The forest received me like a confidant—silent, complicit, heavy with the scent of cold iron and old prayers. Frost gathered at my collar; the air tightened until even the stars seemed to hold their breath. I moved through it as through penance, each step deliberate, measured, meant to prove that I could still command the hunger that haunted me. The manor fell away behind me, its light shrinking to a pulse beneath the snow—hers, mine, the house's. I had sworn to retreat, to keep to the solitude that had preserved me for centuries, to be inevitable only when the hour required it. Yet the night betrayed me with its stillness. Every whisper of wind spoke her name; every shadow curved toward memory. By the time I realized I had stopped walking, my resolve had already turned—slowly, quietly—back toward her.
Strategy, I told myself again. A word sharpened to disguise obsession. Yet strategy does not ache. Strategy does not memorize the sound of a woman's breath caught between defiance and prayer. Strategy does not linger in the echo of her name as if it were the last syllable that could make the world move again.
The wind hunted me through the trees, carrying the faint perfume of wax and fear, of her. It threaded through the pines like a rumor, soft but relentless, until even the night seemed to conspire against my reasoning. I tried to rebuild the walls she had breached—to recall discipline, distance, the careful architecture of restraint—but they cracked beneath the weight of her voice in memory. Every step forward became an act of betrayal against the logic I had lived by. The hunger that had once obeyed me now moved with its own will, choosing her over caution, desire over endurance.
I called it a strategy because the truth was far less noble. What I wanted was not to win, but to understand the thing that had undone me—her quiet courage, her unlearned faith, the way she could look at a monster and see only the man he refused to be. The forest pressed closer, listening, and I knew that if I turned back, it would not be for conquest, but confession.
The silence was deliberate—her final act of mercy, or defiance, I could not tell. It hollowed the night, made every heartbeat sound foreign, like an echo that no longer belonged to me. I stood there, suspended between instinct and dignity, and for a breath's length, I envied the air that still moved toward her.
Snow drifted against my boots, whispering its small betrayals. The forest waited, as though uncertain which version of me would continue—the man who could leave her to her fate, or the creature who never could. I told myself I had already made the choice, that discipline had triumphed. Yet even the stars seemed to know I was lying; they trembled like witnesses afraid to speak.
I hated the air for touching her and then touching me. I hated the night for keeping her cries from me. I hated myself most of all for knowing that, had she whispered my name—just once—the snow would have cracked beneath my step and I would have come like ruin.
But she did not call.
The solitude I had once worn like armor had begun to feel like punishment. The walls, the woods, the endless white—all of it echoed her absence until even silence became her voice. The hearth refused to warm, the candles guttered as though afraid to burn, and the air carried a scent I could not banish—wax, lavender, the faint trace of a pulse that was not my own.
I had built this place to contain what I was. Stone remembers purpose; it does not forgive change. Yet as I crossed its threshold, the cold no longer obeyed me. The quiet I had worshipped turned traitor, repeating every word I had not said to her. I told myself I had returned to think, to prepare, to let her fade into the distance and reason. But reason is an artifice easily undone.
Each room recalled her in its own language—the chair she would have refused, the mirror she would have turned away from, the window that might have framed her if she had followed me here. I stood among ghosts of what had not happened and understood, too late, that indifference was no longer possible.
Now that indifference mocked me.
I listened until the sounds blurred, until the fire's protest and the trees' lament became one indistinguishable voice. It spoke in the language of endurance—slow, measured, without mercy. I had thought myself beyond such noises, immune to the living pulse of the world, but she had left its echo inside me like a heartbeat borrowed from another life.
I pressed my palm to the glass. Frost bloomed beneath my skin, delicate as script, vanishing as soon as it was written. Beyond it, the forest lay bruised with moonlight, patient as hunger itself. Every branch seemed to bow toward the manor, toward her, as if the night, too, had chosen a side.
The hours deepened; the fire sank low, its light fading to a pulse in the ash. My reflection stared back at me from the window—eyes dulled, face half lost to shadow. For a moment, I mistook the figure beyond the glass for her. The illusion broke, but the ache it left behind did not.
I told myself I would sit until the candles died, that I owed the night at least that much obedience. But the dark has a way of whispering what one refuses to think aloud, and its whispers had teeth. It told me what I already knew—that I was not made for stillness, not when she existed a breath away, trembling in a house that did not deserve her.
The hour thickened. The snow outside began to fall again—slow, soundless, absolute. And as it gathered against the window, I felt the truth move through me like blood returning to the vein:
I was already turning toward her.
