Back in the room, the air felt heavier than before. The walls still carried the scent of the Evergarden bar—cheap whiskey, perfume, the stale warmth of too many conversations. I sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the carpet, replaying everything that had happened downstairs. Poppy's laughter. Corvian's attention fixed on her. The way she leaned in and he didn't move away.
Why did it anger me? Why did it matter?
It wasn't jealousy, not exactly—something quieter, more corrosive. Watching him give that kind of attention to someone else felt like being erased, like a trick past its novelty. Was this what he felt when he walked in on Clay and me? That strange, restrained fury disguised as indifference? I hated how the thought made sense.
The bathroom door opened, letting out a curl of steam. Corvian stepped out, toweling his hair, his shirt open at the collar. He looked at me briefly, then said, "Wanna hear something?"
"Not when you just walked out of the bathroom," I said.
His brows knotted, faintly incredulous. "You're disgusting."
I laughed, the sound thinner than I meant. "Okay, tell me."
"No," he said, tossing the towel aside. "You're not worthy."
I rolled my eyes. "Then why start talking at all?"
He didn't answer, just turned toward the window, running a hand through his damp hair.
Before I could press him, my phone began to ring. The sound cut through the room, sharp and intrusive. I grabbed it off the nightstand without checking the screen, expecting Eddie again. "Yeah?"
"Hugo."
The voice stopped me cold. "Odette," I said flatly.
"Yes," she replied. "I've been trying to call Hank, but he's not answering. Things are getting really bad." Her breath came through the line in short, uneven bursts. "Harry's friends called me from Hollowford. They said he's been wandering the streets at night, aimlessly. They found him sleeping next to a vending machine. He's not focused on his studies, he's—he's doing strange things. I think he needs to go to a hospital. Can you come with me to pick him up?"
I stared at the wall, my knuckles whitening around the phone. "Why should I come with you? Take Stephen."
"Stephen's young," she said quickly. "He wouldn't know how to act in these situations. I'm asking you nicely, Hugo. Please. He's your cousin. Someone very close to you."
"Last time I checked, you hated how close we were," I said. "I can't come with you, Odette. Call a friend. Call another relative. I don't care."
"Hugo," she snapped, her voice breaking with disbelief, "when did you become so cruel?"
"I was never kind," I said evenly. "You said that yourself. A hundred times, remember? I was never kind, never considerate, always took too much space. And now you're taking too much of my time. Go solve your problems on your own."
"Is this how you talk to your aunt?" she shouted. "To someone who kept you in their house for ten years?"
"Yeah," I said quietly. "And they kicked me out pretty badly, didn't they? You're missing the point, Odette. I'm not coming to Hollowford. I've got to go now."
"Hugo—"
"Bye." I hung up before she could finish.
I stayed there, breathing shallowly. Pretending I didn't care was easier than admitting I did. But beneath the calm, worry moved like something alive. Harry—sleeping on the street, losing focus, acting strange. Something about it gnawed at me.
I turned to Corvian. He was sitting now, perfectly composed, watching me as though he'd been listening the entire time.
"What happens to Harry?" I asked. My voice cracked more than I wanted it to. "What's going on? She said he's wandering around, doing weird things. What's happening to him?"
Corvian didn't answer right away. The silence between us stretched, heavy and deliberate. His expression didn't change—only his eyes shifted, the faintest flicker of something I couldn't name.
I hated how his quietness always felt like a verdict.
Corvian didn't answer my question. He only turned, slow enough that the air seemed to shift around him.
There it was—the scar. The same pale, deliberate curve I'd noticed once before. It caught the dim yellow glow of the lamp.
He touched it lightly, as if acknowledging an altar. "Do you remember this?"
I swallowed, my throat tight. "I do."
He faced me fully then, his eyes calm in that terrible way only his could be. "Your cousin becomes a suit."
It took me a second to understand what I'd heard. The words entered softly, but their meaning hit like a slow implosion—sound collapsing inward.
"What?" I said, my voice barely a whisper.
He touched the pale seam at his neck like a liturgy. "A marked body isn't possessed, Hugo—it's prepared. The soul isn't forced out; it's displaced. Dormant. What remains is a house with the doors unlocked and the walls still warm."
His words were too measured, too beautiful for what they meant.
I couldn't move. The room felt suspended around us, sound drained from everything but his voice.
