When the dishes are loaded and the fire is steady, we go to bed by the hearth again.
I slide closer. She doesn’t move away. Her palm lands on my chest.
“Henry,” she says into the dark.
“Yeah.”
“You don’t have to be fine here.”
“I know. And you don’t have to be either.”
“Okay.” She presses a kiss to my shoulder. “Sleep.”
I don’t want to sleep.
I want to lose myself in her body again.
But I close my eyes.
Twenty-Seven
Tabitha
Everything is black at first. Almost airless. Pressure builds behind my ribs. The quiet hums in my brain. Then a sound. Not footsteps. Not breathing. Just weight.
My body knows before my mind does. Every muscle locks. My pulse beats too loud, too fast, until it’s the only thing I can hear. I try to move, but the dream doesn’t allow it. My hands are heavy, my fingers useless. My throat opens, but no sound comes out.
There’s a door. It shouldn’t be open, but it is. The air that seeps through is cold and brittle. The shape beyond it keeps changing. It gets taller. Closer. Thinner. Closer again.
My skin prickles. I can feel my own heartbeat against the sheets, against my teeth.
I tell myself it isn’t happening again. I tell myself I’m safe. But the dream laughs like it knows I’m lying.
The walls close in and pulse with my fear. The air thickens until breathing burns. A flicker of dim light glints on something smooth. Then it’s gone. I don’t see, but I feel the stare, the weight of it, pressing down, peeling me open from the inside.
I try to scream.
Nothing.
The sound catches in my throat. My chest won’t rise. I’m a panicked statue trapped in a room that’s all memory and no exit.
The air shifts again. Closer. Close enough to smell.
Salt, sweat, and something I can’t name.
Then warmth. But not a comforting warmth. It’s menacing. Demonic. A hand? A shadow? It doesn’t matter. It’s there. Touching without touching. My stomach turns. My mind fractures between then and now. Then and now. Then?—
The light snaps white. My heart jerks once, twice. The world flips.
And what’s left isn’t him. It isn’t me. It’s the echo of the moment before rescue. The split second that never ends.
The moment before everything breaks.
I jerk, and my eyes shoot open.
A nightmare.
Always the fucking nightmare.