"Why do you not call me?" I asked the empty room. The sound startled me; my voice had forgotten how to sound like yearning. The question hung there, unanswered, dissolving into the brittle air like smoke denied a flame.
I closed my eyes and saw her still—standing before that door, her back a perfect study in restraint. The tremor in her hands had been small, but I had seen it. Every line of her body spoke of terror mastered, not erased. She had looked toward the window once—as though she sensed me—and then forced her gaze away. That single gesture had undone every promise I made to myself.
I paced the room to quiet the vision, but it followed, faithful as guilt. The fire cracked behind me, throwing my reflection against the window—pale, uncertain, less man than echo. The night beyond seemed to breathe with her absence, and I hated it for how easily it held her when I could not.
If I had an ounce of mercy left, I would let her be. Let her forget the shape of me, the sound of my name, the danger she cannot yet name. But mercy has always come to me too late. I felt it then—the pull, the inevitability, the ruin that wears her face.
She is braver than I deserve.
I traced the lines I had drawn weeks ago—safe passages through the woods, alternate roads, names of those who owed me silence. All of it neat, deliberate, methodical. The illusion of control. The kind of planning men do when they wish to feel absolved of what they already intend to do.
My hand hovered over her name, written once in the corner of the map as though to test how ink would bear it. The curve of the letters had dried like a wound refusing to close. I tore the page in half, and still it felt like betrayal.
Outside, the wind shifted. The house listened. Every sound returned to me heavier, as if the night itself disapproved of my hesitation. I told myself she needed time—to see, to choose, to free herself without my interference. But choice is a fragile thing when fear has already spoken first. She would not run; she would endure. She always endures.
I had planned for everything except the part where she refused salvation. I had planned for everything except her will.
And that, too, is why I will fail.
Elias has broken her with precision. To rescue her by force would only remake her prison with a different warden. I pressed my palms against the table until the wood complained. The line between restraint and cowardice is finer than frost. The candle beside me guttered. I stared into its flame until the world contracted to that single point of light. The wax ran over my fingers and cooled before I felt it. How strange that heat still remembers me even when I cannot return its touch.
I rose and crossed to the shelves where I kept relics of the world before I learned to despise it. Dust stirred at my approach, rising like pale ghosts from their long sleep. The room smelled of paper and time, of lives measured and forgotten. My hand hesitated above the remnants—letters unopened, coins from empires now dissolved, a mirror veiled in ash. I had gathered these fragments once to remind myself of what I was; now they only accused me of what I had become.
On the lowest shelf lay the rose she had dropped the night we met. It had withered into something dark, almost metallic, yet its shape endured—defiant, unyielding, preserved by the cruelty of time. I traced a finger along its brittle edge and felt the phantom echo of her pulse. The touch was enough to summon her—her breath, her eyes, the tremor that had ruined my certainty.
"You have made me remember," I said to it. "And memory is the cruelest resurrection."
The rose did not answer, yet its silence deepened the room. Its shadow stretched long across the shelf, thin as a scar. I turned it in my hand, half expecting it to collapse, to grant me the mercy of forgetting. But it held. Even in death, it refused to let her go. The stem bit into my palm, and a bead of blood rose slowly, gleaming in the candlelight. It was such a small offering—proof that some part of me still obeyed the laws of the living. I set the rose back down, though the space it left in my hand throbbed like loss.
The silence answered—my oldest companion. It told me the truth I refused to hear: I would go back. Not tonight, perhaps, but soon. The snow bore my weight but whispered protests; even the earth resents eternity. Her image wavered in the water while I washed my face. I spoke to it as though it could hear me.
"You think me patient," I murmured. "You think my silence a form of mercy. It is not. It is a cage I built around what I dare not feel." The reflection broke when a drop of water fell from my hair. Her face scattered, and mine took its place. I almost envied the distortion. It looked less haunted than the truth. I watched the ripples fade until only stillness remained, and in that stillness, I recognized my defeat. Even absence had begun to resemble her.
The candlelight behind me wavered, reaching across the walls like a trembling confession. The air smelled faintly of smoke and cold iron. Every small thing reminded me that she existed somewhere beyond my reach—breathing, waiting, enduring. I wondered if she still stood by the window, or if the night had already convinced her I would obey.
I remembered her whisper at the window—Do not come. As if I could obey. Every refusal is a summons when spoken by her mouth.
I drew a shape without meaning to—a spiral like the staircase she had climbed, the path she will climb again unless I stop him. There are ways to destroy men like Elias. Slowly, elegantly, without noise. I could unmake his fortune, his allies, his name. I have done it before, to men far worse and far less deserving of pity. And yet, when I imagined his death, I saw not justice but her eyes turning from me, horrified by what she had made of me. To save her, I might have to become everything she believes me capable of and nothing she could ever forgive.
