Chapter 1
Olivia
The kettle hissed behind me as I wrestled my hair into a messy ponytail, the elastic snapping against my fingers. The apartment still smelled faintly of fresh paint and old tenants' regrets, but it was mine. All six hundred square feet of peeling linoleum, thrift-store curtains, and a bathroom sink that hissed like it resented being woken up.
I didn't love it.
But I loved what it meant—freedom.
Morning light filtered through the crooked blinds I'd hung myself, leaving golden bars across the mismatched furniture I'd hauled up three flights of stairs piece by piece. The couch sagged in the middle, upholstered in a shade of brown that suggested someone's grandmother had died in 1987. The coffee table wobbled on uneven legs I kept meaning to fix. The walls breathed when the neighbors fought—which they did, loudly, at two in the morning most Thursdays.
None of it matched. None of it was new.
All of it was mine.
I checked my phone while the kettle screamed. The screen lit up empty. No new messages. The ache settled into my chest like an old friend taking up residence, familiar and unwelcome. I scrolled anyway, just to be sure, just in case someone had thought of me overnight.
They hadn't.
I poured water over instant coffee—the cheap kind that tasted like burned cardboard but cost three dollars for a month's supply. Steam rose and fogged the window above the sink, the one that looked out onto the brick wall of the building next door. Sometimes I caught glimpses of other people's lives through their windows. Mostly I saw bricks.
The A/C unit rattled to life in the corner, drowning out the sounds of traffic below. It leaked condensation onto the floor in a puddle I'd learned to step around. I'd put down a towel. It helped.
I drank the coffee black, standing at the counter because sitting felt like I had time to waste. Last night I'd woken at three to check the deadbolt again, then the chain, then the window locks. The darkness in the corner by the bathroom had seemed deeper than usual, shaped wrong. I'd lain awake until the shapes resolved themselves into a laundry basket and a coat rack and the harmless geometry of cheap furniture.
But that was last night.
This morning I checked the locks out of habit, not fear. That was what I told myself. The deadbolt. The chain. The doorknob twisted to confirm it held.
I grabbed my bag—canvas, secondhand, fraying at one strap—and left early. Being late terrified me in ways the dark corners never could.
The drive into Hollowgrave proper never got easier.
I gripped the steering wheel as my ancient Honda Civic rattled over cobblestones that had no business existing in the twenty-first century. The town sprawled before me like something out of a fever dream—Victorian architecture crammed against brutalist concrete, church spires piercing the low-hanging fog that never quite burned off, even at noon. Gargoyles leered from courthouse eaves. Iron lampposts lined streets that curved without logic, as if the city planners had been drunk or possibly cursed.
Everything here looked like it was auditioning for a horror movie.
The GPS gave up two turns back. I navigated by memory now, following the route I'd driven three times this week already, practicing. Past the cemetery with its crooked headstones. Past the diner with the flickering neon sign that read "E T" because the "A" had died sometime during the Reagan administration.
The stadium rose ahead, impossible to miss.
Hollowgrave Arena squatted on the edge of downtown like a beast mid-crouch. Concrete and steel, brutal in its geometry, with banners hanging limp in the still air. THE HOLLOWGRAVE WRAITHS in letters ten feet tall, purple and black, the team logo—a spectral figure clutching a hockey stick—snarling from every surface. The parking lot stretched vast and mostly empty at this hour, dotted with trucks and beat-up sedans that belonged to people who showed up early because the work demanded it.
I pulled into a spot near the back. Cut the engine. Sat there.
This was it. My new journey. No safety net, no backup plan, no one waiting at home to ask how my day went. I'd left all that behind—the people who said they loved me but loved control more, the friends who weren't really friends, the apartment I'd shared with ghosts of who I used to be.
This version of me sat alone in a parking lot in a town that looked like Halloween vomited on a history textbook, about to walk into a job I'd fought for with everything I had.
Nobody had handed me this. Nobody was holding my hand.
I grabbed my bag and got out before the fear could catch up.
The glass doors slid open with a pneumatic hiss.
"Help you?" The security guard didn't look up from his crossword puzzle, pen tapping against the folded newspaper.
I fished out my ID from the depths of my bag; the laminated card still stiff and new. "Olivia Bennett. I'm starting today—at the cafe?"
