Chapter 29
PENELOPE
Autumn arrives on a blustery October evening with a heavy drop of rust coloured leaves and a cold dousing of rain.
It’s been months since our Pairing. Months since his hands last anchored me to something solid. We only had half of the summer together before Billy was sent away.
The absence of him has become its own hunger, chomping away inside of me like razor sharp teeth torturously nibbling their way into my marrow.
The days blur together in this place, endless halls full of the same faces that once carved fear into my skin, the same whispered prayers that once held me down. Without him, every shadow feels sharper, every footstep too loud, every silence too deep. I try to breathe the way he taught me, steady and slow, but the air tastes wrong without him in it.
They say he’s away on a job, but no one tells me what or why or when he’ll return. Sometimes I think they like watching me wither, alone. Sometimes I think they can smell the fear onme. Billy’s brothers seem to circle me like a school of piranha, watching as I descend lower and lower into the water, but ultimately waiting to attack.
Because I am afraid, terrified of who I become when he’s not here to pull me back from the dark, terrified that one day I’ll look up and realise I’ve been waiting for someone who isn’t coming back to me at all. I’m trying to hold on. But every night gets harder, the days get longer, and I don’t know how much longer I can survive in a world where his absence is the only thing that fills the heaving bosom of my chest.
I’ve done this before.
Endured his absence.
But it’s different this time.
I was alone before. Navigating life without knowing what it was like with him in it. I know now. What it’s like. How he fills me, how he sees me, makes me whole.
Protects me.
The graveyard is the only place where the walls don’t feel like they’re closing in. Slowly, I walk between the stones, my fingers brushing the cold granite edges as if they might answer me, as if the dead might offer the comfort the living never do.
Mist clings to the ground in pale ribbons, curling around my ankles like something trying to keep me here, and for a moment I let it. It’s peaceful in a way that feels dangerous, like the world is holding its breath just to hear mine break. I stop beside an unmarked grave, weather worn and crumbling, I stare down, wondering if this is what waiting feels like, a slow burial in reverse, dirt piling up inside instead of out.
I imagine him beside me, his hand in mine, guiding me through the darkness like he always did, and the ache of it nearly folds me in half. I’ve never felt more alive than when he’s near, and I’ve never felt more ghost than now, walking through a placemeant for the lost, fitting, maybe, because that’s all I am without him.
I have never really felt like anything without him.
It’s not that I can’t get by on my own.
It’s that I don’t want to.
I have never wanted to.
He was all I ever saw whenever I thought of my future.
He and I together.
A big house full of dark rooms and low lights, just Billy and I.
Lovesick little demons creeping in the dark.
But in that house, in this place, a gothic estate locked in by sky high iron fences with razor tops and twenty-four hour armed guard, I’m anything but safe.
Their attention crawls over me now, bold in ways it never was when he stood at my side. The cult speaks in murmurs that stop the moment I enter a room, their gazes lingering too long, too hungrily, as if recalculating my value without the man who once shielded me. Even though I am supposed to be one of them, equal, untouchable, Billy’s absence has become an open wound, and they gather around it, scenting blood.
Every rustle of a robe feels like a threat, every soft chant sounds like a decision being made in a language I don’t understand, meant to exclude me. I can feel the shift, subtle, poisonous, inevitable. They are remembering what they once did to me, and realising there is no one here now to ensure they can’t do it again.
Hail begins as a whisper, soft, cold taps against stone, then suddenly the heavens open, pelting the graveyard with shards of ice that sting like thrown gravel. I flinch beneath the first barrage, breath catching, and instinct sends me sprinting towards the nearest shelter. The mausoleum door groans as I force it open, slipping inside just as the storm crescendos.
Suddenly, darkness swallows me whole, thick and stale, and I press a shaking hand against the wall, searching. My fingers skim along cold marble, then metal, the outline of the door. The hinges shriek when I push it, and a rush of cold damp, subterranean air washes over me.
That’s when I realise what I’ve stumbled upon, instead of the door I entered through taking me back the way I came, I descend into the tunnels. I know I shouldn’t. Everything in me telling me not to do it, not to go, to turn around. That I won’t like what I find. But there’s this other little piece of me, this tiny festering rot, that urges me onwards, luring me farther into the labyrinth beneath Raven Ridge Manor.