I stood and paced, the floorboards measuring my indecision. A wolf howled somewhere beyond the ridge—one note, low and clean, the sound of need without shame. I envied it. Wolves do not rationalize hunger. They feed or die.
But I am not a wolf. I am a thing that remembers oaths and histories, a thing that makes plans as a surgeon makes incisions—precise, necessary, inevitable. If I destroy Elias outright, the world will see only the ruin; they will never see the motive. If I unravel him slowly, the cost will pile like snow until there is nothing left of him worth mourning; she will survive the spectacle, perhaps even be spared the sight of my hands. Yet even that cruelty would burn her: to watch the man who claimed her name unmade piece by careful piece is a violence of its own.
So I folded the fantasy of blood back into the shape of strategy. I would not let my fury be theatre. I would be cleaner than that. I would take what he values—trust, coin, a reputation—and dissolve them until he stood naked, ridiculous, and finally impotent. I would teach him to fear loss in the quietest language I know. And when he bents, when his smile cracks and his hands no longer reach for her, I would be standing where the shadow meets the door—ready to take what remained, if she allowed it.
I ran my thumb along the rim of the locket on the shelf, feeling the old groove where a portrait once was. The gesture steadied me. There is a cruelty in patience, yes, but there is also a mercy in precision: the chance to end something without making her into my mirror. I closed the locket and set it back, and with that small, deliberate motion, the shape of my next steps fell into place.
Her name lived on my tongue like a forbidden prayer. "Evangelina."
The syllables broke against my teeth, softer than I intended, almost tender. The room brightened for an instant, as though the word itself carried light. Then darkness reclaimed it.
She is waiting. I know she is. Every thread of her silence pulls toward me like a tide. And yet she does not call. Pride? Fear? Or faith that I will come without being summoned?
Perhaps all three. Perhaps none. Her silence is not a void but a thing that speaks—patient, exacting, full of claim. It demands I choose not because she needs me to, but because she refuses to bend the world for my convenience. That is the cruelty that wounds me most: she will not make my sin easier by begging for deliverance.
I tasted the name again, and it tasted like permission and like accusation. To answer would be to break the balance she keeps; to remain would be to silence the part of her still brave enough to refuse me. The decision sat between my ribs like a stone. I could feel, with a clarity that was almost violent, which way it would fall.
She tests me without knowing it. She asks me to be both savior and restraint. She asks me to remember that to rescue her too soon is to betray her courage, and to wait too long is to let her perish. No god could answer such a prayer correctly. But I am not a god. I am what remains when heaven forgets a name.
I pressed my hand to the glass. Frost bloomed beneath my palm, a flower of perfect symmetry. It reminded me of the roses I had left for her—frozen, defiant, living because they refused to die correctly. I wondered if she still tended them, if she cursed their persistence as she did her own. The thought almost made me smile. There is a kinship between the things that survive out of stubbornness.
The frost deepened, branching outward like veins, delicate and relentless. Beneath it, I felt the pulse of the night, steady and cold. The world beyond the window was motionless, but I could sense her somewhere within it—breathing, waiting, unaware that my will had already begun to fracture.
I closed my eyes and whispered to the air that trembled between worlds. "Hold her. Until I can." The wind did not answer, but I felt its assent—a shiver through the glass, faint but certain, as though the night itself had promised to keep her for me a little longer.
I began to write. A list of names, debts, paths that lead toward ruin. The ink bled thickly, the script curling into something almost ceremonial. Strategy, yes. Let it be called that, so long as it ends with her free. Each name I wrote was another stone in the grave I was digging for her brother. I could not strike yet, but the hour would come. Patience is not mercy; it is arithmetic. Every cruelty he commits shortens his time. Every bruise he leaves is a tally against his soul. I will balance the account. When I finished, the page looked like scripture written in blood. I folded it once and set it aside. A storm was coming—I could smell it, sharp and metallic, the scent of thunder gnawing at the air. Fitting. The world itself is prepared to confess.
I stepped outside again. The snow had begun to fall anew, thick and unrepentant. It covered my tracks from the night before, erasing proof of my vigil. Only the roses would remain, sealed beneath their veil of white, still breathing frost instead of scent. I watched the storm gather its strength, the sky bruising to iron, the wind circling like a beast made of prayer and punishment. The air trembled with something that was not quite rage, not quite forgiveness—perhaps both.
