He didn’t respond, but I could hear him breathing behind the door, his silence as much an answer as anything.
And somehow, that made everything worse.
The drive was brief, but the world beyond the window felt suspended in time, muted and spectral beneath a heavy shroud of snow. Frost clung to the trees like lace spun from bone, and the sky pressed low, a smothering gray that swallowed the horizon.
Atop a distant hill, a church emerged from the haze, ancient and half-forgotten. The paint peeled, and the once-white facade had yellowed with memory and weather. The crooked steeple pierced the clouds. At its peak, a tarnished brass figure caught the light in brief flickers, part saint, part sentinel.
Grim eased the car into a slow crawl behind a solemn procession of vehicles. The chapel’s doors yawned open as mourners moved up the slope in quiet pilgrimage, dressed in black, their shapes stark against the snow.
Tension crawled along my spine as Grim parked the car on a narrow patch of snow-packed gravel. We joined the flow of mourners at a distance, hanging back since we didn’t quite belong. Just two specters at the edge of something sacred.
Grim’s silence was louder than the gentle wind as we climbed the path toward the mouth of the church. The weight we both carried followed us in. Inside, the air was thick with incense and old wood. Grim’s hand brushed the small of my back, a quiet pressure that urged me forward. I let him guide me to the end of a weathered pew, where we sat, outsiders still, tucked into the corner of grief not meant for us.
Some wept softly, their sorrow threading through the smothered hush. Others whispered behind gloved hands, their voices feathered with reverence or speculation. The air itself seemed to hold its breath. Grief hung thick, not loud or showy, but bone-deep. It seeped into the walls, into the wood beneath our feet, into me. A hush so saturated with mourning it made my skin crawl, as though it knew something I didn’t.
A photograph of a young woman sat on an easel. Pale-pink roses curled around the frame, laced with baby’s breath. “Who is that?” I questioned, my eyes fixed on her serene face.
“You don’t remember?” Grim’s voice was soft, but there was something in his tone that tempted me to meet his gaze.
I studied the photo, searching for any flicker of recognition, but nothing came. The pressure in my chest tightened.
I didn’t recognize the deceased woman, or her name scrawled beneath it.
“Phoenix…” Grim’s voice slid through the air, low and coaxing, and the word hit me with a punch to the gut. In an instant, my mind snapped back to a decade ago—too many years spent buried under rain and distance, all to avoid this exact moment.
Her face, young and terrified, flooded my memory. Her father’s blood spread out on the grocery store floor, soaking into the tiles as I stood frozen in the next aisle. I saved the old woman and he died in her place.
“Why the hell did you bring me here?” I hissed, my voice sharp and angry, but it didn’t match the twisting panic in my gut. I stood to leave, but before I could make it anywhere, Grim’s strong hands pulled me back into my seat.
“You need to understand.” His words were short and measured.
I didn’t care. “I agreed to give you my soul. I agreed to break the curse.” I yanked my arm out of his grip, cold steel flashing through my veins.
“Astoria…” His voice cracked with something raw, and for a moment, the hard mask he always wore slipped. But he didn’t need to physically hold me here. I stayed, rooted to the pew, the weight of this place pressing down on me harder than any of Grim’s demands.
The church loomed around us, its old wooden beams creaking under the weight of history. Sunlight barely filtered through the tall, arched windows, the gray light casting a muted pall over the room. The air stunk of incense and dust, stale from the years the building had spent holding in grief. Every breath felt heavy with it.
The man at the front was fumbling with his notes, his voice nervous, shaky as he spoke about Madison’s life. “Madison was a troubled child,” he said, followed by a heavy sigh. “Her mother left them when she was young. Her father…Jason did his best.Played both parts. He died on vacation when she was just a kid.”
Her cousin (the man speaking) didn’t know Madison. Not really. He spoke in vague terms, dancing around the parts of her life that had been lost to everyone. It made my skin itch to hear it, the way they glossed over the years she spent alone after her father died—alone, trying to figure out where she fit in a world that had already chewed her up.
And theguiltin the air. It was thick. Heavy. Pressing down on my chest too, just like it had pressed down on hers.
Her grandfather moved slowly to the front, his frail legs shaking beneath him. His tear-streaked face was pale, his eyes lost in the fog of grief. The whole room was watching him now, holding its breath as he tried to speak.
“She never… got a chance,” he croaked, his voice breaking under the weight of the years he’d spent mourning hisgranddaughter. The sound of his broken words echoed through the cavernous room, bouncing off the high walls. His wife came forward, her hand on his shoulder, muttering something into his ear before she took the microphone.
“Tragic is all I can think of when I remember Madi,” she said, her voice steady but thick with emotion. “She was beautiful. Her art… it spoke volumes of her kind and gentle heart. The cards we’re dealt aren’t always fair. But I think, looking back, she’d want us to know that it’s what we do with them that matters. The one thing we can’t avoid in this life is death. And I can only hope that wherever she is, she’s at peace now. Our beautiful girl.”
The silence that followed hung heavy. I swallowed, but the lump in my throat wouldn’t go away. Grim didn’t move, didn’t even blink. His gaze was distant, fixed somewhere over my shoulder. Expression unreadable as he absorbed everyone’s pain and, in some twisted way, it didn’t touch him. He ferried her away, after all, but I didn’t blame him for that.
The blame was mine, and it was suffocating me.
The cold chill in the air, the low murmurs of people peddling stories from her youth—it was too much.The smell of wet snow and death crawled in from outside, and all I could feel was the sharp burn of regret, clawing up my chest. I wasn’t just trapped in this building. I was trapped in my own skin, carrying a guilt I could never outrun.
When we made it back to the car, thoughts of the life that girl could’ve lived clung to me like sticky webs.
“She died two days later, you know,” Grim broke the silence, his grip on the steering wheel tightening.
