Page 36 of Weight of Shadows
"I don't need a ritual!" I screamed back. "I don't need your symbols or your blood or your secrets! I just need to stop wanting you to be here! I'm letting go, Dominic! I'm choosing to be alone!"
I reached inward, past the fear, past the grief that had become a comfortable, rotting blanket, and found the one thing I had been protecting all these months: the hope that he would come back and tell me it was all a mistake. I took that hope and I crushed it. I looked at the man I had built my life around and I saw him for what he was, just a man who was so afraid of being forgotten that he tried to swallow the world.
The grief in my chest began to change. It didn't vanish. You don't just stop hurting because you want to. But it transformed. The links of the chain melted, the iron turning into something softer, something internal. It shifted from a weight that held me down to a scar on the inside of my heart. Something that wouldalways be there, something that would always ache when the weather changed, but something that no longer had the power to move my limbs.
The wind died instantly. The shadows retracted as if burned, retreating into the cracks in the floorboards. The notebook on the table burst into flames, the pages curling into black ash.
Dominic's shape began to lose its coherence. The charcoal suit faded, the sharp jawline softened, and for one final second, the monster vanished. It was just him. The Dominic I had married, the man who used to read poetry to me in bed, the man who had been my entire world. His expression was confusion. Pure, unadulterated confusion.
He looked around the room, his eyes lingering on Rowan, then Julian, then Theo, before settling on me. He looked like a man who had just woken up in a house he didn't recognize. His lips moved, forming my name one last time, a silent, hollow sound that carried no weight at all.
Then, like a photograph dropped into water, he dissolved. The grey tint bled out of the air, the cold snapped back into the natural chill of a Hollow Vale autumn, and the silence that followed was so absolute it felt like it might never be broken.
I stood there for a long time, staring at the empty space where my husband had been. My hand was still in Theo's. Behind me, I heard the ragged sound of Rowan's breathing and the soft, shaky exhale of Julian finding his feet.
The room was a wreck. Shattered glass covered every surface, the smell of smoke and ozone hung heavy, and the apartment felt empty. For the first time since I had crossed the town line, I was actually alone in my own head.
"Is he gone?" Theo asked.
I looked at the blackened remains of the notebook, then out the shattered window at the fog that was finally, mercifully, beginning to thin. I felt the weight of the three men behind meand the strange, impossible life we had started to build in the ruins of my past.
"Yes," I said, and the word felt like the first breath I'd taken in years. "He's gone."
thirty-four
JULIAN
The silence in the apartment didn't feel like a threat anymore. It felt like an empty room after a long, exhausting party, the kind where the air is still warm from the bodies that have left it. I sat on the hardwood floor, my back pressed against the cold plaster of the wall, and waited for the sound to return.
It was gone. The melody that hadn't been mine, the one that had tasted like Dominic’s cologne and smelled like rotting silk, had finally thinned out. It settled into the back of my mind like a ghost note, that faint, barely-there vibration a pianist feels in the keys when they haven't quite struck them. It was permanent, a quiet resonance that told me my music would never be entirely my own again. I could feel the residue of what had passedthrough me, a faint metallic hum in my marrow, but as I looked at the three men around me, I decided I could live with a scar. A scar isn't a wound. It's just proof that you didn't break.
Rowan was beside me, his massive frame slumped in a way I’d never seen before. He looked solid, but he looked hollowed out, his shoulders dropping as the adrenaline finally leaked out of him. He didn't say anything, but he didn't have to. He was there. He reached out, his hand heavy and warm as he clamped it onto my shoulder, anchoring me to the floor. I leaned into the weight of him, letting his exhaustion match my own.
Across the room, Theo was leaning against the window frame. He looked like a sketch of himself, all sharp angles and pale skin, but his eyes were present. For the first time since I’d known him, there was no camera between him and the world. The strap hung loose around his neck, the lens cap on, the glass eye finally closed. He looked at us—really looked at us—without trying to frame the moment or capture the light. He just existed in the ruin of the room.
Oleander was on the floor a few feet away, his legs tucked up against his chest. The space where the notebook had burned was a charred circle on the floorboards. He had his phone pressed to his ear, his knuckles white. I could hear the tinny, frantic vibration of a voice on the other end. Liliana. She sounded like she was a thousand miles away, shouting into a void she couldn't see.
"It's over," Oleander said, his voice scraped raw. He stared at the ashes of his past, his dark eyes tracking the way the grey flakes drifted in the draft from the shattered window.
I could hear her voice through the receiver, sharp with a desperation that made my chest ache. "Oleander? Oleander, talk to me. Are you okay? Tell me you're okay."
Oleander closed his eyes. He looked like he was memorizing the feeling of the floor beneath him, the way the air felt withoutthe pressure of a dead man’s ghost. "No," he whispered, and for a second, the room went very still. "No, I'm not okay. But I'm going to be."
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. I heard a shaky breath, a sound that was half-sob and half-laugh. "That's the first honest thing you've said to me in two years," Liliana said, her voice cracking. "Don't you dare hang up. Don't you ever go silent on me again."
Oleander didn't hang up. He just let the phone rest against his shoulder, his eyes finding mine. I reached out, sliding my hand across the floor until my fingers brushed his. He gripped me back, his palm damp and shaking, but his hold was a lifeline. It was a choice. Every touch in this room was a choice now, stripped of the influence of things that didn't belong to the living.
Rowan shifted, pulling me closer until his arm was a heavy bar across my back, his fingers digging into my arm. He was checking for a pulse, I realized. He was making sure we were all still here, still beating, still tethered to the same reality. Theo watched us for a heartbeat longer before his legs seemed to give out, and he slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor too, his knees knocking against Rowan’s boot.
The four of us sat there in the wreckage of the apartment. Outside, the fog pressed against the broken glass, but it didn't look like a wall anymore. It just looked like weather. It was just water in the air, grey and cold and mindless. The shadows in the corners were just shadows, cast by the streetlights and the furniture, no longer reaching out with fingers that felt like ice.
"My piano is going to need tuning," I said, the words feeling small and ridiculous in the quiet. I didn't care about the tuning. I cared about the fact that I could think about the future, even a future as small as a technician arriving with a wrench and a pitch pipe.
Theo let out a breathy, jagged laugh, his head thudding back against the wall. "Your piano is the least of our problems, Julian. Look at this place. It looks like a bomb went off. A very specific, very angry bomb."
"It was an exorcism," Rowan grunted, though his voice lacked its usual bite. He sounded like a man who had finally put down a weight he’d been carrying for a decade. "Whatever it was, it's gone. I can't feel it anymore. The air... it doesn't taste like copper anymore."
"What about the structure?" I asked. "The one in the woods."