I lifted my face to the falling snow, letting it melt against my skin before it remembered what I was. The cold reached my bones but not my heart; that, she had already claimed. Somewhere beyond the storm, she was awake beneath the same dark, drawing breath in a house that would one day be silent because of me. Let the storm come, I thought. Let it bury the world until all that remains is what cannot be erased. I looked once more toward the distant manor. A faint light burned behind one window—hers. Too faint for human eyes to see, but mine caught it, a pulse of fragile gold in a field of darkness. I bowed my head. Not in prayer. In surrender.
"Wait for me," I said to the wind, though I no longer knew whether I begged her or myself.
The snow answered in silence, and in that silence was promise. When at last I turned back toward my dwelling, dawn had not yet decided whether to return. I welcomed the indecision. It matched my own. The horizon was a bruise slowly healing, light buried beneath the weight of the storm. I thought of her standing by that window, her face pale against the glass, her courage a quiet defiance that outshone every flame in that cursed house.
The wind curled around me, carrying the faintest trace of rose and candle smoke. It might have been memory, or it might have been her. I did not question it. I let it guide me a few steps forward before the cold claimed me again. I do not know what I am becoming in her name—savior, monster, or something between—but the choice no longer feels mine. Perhaps it never was. Perhaps we were both written long before we met, our fates inked in the same trembling hand. All that remains now is to see which of us the story will forgive.
Let the world think me patient. Let her think me gone. I am neither. I am waiting for the moment when her courage and my sin meet in the same breath. And when it comes, I will no longer call it strategy. I will call it what it has always been. Love, perhaps—but love sharpened into something more deliberate, more precise. A blade forged in silence and tempered by restraint. A devotion that does not beg to be holy. The kind that builds its altar from ruin and kneels without asking for forgiveness. Let them call it obsession, damnation, blasphemy. They will all be right. When the hour arrives, I will not disguise it in language or reason. I will meet it as I have met every darkness before—barehanded, unrepentant, and hers.
The fire cracked once, too loudly, and I flinched—as if the sound itself accused me. The chamber stank of solitude and smoke, the air bruised by the weight of memory. I sat without moving, though my body begged for motion, for violence, for anything that might drown the echo of her suffering. The world outside had quieted, but the silence was not peace. It was a grave, shallow, and waiting.
I had seen cruelty before. I had written it, shaped it, performed it until it became language. But this—hers—it burned differently. It had no poetry. No ceremony. Only pain, bare and graceless, inflicted by a man too cowardly to know the difference between power and possession. Every sound from that room had branded itself into me, every cry that never came, every silence that begged louder than screams.
I thought I had forgotten how to tremble, but I felt it then—the pulse of rage beneath the calm I had spent centuries constructing. It moved through me like blood rediscovering its path, like an old god stirring in the dark. I could feel it pressing against my ribs, urging my hands toward destruction. The wolf in me howled for retribution; the man in me whispered her name to quiet it.
The flame in the hearth wavered, uncertain of its purpose. I watched it lean, shudder, and right itself again. Such a fragile thing, fire—so easily snuffed, so easily spread. I envied its simplicity. It does not weigh mercy against justice. It consumes what stands before it and calls the act completion.
I closed my eyes, but her image did not fade. It lived behind my lids, luminous and terrible, a reminder that restraint has a cost. The longer I waited, the more the world demanded payment. I pressed my palms to my temples, and still her voice did not leave me. The sound of her breath—small, broken things that tried to keep dignity while dying beneath him. The way she trembled, but never wept aloud. The defiance refused to die even as Elias tried to extinguish it. It all replayed, a film burned into the back of my skull.
When I closed my eyes, I saw her—against the frost, against the floor, against her fate. Her body bending, her will unbending. The bruises forming like signatures of blasphemy upon skin that had once known gentleness. I saw the candlelight crawl over her face, trembling with her pulse, casting shadows like ghosts of prayers unspoken. Her silence had always been her weapon, but tonight it became her wound. I could feel it across the distance between us, the terrible beauty of her endurance, the quiet refusal that made her suffering unbearable to witness. Every breath she took was a rebellion; every heartbeat, an indictment.
I wanted to tear the night apart, to split the air until it bled her name. To shatter every wall between us and end him before his next breath could reach her. But even that fantasy felt profane beside her courage. She bore her torment with a grace that mocked my power. I, who could unmake kingdoms, could do nothing but listen. I opened my eyes to the fire, its glow guttering like a heartbeat spent. The room had not changed, yet everything in it felt smaller—every object reduced to witness, every shadow complicit. The world seemed suddenly unworthy of her.
