Chapter 2
FINN
Broadicea - Enya
T he dirt tastes like pennies and old rain.
It cakes my tongue, wedges deep under my nails, grinds into my eyelids like the earth itself tried to blindfold me with rot.
I open my mouth to breathe and choke on grave.
Grit saws my throat raw on the way down; when I cough, it blasts back in my face—dust of me choking on the same earth that fucking buried me.
The coffin roof bows against my ribs with each breath, an old wood lung I never asked for.
I don’t panic.
I push.
The first shove splits something in my shoulder.
The second splits the wood. Nails shriek.
Iron screams. A seam tears open above me and night stabs through—thin, mean, and stinking of leaf rot and chimney smoke.
I tilt my head to the crack like it’s a priest’s hand blessing me back to life, and I grin in the dark where nobody can see how wrong it looks.
Then I jam my fingers into the splinter and start clawing the world apart.
Boards peel like scabs. The packed earth is worse. It fights me like it remembers taking me and doesn’t want to let go.
Tough fucking luck.
My knuckles grind into soil until skin splits.
I wedge my forearms into the wound of my grave and heave.
Earth avalanches across my face, into my hair, over my teeth.
Worms, rust, the old tang of my own dried blood.
For a second, when the weight above won’t budge, I get the taste of it again—the press of heat, chains hooked behind my ribs, fire teaching me pain is a language and eternity is just a long sick joke you can’t walk away from.
I snarl into the dark and shove harder.
A black slab collapses. The sky rips open like a slit throat, bleeding purple twilight.
I drag myself out—shoulders first, then ribs, then waist. My hips catch on the lip of the coffin and wrench free with a pop that would’ve dropped me when I was still soft, still mortal.
I sprawl on the wet grass and breathe like I’ve made drowning a fucking hobby.
For a long minute, there’s only the sound of me un-dying.
I sit up. The headstone behind me is split down the middle like it tried to claw its way out too.
My name is still carved there—the one she spoke like a vow, like a curse, like a goddamn home.
The dates are wrong. Doesn’t fucking matter.
My hands are raw and black-lined; my mouth is torn at the corner.
None of it matters. Pain’s just pocket change. I shove it down and stand.
Crows boil out of the trees like spilled ink, screaming a hundred scratchy voices into the dusk. One drops from a bare limb, lands a pace from my boots, and fixes me with a glass bead eye, kinder than anything heaven ever spat out.
“Come on then,” I growl, voice sandpaper and grave rot. “We’ve got shit to do.”
The crow hops without fear. Smart bird. Knows exactly who the fuck I belong to, and who belongs to me.
The veil is thin. I feel it like pressure in my temples, or the prickle behind a migraine. Like whispering through a keyhole. I lower my hand until my knuckles brush the crow’s head. The world folds.
For a breath, I am looking at me from below—a mud-painted man, a funeral marionette kneeling in wet grass.
I blink with that second set of lids, a thin, milky sweep that isn’t mine, and the vision snaps back.
The crow’s heart hammers against my finger bones, fast and wild, like it knows it beats for me now.
A year in hell teaches you what you can ride. Chains, for a while. Fire, always. Crows—forever.
When the devil took me, he didn’t gloat.
He didn’t need to. A palm on my sternum, a black-hot silence, and in that silence I learned I could see through eyes that aren’t mine if I let the feral part of me scratch to the front.
I watched her that way. Every damn day. Rooftops, rain gutters.
Tree limbs. Power lines. I watched her sleep curled around my hoodie on rainy nights, pencil smudges on her fingers, sketches of me scattered across the table.
I watched her build a life out of the scraps I left her.
Watched her breathe, eat, exist—mine, even when she thought she was free.
And I was content to let her. To let her live the life I bled to give her.
Until him.
I saw the slip. The lean. Saw her let someone else’s shadow cross her skin. His fucking mouth pressed to the hollow of her neck—the place carved out of her body for me. Made for me. The only altar I’ll ever kneel to.
She closed her eyes. Not because she wanted him, because she was pretending it didn’t kill her. Pretending it didn’t rip her in half to let someone else trespass where she already swore only I belonged.
The vow she made over my body shattered. Cracked open like river ice breaking under weight it was never meant to hold. I felt it split, felt it crush me all over again, like a hand around my neck dragging me back from the fire.
