I lean in closer, brushing the bridge of my nose along the curve where her neck meets her shoulder, drawing in her scent as if it might steady the restless hunger building in my chest. She shifts, barely, but I feel it. The smallest change in the tension of her body, the faint rise of breath in her lungs. Every subtle movement only pulls the coil of obsession inside me tighter, winding it until it’s a humming, living, breathing thing beneath my skin. Heat gathers low in my body, my dick hardening, throbbing, and straining against the denim fabric of my jeans, and I know she feels it. My body presses in behind her, the space between us nonexistent, and I’m half expecting her to make a run for it. Maybe this will frighten her. I hope it does. Enough to send her fleeing back to whatever quiet corner of the world she crawled from, far from the reach of a man like me. Still, she stands there.Because she belongs to this cemetery, belongs to me. The same way the night is claimed by the moon. Drawn into my world like all lost things eventually are.
“Why do you come here?” I murmur, my voice low in the hush surroundings.
“Someone has to remember them,” she says softly, her answer settling between us, simple and enigmatic.
I understand every word.
Her innocence strikes me. She mourns lives she never knew, unaware that half of them were probably hellspawn. I wonder what truths she carries in her mind, delicate illusions that have twisted her heart into kindness. What sort of man she imagines me to be, and which pieces terrify her the most.
“Here lies nothing but evil,” I finally say, and she turns around to face me, her body still pressed against mine, her basket on the ground forgotten, her gaze burning into me. If I had half a soul, she’d burn that, too.
“True darkness never dies,” she says, her gaze flicking between mine. “It lingers,” she continues, quiet and certain, “like a sickness, buried inside the living.”
“You speak as though you’ve seen death yourself,” I murmur, the edge in my voice betraying curiosity I don’t usually allow. She tilts her head, a faint quirk of amusement playing at her lips.
“It takes the sadness of life to truly appreciate the beauty of death.” Her words settle over me, stepping closer without thinking, completely drawn to the small, impossible grace with which she carries herself.
“And you… You find this beautiful?” I whisper, my eyes dropping to her full, pink lips.
“Yes,” she breathes, her gaze trailing downward, glancing at my mouth before she pulls back, gliding past me with ease, unbothered by the trance threatening to pull us under. She circles me, untouchable, before reaching down to retrieve her basket. Silence stretches between us. My fingers twitch at my sides, itching to reach for her, to close the space that she so effortlessly commands.
“You don’t fear me?” I finally say, my voice rougher than I had meant it to be. She glances at me over her shoulder, a faint smile brushing her lips as she walks.
“Should I?”
Should she?
“Fear usually follows me. Few rarely stand without shivering when they cross my path.” It’s not that I’m smug, I just haven’t met anyone quite like her before. Most people know who I am around here.
“I do not fear my death. But when you’re ready, I’ll be waiting.” She continues moving, slipping further into the thicket of trees that frames my graveyard.I want to run to her. To stop her. To learn who she is. To know the ghost that haunts my home.
Haunts me.
But I don’t. Because my life, molded by death and discipline, wasn’t made for a woman like her. Fragile, yet not. Broken, yet assured. And by the time I realize I’ve been standing out here way too long, I turn, stepping deeper into the trees, leaving the place where she stood moments ago, and into my house, alone. I’m not convinced she was ever there, because the silence surrounding me has been fractured beyond repair. Still, her shadow will follow me into tomorrow. When the hunt resumes to take down the evil of this earth, the sickness…buried inside the living.
CHAPTER FIVE
WINTER
Three years before the present day
19 years old
Winter creeps beneath the floorboards, slipping through the cracks and winding around my spine, settling into the hollows of my tired body. A slow, patient ache that threads through the marrow and twists beneath my ribs. I kneel on the floor, hands pressed to my thighs, clinging to these few hours of solidarity, waiting for them. While the small, silent part of me has long since surrendered to the certainty of this place.
Each day is the same. I wake, make my bed, listen to the birds flying freely beyond the boards of this cottage, a world I haven’t touched since the summer. Their wings cutting through the sky I no longer know, carrying the memory of freedom into a room that has none, into a life that no longer belongs to me.
Then, eventually, the chain drags me upright,heavier these days, biting into my waist where the old one once rested, replaced with a much longer link. A new weight for new tasks. A new reminder that I must earn my keep. I cook, clean, I bend and polish and scrub, moving through chores knowing that every ache in my hands, every hesitation in my step, will cost me more than a glance or a word. It will cost me my small measure of safety, my claim to the scraps I am allowed. So I do as I’m told.
To survive.
The sound of the door unlocking from the outside fills the quiet, but I don’t startle or jump like I used to. The door swings open, and I look up at the looming figure standing there, Harry, come to let me out for the day.
“Hey there, Snow,” he says, whistling lazily. The nickname twists in my stomach, sour and unwelcome. I keep my gaze low, letting him do his inspection in silence. He roams around, circling my bed, lifting corners of blankets, checking the neatness of my small, confined world. Everything is as it should be, at least, according to their standards. A sewing machine sits in the corner, a gift they werekindenough to give me, an earned luxury for me to mend their clothes and make my own. From discarded curtains, I’ve stitched clothing for myself, proof that I have earned the right to hide my skin, my dignity, which is not how it used to be.
When Harry finally steps back, I rise and move to walk in front of him, letting the familiar tension in my shoulders settle into its practiced posture. Into the kitchen I go, the chain dragging behind me.
Around the hexagon chipboard table, the six large men talk quietly among themselves, the hum of their conversation filling the space, but it isn’t friendly. It’s a low, watchful murmur, full of judgment and scrutiny that I’ve learned to read. In another life, they might have been considered good-looking. Well built, symmetrical, but here, stripped of the illusion they paint to the outside world, they are terrifying.
