I was walking because the air in the apartment had become a solid thing, a physical weight that tasted of static and old, buried mistakes. It was 2 AM, the hour when Hollow Vale stopped pretending to be a town, and I was moving through the streets with the kind of frantic, rhythmic pace that usually preceded a disaster. The darkness was pressing against my skin, pushing at the part of me that remembered how to be violent.
The last time the air felt that thick, that electric, I killed a man. I stood in the shadow of a house that looked exactly like the ones I was passing now, and I did what I thought was necessary to protect Julian. Years later, I was still not sure if that choice wasmine, or if the darkness of this place had simply found a hollow space inside me and filled it with a command.
Oleander's voice kept looping in the back of my mind. My husband was into something occult, he had said, looking so small against the backdrop of our lives. It's connected to me. The words unlocked everything. They explained why I felt like a fuse that had already been lit.
I turned a corner onto a street where the Victorian houses leaned toward each other. The fog was sitting at knee-level, a sea of churning grey that made it feel like I was wading through a memory. I could feel the cold spot that followed Oleander, even though he was miles away in that brick apartment he inherited from a monster. It was a tether, pulling at my gut, demanding I go back and finish what was started.
I reached the edge of the East Side, where the buildings stopped pretending to stand straight and began their slow, spiral collapse into the earth. The woods were a wall of black timber that seemed to absorb the very concept of light. I stopped at the line where the gravel ended and the mud began, my lungs burning.
I needed to break something. I could feel the urge in my knuckles, a dull ache that demanded a target. If I had stayed in the apartment, I would have put my fist through the wall or, worse, I would have looked at Oleander and seen only the door he opened, the one that was currently inviting every shadow in this town to take a seat at our table. I was a protector by trade and by instinct, but how do you protect a man from the ghost he's carrying in his own chest? How do you keep the dark out when the person you're falling for is the one who let it in?
I closed my eyes and breathed, counting the seconds, trying to talk myself down. The violence was a living thing, coiled beneath my ribs, and right now it was whispering that Oleander was a liability. That the only way to save Julian was to cut Oleanderloose. But then I remembered the way Oleander looked when I first touched him, like a man who had spent months underwater and had finally found a pocket of air. I remembered the desperation in his hands, the way he clung to me as if I were the only solid thing in a world made of smoke.
A twig snapped, the sound muffled by the mist, but distinct enough to make me spin around, my hand already dropping to the knife at my belt. I was ready for a shadow. I was ready for a manifestation of Dominic Ashworth's possessive, rotting ego. I was ready to fight something I could actually kill.
Instead, I saw Julian. He was standing twenty feet away, a silhouette carved out of the grey, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his coat. He looked like he'd been following me for blocks, which he almost certainly had. Julian had always been the only one who could move through my wake without me noticing, the only one who knew the rhythm of my breathing well enough to match it.
"You don't get to disappear, Rowan," he said. His voice was low, carrying through the fog with a clarity that cut right through my head. He didn't move any closer. He knew better than to crowd me when I was vibrating like this.
"I'm not safe right now, Jules," I rasped. "You shouldn't have followed me. Go back to the apartment. Check on Theo. Make sure the doors are locked."
Julian took one slow step forward, his boots crunching on the gravel. "You've never been safe. That's not new. We didn't choose you because you were a sanctuary, Rowan. We chose you because you were the only one who would stand in the doorway." He paused, his dark eyes searching mine through the gloom. "What's new is that you're scared."
The lie wouldn't form. The pressure against my skin was the weight of my own fear, a cold realization that for the first time in my life, I didn't know if my strength was enough. I was scared ofwhat Oleander brought with him, but I was more scared of what I'd do if I couldn't stop it.
"He's the reason it's here, Julian," I said, the words coming out in a jagged rush. "Everything that's happening, the music, the photos, the way the house felt tonight, it's all because of him. Dominic didn't just leave him an apartment. He left him a wound that won't stop bleeding into the world. And we're all just standing in the puddle, waiting to drown."
Julian closed the distance, stopping just out of arm's reach. He didn't touch me. He knew that if he touched me right now, I didn't trust what I'd do. He just stood there in the fog. "So that's it? He's a liability, so we just let the shadows have him? Is that the man you are tonight?"
I looked away, toward the black wall of the woods. I thought about Oleander sitting alone in that apartment, waiting for the scent of a dead man's cologne to fill the hallway. I thought about the way his presence had destabilized the two-man orbit Julian and I had spent years perfecting, and how Theo had fit into the gaps so easily, and how Oleander had become the center before we even realized the gravity had shifted.
"I don't know who I am tonight," I admitted, and the admission finally made the pressure in my chest crack. I sank to my knees in the wet gravel, my head dropping forward. The rage was still there, but the air was starting to move again. "I just know I can't protect you if he's the one holding the door open."
"Then we help him close it," Julian said, and this time, he did reach out. He laid a hand on my shoulder, his grip firm and grounding, pulling me back from the ledge. "But you don't get to run into the woods and pretend you're a monster just so you don't have to be a man who's afraid of losing something. We're going back. All of us."
twenty-four
OLEANDER
I woke up to the smell of coffee. Not the bitter, watery stuff I made in the chipped ceramic pot I'd found in the back of the cupboard, but the rich, dark roast Dominic used to have shipped from some small roastery he'd found. It was a smell that belonged in a different life, a life of clean linens, morning sunlight, and the quiet security of being wanted by a man who knew exactly how I liked my mornings.
I didn't move. I was still on the couch, my limbs heavy and leaden, my neck stiff from the angle I'd slept at. The grey light filtered through the curtains. The radiator hissed, a rhythmic, wet sound that felt like breathing. I waited for the logic to kick in, for my brain to remind me that I hadn't bought coffee beans inweeks, that the machine was unplugged, and that the man who loved that scent had been dead for seven months.
The logic never came. In this apartment, the walls had started to feel less like architecture and more like a skin that was slowly thickening, drawing closer to my own. Everything was becoming domestic. Cared for. When I finally stood up and walked into the kitchen, the coffee maker was indeed on, its little red light glowing like a watchful eye. A single mug sat on the counter. My favorite mug, the one with the small chip on the rim that Dominic had always promised to replace but never did because he knew I liked the imperfection.
It was seductive, in a way that made my skin crawl and my heart ache simultaneously. There was a terrifying comfort in being looked after by a ghost. It required nothing of me. No explanations, no apologies for the things I'd said to Rowan or the way I'd looked at Julian. It was a love that didn't ask me to be better or different. It just asked me to stay. To sink into the rot and let the shadows tuck me in.
I looked at the kitchen table. The leather-bound notebook was there, sitting squarely in the center of the wood. I had put it in the back of the hallway closet when I moved in, buried under a stack of winter coats. I'd shoved it behind a box of old shoes and closed the door firmly, needing the weight of the wood between me and those spiraling symbols. But here it was. It didn't look like it had been moved. It looked like it had grown there, a dark fruit produced by the apartment itself.
My phone vibrated on the counter. Liliana. I picked it up on the fourth ring.
"Oleander?" Her voice came through, worry bleeding through her tone.
"I'm here, Lili," I said. I reached out and touched the edge of the notebook, tracing the grain of the leather. It felt warm. Too warm for a room that was currently sixty-two degrees.
"You sound wrong," she said. I could hear the background noise of London, a distant siren, the muffled roar of traffic. "You sound distant. Like you're speaking from the bottom of a well."
"I'm fine. I just haven't had my coffee yet," I lied, watching the steam rise from the mug I hadn't poured.
