Page 28

Damon steps inside, still wearing his coat, keys in hand. He stops just inside the threshold, eyes moving between us–me pressed close to Hunter, Hunter’s hand on my waist, the charged tension thick enough to taste. He takes it all in without a word, his expression unreadable for a beat.

Finally, he speaks, voice calm but urgent. “We need to go. The King is awake.”

Hunter’s hand drops from my waist instantly, and he takes a step back, putting distance between us again. My heart is still racing, lips still tingling from our kiss, but reality crashes back in hard.

My husband is awake.

8

Timothy

I am suspended between breaths.

That is the first thing I know.

Held in the narrow seam between one world and the next, where time has no manners and pain has no shape. It could have been a second. It could have been a hundred solstices. There is no clock here, no pulse to measure by, only the slow turning of something ancient beneath me.

When I open my eyes, I am standing on black earth.

Mist slides over the ground in pale ribbons, winding around my boots. Above me hangs a sky the color of bruised velvet, moonless and endless. Bare trees rise from the land like cathedral pillars, their branches woven together in high arches. Moss drapes from them like funeral cloth. In the distance, bells ring from somewhere under the soil.

One solemn note.

Then another.

Then silence thick enough to choke on.

The air smells of rain, iron, damp roots, and sweet rot. Death and growth together. Fallen leaves softening into soil. Seeds split underground. The endless loop of endings becoming beginnings laced with Baron truths.

Decay is not failure.

Burial is not loss.

Everything that dies feeds what comes next.

Memento Mori.

I know this place, though I have never seen it. Or perhaps I have seen it every night of my life and only now remembered. Stone markers jut from the earth at odd angles, half-swallowed by vines. A fox darts through the mist, white as bone, then vanishes. Crows gather in the trees above me, black shapes shifting and muttering to one another.

I do not know where I am going.

I only know I must move. There is something missing. Something mine.

I walk.

The land changes with every dozen steps. Frost rims the grass, then melts beneath spring rain. Wildflowers bloom in clusters beside dead branches. Summer heat presses against my skin, only to be stripped away by autumn wind carrying ash and leaves. The seasons wheel around me in furious silence.

Life. Death. Life again, until, ahead, the ground splits open into a dark mouth framed in roots and stone. A tunnel.

No.

The tunnel.

The hidden arteries beneath Forsyth. The crypt passages. The underground altars where Barons and Baronesses were initiated, punished, worshipped, remade. Where secrets traveled safer than men ever did.

I descend without hesitation.

The stone walls sweat moisture. Symbols are carved into them, made by hundreds of hands across hundreds of years—crowns, antlers, pentagrams, circles of thorns, crude claws slashed deep into limestone. Candles burn in alcoves, though no one tends them. Their flames do not flicker.