It would not stop. The images came faster. Her hands were clutching at the air as if it could forgive her. The echo of his words—Did you meet someone who believes he can keep you? Hope has a scent; it's a vulgar perfume. Each phrase a lash. Each syllable a wound. And I, the thing made of centuries, could do nothing but listen.
The sound of him—the rhythm of cruelty, deliberate and practiced—threaded through me like iron through blood. I felt every strike in her silence, every withheld cry carving itself into the hollow of my chest. The beast within me stirred, demanding release, but I forced it still. If I surrendered to it now, I would not stop until the house itself lay in ruin. I dug my nails into my palms until the skin broke. Pain, honest and immediate, reminded me that I could still bleed for her. The scent of it rose—salt and iron—an old language my body had not spoken in years. The flame shuddered on its wick, as though recoiling from what I had become.
I wanted to be wind, door, shadow—anything that could reach her without the cost of my presence. Instead, I remained what I have always been: a witness shackled to restraint. It is a curse older than hunger, this watching without touch. To see, to know, to ache—and do nothing. The room pulsed with her suffering. The walls seemed to lean closer, listening as I whispered her name once, not as prayer, not as vow, but as apology.
Anger should have felt familiar—it has been my oldest lover—but this fury was different. It was not cold. It did not sharpen me; it unmade me. My control, my restraint, my centuries of discipline—all cracked under the pressure of her silence. I rose, pacing before the dying fire, the floor creaking in protest. My reflection in the window stared back, distorted by frost, more specter than man. "You could have stopped it," it whispered. I struck the glass with my fist, hard enough to fracture it but not to break it. A web of cracks bloomed across the pane, each line like a vein of guilt.
Blood gathered at my knuckles, bright against the pallor of my skin. It slid into the cracks, tracing them like ink, filling the fractures I could not mend. The glass trembled, threatening to shatter, but held—mocking me with its endurance. I almost envied it. How easily it could remain whole while broken. The wind outside screamed against the window, desperate to enter, to bear witness. The fire flared once, startled by the violence, then collapsed into embers. Shadows leaped across the walls, taking shapes that resembled her hands, her mouth, her defiance. They reached for me and vanished before I could touch them.
I pressed my forehead to the glass, breathing in the cold until it stung my lungs. The world beyond was a blur of white and black—snow and forest, silence and sin. Somewhere within that darkness, she was still breathing. That truth both steadied and destroyed me. I drew my hand back, the blood drying already, the sting fading too quickly. "You could have stopped it," the reflection whispered again. "Yes," I said. "And I will."
"But why didn't you move?" Because she hadn't called. Because I told myself I honored her will. Because I lied.
The truth burned through me: I did not move because I was afraid—afraid that once I began, I would not stop. That I would paint the walls of that house in her brother's blood and forget to feel shame for it. That I would enjoy it.
And perhaps I would have.
The thought curdled in me, thick and undeniable. I have killed before; I know the rhythm of ending a life—the stillness after, the purity of it. It is too easy. Violence has a clarity that mercy lacks. But this… this would not have been justice. It would have been hunger masquerading as salvation. I told myself I waited for her sake, to spare her the sight of what I am when I no longer measure my strength. But that, too, was cowardice dressed as care. I feared her gaze more than his cruelty. I feared what she would see when the mask of restraint fell away—what she would name me if she watched me become what I was made for.
The night pressed close, listening. Even the storm seemed to hesitate, unsure whether to cleanse or to witness. I bowed my head, the truth settling like ash inside me: she was not the only one trapped in that house. Her pain had become a contagion, infecting every fiber I once thought immune. Even now, I could smell her despair in the air—iron and roses, salt and wax. I could taste it, bitter on my tongue, like communion turned to poison.
I sat again, but sitting did nothing to still the trembling. I ran a hand through my hair, gripping until strands tore loose. My body remembered motion even when my mind demanded restraint. I had not felt this alive in centuries—and I hated it.
"What have you done to me?" I whispered into the cold.
The question hung there, absurd and useless. She could not hear me, and even if she could, she would not understand. How could she? She, with her fragile hope and broken body, had woken something that should have stayed buried. Something older than mercy, older than thought—a hunger that knew her name long before I did. It coiled within me now, patient and cruel, whispering of blood and warmth and the salvation found in ruin. I wanted to deny it, to tear it out of myself, but it had already taken root, wrapping around the hollows where faith once lived.
