“I need this,” I say, my voice thick.
“No.” The word is quiet, but absolute. It stops my hand mid-air.
I turn to face him, bewildered. “What? Why? It’s my sister, Cassian.”
He pushes off the doorframe and walks toward me. “That life is over,” he says, his voice soft, which makes the words even crueler. “The girl in that picture is gone. I’m not letting you bring ghosts into my home.”
Tears spring to my eyes, hot and angry. “You can’t ask me to leave this. It’s all I have left of her.”
His expression hardens. He cups my jaw, his thumb stroking my cheek, forcing me to meet his intense gaze.
“I’m not asking,” he says, his voice a low, dangerous growl. “You wanted to feel something new, you wanted to be alive again. You can’t do that if you’re clinging to a tombstone. Hermemory is a ghost that keeps you a ghost. I’m not competing with that.”
His logic is twisted, possessive, and utterly devastating. He’s framing this as an act of liberation, but it feels like an amputation.
My gaze flickers from his intense eyes to the smiling face in the photograph, the sun, the laughter, the before. Then I look back at him, the noise, the pain, the now.
With a shuddering breath, my hand falls away from the frame.
A dark satisfaction glints in his eyes. “Good girl.”
I zip the bag with a sharp, final sound. I walk past him, refusing to look at the photo on the nightstand, the ghost I’m leaving behind. He follows me out, and as I lock the door to my apartment, the click of the deadbolt sounds like a coffin closing.
Twenty One
Cassian
She’sasleep.
I lie perfectly still in the dark, listening to the soft, steady rhythm of her breathing. Aria’s head is on my chest, and her hand is resting over my heart as if she has a right to it. Her warmth seeps into my skin, a poison that feels terrifyingly like peace. Every breath she takes is a quiet accusation. Every beat of her heart against my hand is a reminder of the one that stopped.
I should feel powerful. I have her. The ghost who has haunted my every waking moment for years is finally here, in my bed, her life held in the palm of my hand. This is what I wanted. This is the only thing I've wanted.
But the victory is hollow, leaving a metallic taste of ash in my mouth. Having Aria here, so close, so real, doesn’t silence the ghosts; it gives them shape. It gives them her face.
Her body shifts in her sleep, a soft murmur escaping her lips as she presses closer. The innocent trust in that sound is a hot poker to the gut. She feels safe with me, the architect of her private apocalypse. The irony is so thick it chokes me.
I can’t breathe.
Carefully, I slide my arm from beneath her, lifting her head and gently placing it on the pillow. The loss of her warmth is immediate, leaving the skin of my chest cold and exposed. I slip out of the bed, my feet silent on the cold concrete. The loft is dark, the city lights painting long, skeletal shadows across the floor. For a moment I just stand there, watching her, a man observing the most beautiful, fragile thing he has ever stolen.
I have to get away. The intimacy of that bed is a cage I can't bear.
I retreat to the bathroom, closing the door and plunging myself into near total darkness. I don’t turn on the light. I don’t need to see the monster in the mirror. Not yet. I step into the shower stall and turn the knob as far as it will go. The water blasts out, scalding hot, and I step under the spray without flinching, welcoming the punishment.
The steam fills the stall, but it can’t obscure the images burned onto the back of my eyelids. Twisted metal. The scent of gasoline and rain. The flashing red and blue lights painting a nightmare across the wet asphalt. A name on a piece of paper that stopped my heart and restarted it all at once.Aria.
And that’s not even the beginning of the rot.
My mind, a traitor, drags me further back, to a house full of screaming and broken glass. To a sin my father started, a curse passed down. He broke one family, and years later, I broke the other. A tragic, tangled knot of fate that she knows nothing about. She thinks her story is a simple, brutal tragedy. She has no idea it’s a goddamn Greek epic, and I am the villain of every act.
I scrub my skin raw, as if I could wash off the grime of my secrets. I try to wash away the scent of her that clings to me, a constant, damning reminder of my hypocrisy. I told her she couldn’t bring ghosts into my home, while I am haunted by a legion of them. Her sister. My brother. The ghosts from that house.
The water cools, the steam dissipates. I turn it off, the sudden silence deafening. I stand there, dripping in the dark, my chest heaving. Nothing has been washed away. The guilt is still there, a permanent stain on my soul.
I step out and finally force myself to look at my reflection in the polished steel above the sink. The dim light from the window catches my face. The man staring back is a stranger. His eyes are hollowed out, his expression a mask of torment and grim resolve. This is not the face of a lover. It is the face of a jailer.
A jailer who has locked himself in the same cell as his prisoner.
