Page 33 of Weight of Shadows
"No," I said. "This music is mine. This piano is mine."
I slammed my hands down in a dissonant, crashing chord that shattered the melody like glass. The sound was deafening, a roar that seemed to shake the foundations. For a second, the invisible fingers faltered. The room went silent.
I began to play. Not Dominic's song. Not the minor-key waltz that had been stalking me. I played something ugly and loud and filled with the frantic, desperate energy of a man who was refusing to be erased. I played the sound of Rowan's anger and Theo's obsession and Oleander's breaking heart. I played the truth of Hollow Vale, not the beauty of its rot, but the stench of its hunger.
Rowan moved to stand behind me, his heavy hands coming to rest on my shoulders, his heat a grounding force against the chill of the bench. Theo crouched beside the piano, his camera forgotten, watching my fingers fly across the keys. We were afortress. And whatever was trying to use me as a conduit was going to find out that my hands were not for the taking.
The walls buckled, the wallpaper curling back, and the melody tried to push back, a high-pitched whine that threatened to split my skull. I didn't stop. I played until my wrists ached, until the sweat was stinging my eyes, until the only thing I could hear was the sound of my own defiance. I would not be the soundtrack to my own destruction.
The music ended with a snap. A sudden, jarring silence that felt like a cord being cut. The keys went still. The walls stopped humming. The air felt thin and exhausted, the smell of sandalwood replaced by the scent of ozone. We were alone in the dark, three men breathing hard in a room that was slowly coming back to itself.
"Did we win?" Theo whispered.
Rowan tightened his grip on my shoulders, his fingers digging into my skin. I looked down at my hands. They were red and shaking. I had held the line, for now. But I could feel the town waiting outside the window.
I stood up. "Get the notebook. We're not waiting for him to come to us anymore. We're ending this."
thirty-one
OLEANDER
THIRTY MINUTES AGO
The light in the apartment retreated, pulling back into the corners, leaving the center of the living room a hollow, grey bowl of silence. There was no sound of traffic from the street outside, no hum of a refrigerator, no distant siren. Hollow Vale had gone quiet, as if the town were holding its breath.
I sat in the thickening dark and thought of the three men who were likely looking for me. Rowan's steady weight, Julian's precise hands, Theo's searching gaze. They felt like a different world. But this room belonged to the cold.
"Dominic," I said. "Come here."
The air crystallized. I watched my breath bloom in front of me, a white cloud that didn't dissipate. Then came the smell. Sandalwood and expensive wool, a faint, sweet sharpness that used to mean safety. It was the smell of the man who had curated every inch of my life until there was nothing left of me but the shape he'd carved out.
A shape began to coalesce in the corner by the bookshelf. It didn't step out of the shadows. It was made of them. A silhouette wearing the shape of the man I had buried, gathering the darkness until it had weight and edges. The broad shoulders. The sharp, clean line of the fade. The solid, terrifying presence of a man who never asked for permission to exist.
The distance between us seemed to collapse. I looked directly into the hollows where his eyes should have been, into the wrongness of that familiar face.
"Oleander," he said. It wasn't a whisper or a trick of the wind. It was his voice, the baritone that used to vibrate against my collarbone when we danced. "You look tired, Lee. You look like you've been fighting for something that isn't yours."
"You're dead," I said, my voice steadying. "I saw the dirt. I felt the cold on your skin. You aren't here."
"That doesn't matter here," he replied, and the shape of him shifted, stepping forward. The floorboards didn't creak. The air just moved around him, heavy and smelling of our old apartment. "In this place, nothing is truly gone. Only tucked away. You know that. You've been tucking yourself away since the funeral."
He reached out a hand. It looked solid, the fingers long and blunt, the skin a pale, shimmering grey. I could almost feel the phantom pressure of those fingers on my jaw, the way he used to tilt my head up so I had no choice but to see him. For a heartbeat, the familiar pull of it was so strong I almost leaned into the void.
"Surrender, Lee," he murmured. "Stop trying to carry the weight of those men. They don't know you. They know the wreck I left behind. Come back to the quiet. Come back to the devotion."
The temptation pressed down on me. If I stayed here, if I let the shadows take me, I wouldn't have to worry about Rowan's violent protective streaks or Julian's haunting melodies or the way Theo looked at me like I was a puzzle he was desperate to solve. I could just be the ghost of Oleander Voss, kept safe in a dark room by the only man who had ever truly claimed me. The door would quiet. The guilt would stop screaming. I could fall backward into the grief and let it swallow me whole.
"It's so easy," Dominic whispered. "Just stop fighting. Let them go. They'll forget you eventually. Everyone does. But I never will."
I reached for my phone. Not because I was calling for help, but because I needed a tether to a reality that didn't smell like sandalwood. My fingers were numb, fumbling with the screen until the light blinded me. It was 3 AM in London. She wouldn't be asleep.
Liliana answered on the first ring. "Oleander? What happened?"
I looked at the shadow-man standing in my living room, his hand still extended. "He's here, Lili," I whispered. "He's standing right in front of me. He wants me to stay. He says it'll be quiet. He says he'll take care of me."
A sharp intake of breath on the other end. "Tell me exactly what he said, Ollie. Every word."
I repeated it. I told her about the offer of surrender, about the quiet, about the way he looked at me with that soft, sad smile. I told her that I was tired, and that for the first time, Dominic was being kind. He was giving me a choice.