I pressed my palms together, as if prayer could contain what devotion could not. "You've undone me," I said, softer this time, not accusation but awe. The words clouded in the air, a ghost that refused to vanish. For a long while, I simply listened—to the fire dying in the hearth, to the wind pacing outside the door, to the echo of her heartbeat where no heartbeat should exist. I tried to reason with myself: she is one mortal among thousands; she is temporary; she will wither, and you will not. But logic has no dominion over the haunted. Each attempt to forget only brought her closer. I could feel the ghost of her warmth beneath my fingertips, though I have no warmth to give. I could see the hollow beneath her eyes, the pale shimmer of courage where despair should have been.
When I closed my eyes again, I saw Elias instead. His smirk. His composure. His self-made godhood. I imagined how easily his spine would break. How quietly his breath would end. How satisfying the silence would be after the final plea. The thought came to me with such clarity that I almost mistook it for memory. My body reacted before conscience could intervene—a tightening of the jaw, a shift in stance, the phantom weight of a blade in my hand. I could see it: his blood on the marble, the light fading from those arrogant eyes. For a moment, it felt just. For a moment, it felt right. But righteousness is a mask cruelty wears when it wants to be adored. I have worn it before; I know its texture. It fits too easily. The danger lies not in vengeance, but in how sweetly it sings.
I exhaled and opened my eyes, the image dissolving like breath on glass. The room returned, unchanged but watching. The fire hissed, weary of my hesitation. Even the wind seemed to hold itself still, waiting for me to decide what kind of man—or monster-I would be when dawn found me. I stood again, my body moving before thought. My teeth ached; my vision blurred. The room smelled suddenly of ash and iron, though neither were present. The urge was old, instinctual—the predator waking after too long an imitation of civility.
I wanted to kill him. I wanted to erase him.
Not for justice—there is no justice left in me—but for the desecration of beauty. For teaching her to flinch when she should have been adored. For every bruise he'd written in his own language of cowardice. But I also knew this: if I killed him tonight, I would lose her. She would see in me only another tyrant, another cage wearing different teeth.
I wrapped my hands around the locket at my throat as if to steady my pulse. Mercy, if mercy there must be, will be precise. I will not let my failure to feel shame become her chain. I will balance the account—slowly, inevitably—so that when the last thing falls away, she may still look at me and see, if not saint, then at least the man who kept his hands from becoming what she feared.
And yet even as I vowed this, a darker honesty edged forward: patience is only another shape of hunger, and patience prolonged can teach a cruelty of its own. Waiting will hollow a man as surely as violence; ruin administered drip by drip may torment more exquisitely than a single blade. I felt that possibility like a cold finger at my throat and answered it with another promise—no spectacle, no blood for display, but no mercy for the crimes he has carved into her. Let him unravel in the quiet; let him learn the slow arithmetic of loss. When at last the accounting is complete, if she stands before me and names what I have become, I will accept it. There will be consequences for my restraint as well as for my rage. I will accept them all so that whatever remains of her will be hers alone.
But the paradox sickened me. To protect her, I must become again the thing I once vowed to bury. To save her, I must risk losing what little of her belief I possess. I sank to my knees before the fire. The embers breathed faintly, a dying heart refusing to still. The heat pressed against my face like a confession. "I should have gone back," I said, the words cracking. "I should have ended it." No one answered, and still the silence scolded me.
Her name pulsed in my skull: Evangelina.
Each repetition cut deeper, each memory another blade. Her face as she turned at the stairs. She shivered when my unseen hand brushed the air behind her neck. The blood on her lip. The way she touched the rose I left, reverent as prayer. The fire wavered as if it, too, remembered her. Sparks rose like fragments of her voice, breaking apart before they reached the chimney's throat. I stared into them until my vision blurred, until I saw her there again—her shoulders bowed, her eyes shining with a defiance that even pain could not dim.
I pressed a hand to the hearthstone. The warmth there felt borrowed, false, a mimicry of what she had once given freely. If I closed my eyes, I could almost feel her heartbeat echoing beneath my palm, steady and fragile, a rhythm the world was not worthy of. I whispered her name again, quieter this time, not as an invocation but as repentance. The sound of it hollowed the room. The silence that followed was not empty—it was listening. And in that listening, I felt her absence expand until it filled everything I had left.
And the way she endured—wordless, unbroken, holy in her suffering. It made me furious. It made me revere her. It made me ache.
I leaned my head against the cold stone wall and let the pain wash through me. The chill bit at my skin, a welcome punishment, a poor substitute for penance. "I cannot see her body ruined again," I whispered. "Not by his hand. Not by mine." It was a vow. Not the kind made with ceremony or witness. The kind carved into bone.
