The warning slithered into my spine and settled there, feeling cold and aching, but I nodded. I trusted him. Then the wind stirred, but not like the last time, it wasn’t a violent roar that had shaken the windows and screamed through the walls. This time, the breeze was soft, warm almost, whispering around us like a memory brushing past. Damian didn’t react, nor did I, we didn’t need to, because when our eyes met, we knew that we had both felt the difference and shift in the air.
Then…midnight came, and he took a deep breath and began speaking, just like last night before the madness happened. It wasn’t in the distorted, guttural way the spirit had torn out ofhim; it was layered now, incomprehensible in a way that kept me hooked on him. The words weren’t meant for me, and yet they passed through me like static under my skin.
I should have been stunned or felt lost or alone perhaps, but gods…all I could do was look at him. His face was made of shadows and candlelight, the sharp line of his jaw looked softer tonight, almost breakable. His lashes trembled, and his mouth tensed around each strange syllable. My chest tightened, in a slow, unbearable squeeze. The truth hit me like a falling star. I was falling for him, for a man I only knew for 24 hours, but felt like a lifetime. For a man calling a ghost like it was a prayer, for a man who chose to stay when this time, I was the one who drove him away.
Then, his voice cracked, dragging me out of my thoughts. The sound was barely audible, but it was familiar, it was the sound that cracked something in you before…tears. I watched as a tear slid down his cheek, and my breath stilled, as something inside me shattered. Before I could process what was happening, his emotions came out as storms, not raindrops. But here he was…breaking open in front of me like the ritual had slipped its fingers inside him and found something buried deep, and ripped it out.
“Damian?” I whispered, getting no answer.
He kept chanting, but the chant trembled now, curling around his tears. More streams fell, tracing the line of his jaw, then more, and his shoulders began to shake. His breath fractured into thin, fragile pieces. Everything about this didn’t feel right.
“Talk to me,” I begged, my voice cracking. “Say something, please. Please tell me what’s happening.” Fear began to claw inside me, almost making me turn to the mirror, to beg the ghost to let him go. If he was the one doing this to Damian, I wanted to beg until it stopped.
But there was nothing but the silence that swallowed mywords, so cruel, so empty.
I shut my eyes, trying my best to stay calm, to not look at the mirror. “Damian, please. Look at me. Just look at me, please.” My hands shook.
But his tears only fell harder as I looked at him again, and panic pressed against my ribs, sharp as glass. I pushed myself towards him now sitting a few inches away from him, desperate to pull him out of whatever crushing place his mind had been thrown into.
“Damian,” I whispered, my voice trembling in a plea. “Please come back to me, I’m right here. Come back to me.” And then, suddenly…he gasped.
A sharp, wrecked sound, as his head snapped up. His eyes were red and shining, staring straight at me. Not through me, not past me, just at me. The grief in his face was unbearable. It wasn’t just sadness, it was a kind of sorrow that collapsed worlds, the kind that hollows a person out and leaves them echoing. I felt my own tears rise instantly, hot, and stinging. I didn’t even know why. I just…felt him, felt all of it, like his pain had snuck into my chest like someone had punched the air out of me from the inside.
He swallowed hard, and his lips trembled, then, in the softest, shakiest voice I’d ever heard from a man, he said, “I am so sorry, baby.”
I broke, and I didn’t even know why. Something about how he said it, how he looked at me and said those words reminded me of how people had spoken to me at my parents’ funeral. So soft, cracked, and guilty, carrying more sorrow than their arms could hold. For a moment, it felt like grief itself had sat between us, warming its hands by the ache in our chests.
Tears spilled down my cheeks in quiet, helpless drops, and I still didn’t even know why. His sadness was so raw it felt contagious, like my heart recognized the rhythm of his pain and decided to mirror it.
My voice barely worked. “Damian…why are you sorry? What did you see?”
The candles flickered wildly, bending toward him as if they, too, were leaning in to hear the answer. Like the whole room waited with me, yet he didn’t answer, he just stared at me, tears glittering in his eyes as he looked at me. Like the truth he carried could destroy me, and he felt guilty about it. I stared at him, my voice barely more than a shaken whisper as I asked why he was sorry, why he sounded like he was confessing to something the universe itself couldn’t carry for him. He kept his gaze low, his shoulders trembling as if each breath he took burned him, then a tear slid down his cheek and hit our joined hands with a heaviness that made my chest twist so violently I felt something inside me splinter.
I reached for him instinctively, my panic rising in a rush of heat and cold. “Damian,” I murmured, leaning closer, feeling the candles flicker around us like they were eavesdropping. “Tell me, please. Who is it? What did you see?”
For a heartbeat he didn’t move, didn’t breathe, or even feel like he was existing, until he lifted his eyes, and in them, I knew something had shattered.
“My brother,” he said, and something deep in my body recoiled, not understanding the meaning yet, only the way the words landed like a blow bruised something in me.
The grief on his face was too raw, too old, and too familiar for my chest to hold without splitting open. I grabbed both of his hands because one wasn’t enough, because if I didn’t hold him he looked like he might fall through the floor. “Damian… I’m so sorry,” I whispered, tears spilling out of my eyes without my permission. “God, I am so sorry”
He leaned into my touch, not for comfort but because he looked like he might collapse without it, and I could almost feel his grief like a pulse under my palms. “I am sorry you had to findout like this,” I said, my voice cracking. “Through me,” I added, not caring how I was linked to this, to his brother.
He took a single breath, and it shook something in the room, even the candles paused. “There’s more,” he murmured, and my stomach dropped so fast my whole body went hollow. I felt a chill slide up my spine, settling in my throat until my next breath hurt.
“More?” I asked, barely able to form the words, too afraid for what next he might say.
Damian looked at me with a devastation that made my heart twist in agony. “Oh baby…” He cupped my face, and I cried. I cried because fear had gripped me, suffocating the life out of me. “My brother isn’t just the spirit haunting you.” He swallowed hard. “He’s also Max.”
The silence that followed didn’t fall, it collapsed like a ceiling giving way. My lungs refused to work, my thoughts scattered, my body went rigid like it was bracing for an impact that had already happened.
“M…” I couldn’t, I couldn’t say it. Because it couldn’t be! “M…Max?” I breathed, shaking my head. “You mean…my Max?” Damian nodded once, slow, apologetic, and destroyed. “My brother?” I asked again, hoping he would think and say “oh, he had a mix up,” but he didn’t, because he only cried and nodded again.
My brother? My Max? The one I was waiting for? The voice that promised he’d be home later today? The boy I grew up shadowing like a second heartbeat, loving more than I ever should have? Gone? Gone in the most impossible, brutal way? No! Never!
“No,” I whispered, shaking my head harder as tears spilled freely now. “No, Damian…no. He called me. He said he was coming home, he said…he said he missed me.” My voice cracked, broke, and scattered. Damian reached for my hands again, andthe grief between us surged so thick I could almost taste the metallic weight of it on my tongue.
“I didn’t know it was him,” he said, his breath trembling. “I swear to you, Elena, I didn’t know until now.” I believed him, I did. But…but my brother…my only family.