"So when I say your cousin becomes a suit," he continued, "I don't mean grotesque mimicry. I mean translation. We can't touch without one. Flesh is what gives us weight. Without it, we are only memory—sound without echo."
He stepped closer. I noticed the small human things about him then—the shallow line under his eyes, the way his body shivered slightly from the cool air still leaking from the bathroom, the faint twitch in his throat that betrayed a pulse. Details I had always dismissed as mannerisms, illusions.
"This body," he said, laying a hand against his chest, "is not mine. It remembers things I never lived. Scars that belong to a stranger. Reflexes that surface before I think to act. Sometimes it flinches before I do. Sometimes it dreams."
He spoke like he was reciting scripture—devotion turned inward, a creed for the damned.
"I am its tenant, not its soul. The one who wore it before me… left it ready. What you did to Harry—what you call a crime—is not new. It is a rite as old as the fall itself."
I took a step back, my knees weak. "So you're saying… you—someone did this to you too?"
He nodded once, without pride or shame. "The body I wear once waited, like his will. Someone prepared it, hollowed it, left its soul wandering. I stepped in. And when you marked your cousin, you opened the same door."
I felt sick. My hands were shaking. The idea of Harry—not dead, but waiting—struck something deeper than grief. It was worse than death. It was pause.
"You ask what became of him," Corvian said, his voice lowering. "When you marked him, you didn't wound him. You unmoored him. His soul walks where it should not. His body remains, waiting to be spoken through."
He turned slightly, the light pooling along his shoulders. "That's all a suit is, Hugo—a body waiting for a voice. The one I wear once waited too."
He said it so calmly that it felt blasphemous. Like hearing a prayer recited in reverse.
I stared at him—the shape of him, the weight of him—and saw, for the first time, not a devil, but an echo of someone else's sin. Mine, just older. Someone once did to him what I had done to Harry. The revelation lodged deep in me, cold and unbearable.
The silence that followed was immense.
"This isn't—" I started, but the words dissolved halfway. "This isn't real. It can't be."
Corvian looked at me with something close to pity, though it vanished as quickly as it came. "Don't pity him," he said. "He was long gone before I came. Bodies don't die when the soul leaves, Hugo. They just wait for something to make use of them."
He turned his gaze toward the window then, and for the first time I noticed the reflection staring back at us—not just his, not just mine. Something in-between.
And it was waiting.
I couldn't breathe. The words wouldn't leave me. They stayed in my mouth, dry and bitter, as if the air itself refused to carry them.
He was standing right there—Corvian, my teacher, my ruin—and yet what I saw wasn't him anymore. It was what he had been before the possession, before grace was stripped from whatever made him eternal. The weight of his existence was suddenly unbearable; every motion of his borrowed body felt sacrilegious.
I looked at him and realized that I was looking at the consequence of what I had done.
The thought struck through me, clean and merciless: Harry would become this. A vessel. A body unmoored, emptied of its rightful soul, waiting for something unspeakable to crawl inside. Somewhere out there, in the same world that once held him, something like Corvian would wear his skin.
My body went cold.
He had said it so plainly—Your cousin becomes a suit. Like it was nothing more than fact, not horror. My cousin. My Harry. The same boy who once shared my cigarettes behind the school gates, whose laughter used to echo through the night until Odette shouted at us to stop.
And now—what? His soul wandering like smoke over water, his body still warm somewhere, waiting for a voice that wasn't his.
I pressed my hands against my face, but it didn't stop the tremor. "No," I whispered. "No, this can't—"
Corvian watched me. He didn't move, didn't even blink. His stillness made everything worse, as though grief itself had to obey his silence.
"You mean," I said, forcing the words out, "you mean there's something in him now. Someone—like you."
"Not yet," he said softly. "But soon. The body calls to what's missing. It doesn't stay vacant forever."
I stepped back until my shoulder met the wall. "You're telling me he's going to turn into this—this—" I gestured at him, at the body that was both his and not his.
"This," he said, and touched his chest, "is not turning. It's continuation."
I stared. His calm was obscene.
"It's what you made of him," he continued. "What someone once made of me."
The words cracked open something I couldn't close. All this time I'd thought he'd been my undoing, that he had found me and reshaped me into something beneath him. But no—he was proof that the same sin had already been committed, long before me. Someone had done this to him. Someone had carved the same wound into another body and filled it with a thing that thought like him, felt like him, spoke like him.