The words lingered in the air, weightless yet binding, as though the night itself had taken note. The fire snapped behind me, a sound too alive for so dead a room. I felt the echo of my own heartbeat—slow, reluctant, the pulse of something ancient remembering why it still endures.I closed my eyes and saw her again, the curve of her shoulders beneath that cruel light, her breath shuddering like a prayer she refused to release. She had survived him once; she would survive again—but not alone. Not while I still remembered what it was to hunger and to protect in the same breath.
I pressed my palm to the floor, feeling the cold seep through skin and sinew until it reached what was left of my heart. "I will not fail her," I said, though I no longer knew if it was a promise or a curse. The silence accepted both. And somewhere beyond the walls, the storm began to rise—slow, deliberate, answering. I rose once more and crossed to the shelves. My hands found the old blade—ceremonial, elegant, meant for rituals now outlawed even by monsters. Its edge gleamed faintly in the moonlight, silver catching silver. I did not draw it for blood. Not yet. But I held it like an answer.
If she called for me again, I would go. And this time, I would not stop until he ceased to exist.
I thought of his words again—Did you meet someone who believes he can keep you? Hope has a scent; it's a vulgar perfume. The arrogance in them festered, replaying in my head until they no longer sounded like words but like mockery. My hand tightened around the hilt until it cracked the wood.
Hope has a scent, he said. Yes. So does death. The blade hummed faintly in my palm, a note of promise and peril, as if it had been waiting for the moment when I would choose its voice over reason. I could taste both in the air—candles and rose, and beneath them the colder metal of consequence. There are many deaths a man can meet: public, theatrical, sudden. There are other deaths, surgical and patient, that unravel a life without spectacle, leaving only the quiet that follows when no one is left to speak for the dead.
I do not hunger for spectacle. I prefer the calculus of undoing: reduce a man's holdings, unthread his favors, let the name that once swung gates fall hollow in mouths that used to worship it. When a man begins to fear the debts he cannot repay—his reputation, his borrowed loyalties, the casual worship of sycophants—humility arrives without theater and lasts far longer than any shouted confession. Yet if necessity demands it, if keeping her whole requires my hands to be stained, then blood will speak where patience cannot.
I set the tip of the blade against the sill, feeling the cool give beneath metal and wood, and for the first time since I tasted the sharpness of longing, I did not flinch. Soon, he would learn to tell the difference. But beneath the fury, beneath the planning, beneath the centuries of composure I wore like armor, something else stirred—something softer, more dangerous. Guilt. Not for him. For her. For how I had watched and waited and done nothing.
Each breath I took now was heavy with her silence. I could almost hear her heartbeat again, slower now, faint. I imagined her lying awake, her body aching, her mind repeating the names of her fears. Did she think of me then? Did she curse me for not coming? I did not deserve her curse, but I desired it more than forgiveness. Forgiveness is sterile; it ends things. But hatred—it sustains. It binds. It keeps the living tied to the dead and the damned alike.
Perhaps she would never forgive me. Perhaps that was how she would love me. I smiled bitterly, the expression foreign to my face. "So be it," I murmured. "If her hatred keeps me near, I'll wear it gladly."
The words tasted bitter-sweet. Somewhere deep in the forest, something howled—low, mournful, and free. I envied the honesty of its grief. My own was a quieter thing, made of restraint and centuries of penance. I wondered if she would ever know how much I had already given to the silence between us—how much of myself I had entombed there, waiting for her to resurrect or condemn.
The fire had sunk to embers. I watched their faint light pulse, slow and uneven, and thought: love and damnation share the same color when seen in the dark. The fire had dimmed again, but I no longer tended it. I preferred the cold now—it matched the hollowness beneath my ribs. I had forgotten what warmth was, but pain—pain I remembered well. It was the one companion that never betrayed me.
I stood once more, pacing the length of the room, my shadow following like a second conscience. The air shifted; the snow outside thickened, covering even the trace of moonlight. A storm was rising—an echo of my own unrest. I pressed my hand to my chest, where once a heartbeat lived. I felt nothing. Yet beneath that nothing, there was movement—slow, reluctant, like a long-buried seed stirring in frost.
Was this love? No. Love is mortal, transient, naïve. This was something older. A hunger that remembered tenderness. I hated it. I welcomed it. It spread through me like thawing ice, painful in its gentleness. I could feel it crawling up my throat, reshaping the way I breathed her name. There was no purity in it, no redemption waiting beyond it. Only the knowledge that she had awakened the one part of me that should have stayed buried.