The veil felt it, too.
Devil’s Night. The goddamn border between what belongs in the ground and what refuses to rot is paper-thin. And all it fucking took was the pressure of that broken promise, and my love—which has never been holy, only hungry, rabid, and fucking endless—for me to pass right through it.
I was always going to come back. Always . The second she let another man’s hands, and mouth, anywhere near what’s mine, hell itself shoved the door open and begged me to walk through.
And with the veil split thin for the first time since that night, there’s not a single fucking thing that can stop me. Not God. Not Devil. Not her tears or her lies. She’s mine, and I’m going to make her remember it.
I walk. The cemetery is a cold parish—crooked teeth of stone, dead grass chewed to nub, and a ring of skeletal maples chattering in the wind. Houses glow on the hill beyond, yellow squares of counterfeit safety.
The crows string themselves across the night, wing to wing, a black ribbon pulling through the dark.
They don’t wait for me, they move. A living arrow. A command in feathers and beaks.
Each beat of their wings stitches a path through the fog, and I move in their wake, hunting, because my body only knows one command when she’s near, take .
I follow, boots pounding gravel, then dirt, then soft grass, each step stitched to theirs. Every time they vanish into fog, one drops lower, croaking sharp, dragging me back on course.
Fields pass underfoot. Fences. The faint glow of porch lights where people think they’re safe. The crows never falter, a living compass, a sermon in fucking wings. When I slow, they wheel back, shrieking until I pick up the pace again. They know where she is. They always fucking know.
And then, lantern light. Strings of sagging orange bulbs come into view, bleeding color into fog.
Jack-o’-lanterns grin from hay bales. Scarecrows slump like hanged men, empty-eyed and waiting.
Teenagers in thrifted flannel and plastic masks stumble around with spiked cider, laughing too loudly, and eager to prove they’re not afraid.
The corn whispers like a congregation. Fog licks the ground. Somewhere, a speaker moans on loop—an actor trying too hard to make death sound sexy.
I almost laugh, but don’t.
I step off the path and into the corn.
The stalks close around me like jealous sentinels, rising to my shoulders, trying to keep me from what’s mine. Dry leaves rasp my palms and slice little kisses into my skin. I don’t bleed red anymore, hell burned that out of me. It taught me patience is worthless, that color is a fucking lie.
I move through without brushing a single string light, every step cut sharp and sure, like the maze itself knows better than to touch me.
And then I stop.
Because I feel her. Because she’s here.
The word isn’t observation, it’s ownership. It’s the gravity that keeps the world from splitting apart. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s already in my hands. Always was. Always will be.
The crow on the Corn Maze sign tilts its head and my vision slides. Through its eyes, I see her just inside the maze. Black dress scattered with pale roses, leather jacket snug at her waist, socks pulled high to show just a strip of bare skin before her boots.
Every detail screams what no one else around her seems to notice—she’s still alive because of me. Thriving. Glowing. Moving through the world like she finally belongs to it, but I know better.
She’s talking to him. Smiling even. On the surface, she looks whole, beautiful, and untouchable.
The kind of girl everyone else sees as strong enough to have outrun her ghosts.
But I see the cracks. The way her eyes cut sideways when no one’s watching.
The little pause before her laugh, like her body’s asking permission it doesn’t want to grant.
He says something and she gives him a laugh.
But it isn’t the one she used to give me.
Not the one that split her chest open, raw and reckless, like she’d finally stopped pretending she was anything but mine.
No. This one is thinner. Brittle. A laugh that aches to sound real but carries the truth of her longing for me.
For the hands that taught her what it felt like to come undone without fear.
Her hair is shorter now. It curls at her jaw, sharp as a blade. The moon cuts her cheekbone into something I want to grip, bruise, remind . My hands ache to hold her face still, force her to look at me and remember the vow she made. Of who she fucking belongs to.
And then he does it. He leans in. Puts his mouth on the hollow where her neck meets her shoulder. My hollow. My mark. The first place I ever claimed her with my touch, the place I died to keep sacred. Yet she lets him, just lets him touch what’s mine. Lets him taste what only I should ever taste.
Her pupils flare. She even smiles after, like this is what living feels like.
My vision whites out at the edges.