"You wear another man," I said, my voice shaking. "You live inside his skin."
Corvian's gaze softened, not with pity, but with patience. "I inhabit it," he said. "The difference matters."
I wanted to hate him. I wanted to strike him, to shout something cruel enough to fill the space between us. But I couldn't. Because behind that composure, I could see it now—the small human betrayals of flesh. The twitch of muscle when the room cooled. The way his breath trembled, faintly, when he exhaled. The pulse fluttering just beneath the hollow of his throat.
The body remembered life, even if he didn't.
And Harry—my Harry—would remember too. Even when he was gone. Even when something else stood inside him, speaking with a voice that wasn't his.
The thought hollowed me. My chest felt carved out. I could almost hear him calling my name, that easy laugh catching in his throat. I had thought the worst thing I'd done was hurt him. Now I understood—I hadn't hurt him. I had undone him.
Corvian's voice came again, quiet, certain. "Bodies don't die when the soul leaves, Hugo. They just wait."
The words pressed against me like prayer and punishment.
I looked at him—this fallen thing, wrapped in a stranger's form—and it felt like standing before my own aftermath. My own sin, breathing. My future, already spoken.
And suddenly, I understood what damnation looked like. It had a pulse.
He moved closer. I didn't step back. Couldn't. There was something unearthly in the way he approached—measured, deliberate, as though each step was a thought he'd already weighed. The space between us thinned until I could see the glint of light catching the curve of his scar again, the seam that made him more terrifying than divine.
He leaned down, close enough that his breath grazed my ear. "Is this body your type?" he whispered.
For a second, I didn't understand. The words were too quiet, too calm. Then they sank in, and my stomach turned.
"What are you talking about?" I said, the shock cracking through my voice. "You just told me Harry's body is going to be used for—whatever this is—and you're asking me if this body is to my liking?"
Something shifted in his face then, the way storms do before they break—silent, swift, unstoppable. His eyes darkened, his jaw tightened, and when he spoke again, his voice was not calm. It rose, sharp and cold, filling the room like the first shatter of glass.
"And what the fuck did you expect?"
The sound hit me hard. I had never heard him like that. Not once.
"You thought marking someone was what, Hugo?" He stepped back, gesturing with one hand, his tone flaying me open. "A badge of honor? Some holy act of mercy? Or did you stupidly believe you were upgrading them to heaven?"
I couldn't speak. I stood frozen, the words slamming through every fragile piece of thought I had left.
"What did you expect?" he went on, his voice breaking from control into something raw. "You were asked to mark a body to seal your pact with a devil, and now you're shocked—shocked—to learn what happens to the flesh after? Is your mind that primitive?"
"Corvian—"
He cut me off, the rage in his tone suddenly quieter, sharper. "Do you even listen to yourself? You toyed with eternity like it was a trick deck in your hand and never thought to ask what the cards were made of."
He turned away from me, pacing once across the room before stopping near the window. His hand dragged through his hair, a gesture too human for him, too exhausted. "This is impossible," he muttered. "I thought you'd be smarter than this."
I stared at the back of his head, the line of his shoulders taut with fury. His words hung between us, hot and heavy, each one burning its way into me.
He laughed once, low and bitter. "Turns out you're as stupid as they all come."
The silence after was brutal. I could still hear his anger breathing through the room, still feel the sting of his words tightening around my ribs.
And maybe he was right. Maybe I was that stupid—too blinded by what I wanted from him to ever stop and see what I had actually done.
"You should be thankful he isn't dead," Corvian said, still facing the window. His reflection stared back at me from the glass—pale, distant, divided between two worlds. "Instead, you stand there so repulsed, so shocked by the idea. Unbelievable."
I stepped forward before I could stop myself. "I need you to be humble for a second and understand me!" My voice cracked against the stillness. "This is all new to me, Corvian. All of it. Knowing that this body standing in front of me right now—" I gestured toward him, my hand shaking. "—is someone who once lived, who ate, slept, had people who loved him, somebody's son—being used like that—it's not something I can just comprehend overnight. I'm not repulsed, I'm just… lost."
He turned then, slow, unhurried, like he was giving my words time to die before answering. "And how do you think I got this body, Hugo?" His tone was knife-smooth, precise. "Knitted it together? 3D printed it?"
