I should’ve left it at that. I should’ve gotten my ass downstairs, locked myself in the guest room, and crocheted my anxiety into something wearable. But I was wine-bold and deeply unbothered by common sense.
I brushed my fingertips over one of the symbols. The stone pulsed faintly beneath my touch, warm for a second, then cool again. Or… I was drunk. Hard to tell.
“That’s… probably fine.”
There was a Latin phrase carved across the center, the letters so deep they caught the light. Squinting, I leaned closer.
“Dominum ex tenebris,” I read in the worst British accent imaginable. “That’s right, I’m a classy bitchandbilingual.”
I took a triumphant sip of wine. Satisfied, I turned to leave?—
—and the floor shivered.
A low hum spread through the air, quiet at first, then building. My skin prickled. “Oh no. Oh no, no, no.”
One by one, the symbols began to glow. The hum became a vibration that rattled through the floorboards. Static filled the room, a fizzing pressure that buzzed behind my teeth. The flashlight on my phone faltered.
“Okay,” I said, backing up, my voice wobbling. “Cool party trick. Love the vibes.”
Papers fluttered from the corners, wind coming from nowhere, swirling dust around me in a frantic spiral.
“Fuck,” I said, clutching my wine like it could save me.
Then the coffin lid groaned.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
The sound was deep and heavy, the kind that came from something that had been still for far too long. The slab shifted, stone grinding against stone.
I froze.
My brain, ever helpful, provided commentary:Congratulations, Nadia. You’ve opened your first cursed tomb.
The wind, which appeared from nowhere, whipped. My hair stuck to my face. The tapestry flapped against the wall ominously.
The lid slid another inch.
“Nope,” I said, taking one slow step backward. “Nope. This is where I die. Love you, Mom.”
I glanced toward the stairs, calculating my odds of outrunning whatever was about to crawl out of that thing.
The symbols flared once more—blinding white—and the sound of the coffin’s final grind filled the space.
Then came silence.
My heartbeat was the only sound.
I swallowed hard, clutching the neck of my wine bottle like a weapon. “Okay,” I whispered, eyes fixed on the coffin. “If you’re undead, please be hot.”
Because if I was going to die in a haunted attic, I at least wanted it to be interesting.
Chapter 3
Cristian
Ihung in a void so complete it was an insult to nothingness. Time had no slope. Memories arrived in fragments, then fell away. I grasped at them the way a drowning man clutches rope, though rope itself had become an abstraction.
Betrayal. Poison. Latin chanting threading through the chaos. Pain in my chest. The cold of stone under me. Between them, there was the loop of base impressions that came and went and came again and again.
