“Maybe one day,” Nathaniel hummed.
I nodded, gaze falling onto my lap.
“I’d still like to be friends, you know,” Nathaniel said.
At my silence, disappointment etched across his furrowed brows, lips pulling down in a heartbreaking frown.
I needed to adjust to being on my own. And that meant my walls had never been higher. But Nathaniel, somehow, always seemed to find a ladder tall enough to climb over.
“I’m not going to hurt you like Ava did,” he said.
“You can’t promise that.”
“I can.” He slowly rose to his feet, a look of determination sharpening his features. “I, Nathaniel Carrington, promise to never break your heart.”
I fought valiantly to suppress an eyeroll as he ever so dramatically crossed a hand over his chest. He looked like a knight swearing allegiance to his monarch the way he stood with his back straight, feet together, expression serious.
“And I, Augustus Saint, promise to never breakyourheart,” I played along, mimicking his stance with my own hand splayed across my chest.
I never kept that promise.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
An unreliable narrator is an untrustworthy storyteller, deliberately deceptive or misguided.
Do you trust me?
You shouldn’t.
I murdered my mother.
I am the villain of this story.
I have lied to you.
Repeat it to yourself, like a mantra. You cannot trust me. What is real? You are being fed a lie.
Nathaniel ate the lie, devoured it, worshipped it. And you don’t want to share his fate, do you?
Nathaniel had always loved the villain. They were tragically misunderstood, he’d declare in between study sessions, seated on the couch inside his study, popcorn between us while he forced me through hours of television. There was goodness in their hearts. Buried deep, deep down. Trauma shaped their hard shells, built their guarded walls. It wasn’t their fault, he insisted.
I disagreed. Villains had always been given a choice. Judas chose to betray Jesus of Nazareth for coin, Macbeth chose to commit treason for power, and I chose to evade happiness as though it were the plague. There is always a choice. And the wrong one can tear at your soul, steal your humanity, and lock it up in a cold cellar.
The ghost of North Lane knew that all too well, something we bonded over in the darkness, imprisoned with only haunting memories of our sin. We were both awaiting a salvation that would never come—a salvation that we had both chased away.
Nathaniel had been my salvation before I abandoned him, driven by the fear of being unravelled and a hunger to understand my past.
And I had been my mother’s, before the truth barrelled toward us in frightening waves. Now she was dead, and I was a prisoner in her House, forced to roam the dark halls like a long-forgotten phantom. And maybe I was, for who knew how much time had passed?
A floorboard creaked on the staircase, drawing my attention away from the scorched living room—a room reduced to nothing but a grey memory. Instead, my gaze drifted toward the staircase where I had once stood, gazing out at my brother shivering in a circle of flames.
On the third step from the bottom, a faceless shadow stood, its slender fingers curled around the wooden railing. It was too tall to have been my mother, and so I wearily stepped forward, searching the darkness for a face. Perhaps there was more than one prisoner trapped in North Lane.
The shadow turned and ascended the staircase, each step groaning from its weight. I followed, anxious, chasing an alliance that could buy our freedom. But no matter how quickly I ran, I never caught up. The shadow was faster, waltzingdown the hall with an air of ease I could not imagine belonging to a prisoner.
“Wait!” I called, stumbling through the darkness, nails dragging along the torn wallpaper to feel my way toward the back of the House.
There was a room at the end of the long upstairs hallway. It had always been boarded up. My parents never told me what was in there, except that it was locked, and no one knew where to find the key. I had never really paid much attention to the room as a boy, but as I watched the shadow figure disappear inside, I racked my brain for answers.