"Anything else but this!" I shouted. "Maybe it's an illusion, maybe it's something else!"
He scoffed. The sound was sharp, humorless. "You're very perplexing," he said. "You deal with morality like it's fine dining—laid out with a knife and fork, all neat and tidy. You pick it up, slice it small, chew carefully, and swallow only what's convenient for you. When it serves your guilt, you feast. But deep down?" His eyes found mine, unwavering. "You're beyond fucked up, Hugo."
I couldn't help it—a laugh slipped out, dry and mean. "That makes two of us, then."
Corvian tilted his head, studying me the way one might study something broken to decide whether it's worth repairing. He stayed like that for a long moment, and then said flatly, "You need to be locked in a mental facility."
The absurdity of it broke through my chest and I laughed again, louder this time, too tired to restrain it. "Let's talk business now," I said, voice uneven, eyes still on him.
The words hung there like a dare.
He didn't move. But his silence felt like the tightening of a string—something pulled just short of snapping.
I felt the need to steer the conversation elsewhere—away from the scar, the body, the unbearable truth he had made sound almost sacred. If I stayed in that moment any longer, I knew I'd lose my grip on what was left of reason.
So I forced the words, careless and desperate, just to break the weight of his silence. Let's talk business. Anything, anything that could pull me back toward the living world, toward the ordinary rhythm of speech, of breath, of pretending things were still within human reach.
Maybe if we talked about something else, I could start to normalize it—the way one learns to live beside disaster, pretending it isn't disaster at all. Maybe if I treated what he said as another piece of information, something logistical, I could fold it into my mind neatly, make it tolerable.
But my thoughts were fraying. The edges of the world felt unstable, softening under the weight of what I now knew. This madness was my own making—born from my hands, my choices—but it kept unraveling, thread after thread, deeper and darker than I could follow. And I could feel it still descending, the slow, dizzying drop into something I couldn't name.
I told myself to breathe. To stay anchored. To keep my head above whatever tide I had called. Because if I didn't—if I let myself feel the full truth of what he'd said—I knew I wouldn't come back from it.
I wanted to tell Odette to stop looking for him. To stop calling, stop trying, stop convincing herself that help still existed. She didn't know what she was chasing anymore. The boy she was desperate to save wasn't there to be found—only what was left of him, a shell still breathing, still warm, but emptied of the thing that had made him Harry.
What was about to become of him wasn't something a doctor could fix. No medicine, no hospital ward, no gentle voice explaining the nature of trauma. There wasn't a cure for this. You can't medicate a soul back into a body once it's been displaced. You can't coax life into what's already been claimed by something older than creation.
I wanted to call her, to tell her the truth, but what could I possibly say? Don't take him to a hospital, Odette. Take him to a priest—no, not even that. Take him to a church and leave him there, because what's inside him isn't your son anymore, it's something that fell before the first breath of man.
But even that wouldn't make sense. Even I didn't understand it. Corvian's words still echoed in my head, twisting and endless. The soul is displaced. The body waits. It made sense only in theory. But this—this was my cousin. My blood.
I had thrown him into the path of no return.
The thought cut through me, sharp and wet. There was no undoing it, no absolution, not even in death. He wasn't dead, that was the irony. He was alive—alive enough to walk, to be found sleeping near vending machines, to breathe under a sky that no longer recognized him. But that wasn't mercy. That was imprisonment.
I didn't know if exorcism would even matter. How do you cast out something that was invited by divine law? Devils weren't parasites. They weren't spirits or specters; they were ancient intelligences, beings once born of light. What I had done wasn't summoning filth from the shadows—it was calling back something that had fallen from heaven.
And I kept thinking about that word—angel. How absurd it sounded now. They called them fallen angels, but there was nothing angelic about them. They were proud, merciless things, starved of divinity yet still obsessed with it. Even stripped of grace, they clung to the name like vanity, like a title they refused to let go. And the worst part? They didn't even hate us. They pitied us.
I pressed the heel of my hand to my eyes, trying to make the thoughts stop. The more I tried to understand, the less human it all felt.
Maybe I could tell myself something simpler—something I could live with. That at least Harry was still alive. That he would keep roaming, somewhere out there. Maybe he'd walk through the world untouched by time, untethered to death. Maybe he'd never grow old, never decay. Immortal.
It should have sounded like comfort. It didn't.
Because immortality is just a prettier word for being trapped.