, not that she spent them out here in the mansion. Selena was a pretty good-looking cat-girl, and I was into beastkin. I had thought at times she might have had the hots for me, which I would not have had a problem with. One time, we’d even had a drunken kiss, but we’d never really followed up that side of things.