The storm pressed harder against the glass, rattling the panes like a summons. I watched the snow blur the horizon until sky and earth became one pale wound. Perhaps this is what eternity truly is—not peace, not stillness, but the endless cycle of remembering and denying the same ache. I closed my eyes and let the cold seep into me, deeper and deeper, until even memory began to tremble. "So be it," I whispered to the dark. "If this is what remains of me, then let it consume what's left."
The wind answered, low and guttural, as if the night itself approved. And for the first time in centuries, I felt something close to life move beneath the ruin. The storm broke at last, wind clawing at the shutters, snow beating against the walls in relentless rhythm. It sounded like her breath again, ragged and urgent. I sat in the dark and let it play through me until the ache became unbearable.
"Why her?" I asked aloud. "Why this woman, when I have buried kingdoms without a flicker of remorse?"
No answer came, but I already knew it. She was not merely beautiful—she was illumination. Through her, I finally understood what light was meant to be. It was not warmth, nor grace, but clarity: the unbearable honesty of seeing, and being seen. I had walked through centuries of shadow, thinking I understood the world, and then she looked at me—and the darkness retreated, ashamed of itself.
In her presence, the air changed. The world seemed to remember how to breathe again. Every line of her face, every tremor in her voice, every silence she held—each was a lesson in what it meant to live beneath light and not be burned. She was not the reason I remembered beauty; she was the reason beauty remembered me. I leaned back in my chair and let the storm rage. The manor would be silent by now. She would be asleep—or pretending. He would be drunk on his own peace, believing the world had bent again to his will. Let him rest. Let him dream of control. It will make his awakening exquisite.
Soon, I told myself. Soon, I will break the architecture of his comfort. But not yet. Patience, like cruelty, is best served slowly. When the wind finally died, I looked toward the horizon. A faint pulse of light glowed there—the first hint of dawn. I should have turned away. I always do. But this time, I stayed. I let the sun's pale edge creep over my hand, watched as it burned my skin to gray smoke, felt nothing but its defiance.
It was her I thought of as I watched the flesh wither: her defiance, her pain, her silence, her name. She has made a monster remember what it means to ache. I pulled my hand away and stared at the faint scars already fading. "You make me mortal," I whispered. "And I hate you for it." But even as I said it, I knew the truth. If she called—if she so much as breathed my name—I would go to her again, gladly, ruinously, and never come back.
Because love for me is not salvation. It is gravity. It drags me toward her with a tenderness sharp enough to wound, an inevitability older than my sin. The sun rose higher, relentless, reaching for me like forgiveness I did not ask for. I watched it climb and thought of her eyes—how even in terror they held light that could shame the dawn itself.
The pain subsided, but the ache remained, threading itself through every part of me that still remembered warmth. I could almost hear her voice in the wind, soft and breaking, not as a plea but as prophecy. Perhaps she already knows: there is no distance wide enough to keep me. No command is strong enough to hold me. The horizon brightened to gold. I turned away at last, not out of fear, but reverence. The day belonged to her. The night, as ever, belonged to me.
And somewhere between them, we are both unmade.
The wind shifted once more, carrying her scent—roses and ash, defiance and despair. I closed my eyes. The room dissolved, and I was there again: the manor, the candles, the bloodless silence, her trembling hands. It played and replayed until the walls themselves seemed to breathe her name. "Evangelina…" It was no longer a vow, nor a curse. It was a surrender. And somewhere deep within, something—heart, soul, or what remains of both—answered her in kind.
The sound lingered in the air, softer than breath, older than prayer. It threaded through the cracks of the house, through stone and frost and memory, until even the fire dared not move. I felt it take root in me—the quiet recognition that there would be no turning away, not now, not ever. She was written into the marrow of what I am, and every moment apart only carved the letters deeper.
I opened my eyes, but the world had changed its shape. The walls seemed to lean closer, listening. The light bent differently, pale and reverent. Her presence was everywhere—impossible, undeniable. The air itself bore her weight.
I whispered her name again, testing it, tasting it, letting it claim what it would. The syllables trembled as they left my mouth, not as an invocation but as a confession. And for the first time since I had forgotten what it was to be human, the silence that followed did not frighten me. It felt like belonging. I stepped forward, just once, letting the wind rise against me, the last whisper of night brushing my face like absolution withheld. It did not matter whether she called. The calling was already in me.
"Soon," I murmured to the dark. Not a promise. Not a threat. Simply the truth.
The dawn broke in full then, spilling gold across the snow—light too pure for monsters, too merciful for saints. I let it touch me one last time before retreating into the shadows. The pain it left behind was exquisite.
It was the shape of her name.