Purring.
He touched his cheek where her lips had been. The skin was still warm.
You’re the first person in ten years who’s made me want to stay somewhere long enough to solve a mystery.
She’d said that. About him. About insufferable, clipboard-wielding, too-many-forms him.
Hux stood on her porch for another full minute, the purring vibrating through his bones, his heart doing things it had never done before.
Hope.
He hadn’t felt it in years. Maybe never—the curse had been consuming his potential since before he was born, after all. Maybe hope was one of the things it had devoured.
But the air felt different. Something had changed in the gardens tonight, among the Fate Lilies, when she’d taken his hands and told him he wasn’t defective.
The curse was still there. The void-dweller was still feeding. His potential was still being consumed by something ancient and hungry and terrible.
But for the first time, he wasn’t facing it alone.
Hux finally made himself walk back down the path, back through the quiet streets of Haven Shores, back to the house where generations of Holts had lived and loved inadequately and died without ever understanding why.
His lion purred the whole way home.
FIFTEEN
LUNARIA
The routine had become dangerous.
Days in the gardens, coaxing flowers back to life, watching the orrery’s dead mechanisms twitch with returning power. Evenings in the archives with Hux, shoulders brushing in narrow corridors, his scent wrapping around her while they pored over documents by flickering fluorescent light. Nights alone in her cottage, decoding Deia’s journals until the stars wheeled toward dawn.
And somewhere in between—the moments she couldn’t stop replaying. The warmth of his hand in hers. The way he’d looked at her in the Fate Lily bed, vulnerable and wanting. The cheek she’d kissed three nights ago, still burning in her memory like a brand.
Dangerous. This is exactly how you get hurt.
But she couldn’t seem to make herself care.
The journal entry took shape slowly beneath her fingers, star positions translating into letters, letters into words that made her blood run cold.
The binding was performed during the Convergence of 1904. I’ve traced the ritual documents to Cornelius Marsh’spersonal papers—hidden, of course, but the void roses led me to them. What I found defies belief.
The entity that tried to cross over—the Hollow King, as the old texts name it—required an anchor to bind. A living anchor. One with futures to consume. Cornelius volunteered the Holt family as that anchor.
His wife’s family.
Without their knowledge. Without their consent.
For years, the Holts have been feeding this thing. Their capacity for fated bonds, their potential for love—consumed before it can form. Generation after generation of loneliness.
Lunaria set down her pen.
Cornelius had sacrificed his wife’s entire bloodline to save his own skin. To keep Haven Shores safe from an entity that would have consumed them all.
A warlock who had bargained with something older than memory—and been rewarded for it. The Hollow King had extended his life as part of the deal, keeping him alive long past any natural span. Long enough to silence Deia. Long enough to make sure no one ever found the truth.
Noble, in its way, some might argue. A necessary sacrifice.
But it wasn’t Cornelius who’d paid the price. It wasn’t his descendants who’d spent generations wondering why they couldn’t feel complete. It was the Holts—the family he’d married into, then betrayed.
