Chapter 26 Estella #2
The scent of minerals and chalky earth fills my senses, carrying the weight of centuries undisturbed. Ahead, rough-cut limestone walls rise like the pages of ancient parchment, yellowed and worn. I blink against the light, watching Dante drop off the ladder.
“I feel like we’re in a fucking horror movie,” Dante mutters flatly. “Ever seen As Above, So Below?”
I narrow my eyes, digging through memory. “No. Do they survive?”
He shrugs, nodding forward. “Not all of them.”
Of course.
Each step echoes in dull, padded tones, sound swallowed by the cavernous silence. My own breathing rings loud in my ears, louder than my footsteps, as if the catacombs themselves are listening.
The passage widens into the first chamber—the threshold of the catacombs. Niches carved into the stone cradle old shapes: stacked bones in uneven towers, skulls with hollow eyes staring into nothing, stone tablets whose names have eroded into dust.
The floor dips, forming shallow pools where water gathers in black mirrors that shiver under the sweep of my flashlight.
“Jesus Christ,” Dante mutters, trying to laugh, but dust lodges in his lungs. He doubles over in a sharp cough.
“You okay?” I ask once he catches his breath. I lift the light higher, sweeping over the stone, the bones, the silent witnesses lining the walls.
“Don’t worry about me,” he says softly. “Just don’t breathe too deep. The air here’s full of old death.”
We press on. The ceiling above us is scarred with soot—centuries of torches dragged along the same path, leaving long, black streaks like fossilized smoke.
Pillars rise ahead, shaped less like architecture and more like the roots of a buried world.
Small alcoves veer off into cramped side tunnels, dead ends that smell of damp rags and time calcified into stone.
“How long has it been since anyone walked down here?” I whisper. “This place feels dead in a way that’s… permanent.”
They could have cleared it out, modernized it, or destroyed it entirely. But they didn’t. This, apparently, is history worth preserving. Every skull, every femur, every crumbling tablet holds a memory that can’t be archived—more trophy than grave.
“This would be a perfect place to kill somebody,” Dante says lightly.
I snap the flashlight toward him, the beam slicing across his face, right into his eyes. “Not funny.”
He smirks, turning his face slightly to escape the brightness. “What? You scared, little shadow?”
The nickname runs through me like a heated wire, sending a pleasant shiver down my spine. “I’m never scared,” I reply.
It’s not a lie. Not entirely. I like fear—the flash of the hunt, the thrill of being chased, or watching someone realize I’m the one chasing them. Just like when Dante stalked me from a distance: always out of sight, but never out of reach.
I like the fear he makes me feel—the kind that carries a promise of something dangerously intoxicating, painfully addictive, and unbearably beautiful.
“This place…” I whisper, the words slipping out before I can stop them. “I think it reminds me of the town I was born in.”
Dante steps closer, his presence a steadying weight in the dark. “Does that make you uncomfortable?” he asks softly.
“A bit,” I admit. “It’s just as crumpled and depressing as that place.”
The memories strike like a rush of freezing water, bringing a sensation of sorrow and misery, and spreading that familiar tightness that squeezes my lungs.
Dante and I have been talking about our pasts so much lately, pulling the rot out piece by piece, and now the aftertaste of hopelessness sits on my tongue.
It helps to speak it aloud in a way that isn’t only rage, but it still leaves my skin crawling.
His arm slides around me, firm and warm, coiling with quiet certainty.
“I can only process that place when I’m with you,” I grind out, suddenly defensive. “It’s been years, and I’m so fucking weak for still needing something to hold on to.”
“Do you think holding onto me makes you weak?”
“Maybe?” I ask after a short pause. “Probably.”
“No, little shadow. I hold your pain the way you hold mine. Do you think that makes me weak? Trusting you? Giving you pieces of myself I’ve never shown anyone?”
It takes me a few seconds to find my voice. “No.”
Dante leans in, the heat of his breath skittering across my cheek, wrapping me in him even as the cold stone presses around us. “There’s a price that comes with that, Estella,” he murmurs. “And I need to tell you something.”
A pressure builds—the one I’ve grown familiar with—the weight in the air right before I learn something new about him, something carved from his past and shaped like a scar.
“Do you remember what I told you about the relationship I had? My first and only girlfriend?” he asks.
My jaw tightens, my lips twitching with the sharp bloom of anger. “Yes,” I say, teeth clenched. “Why?”
He takes a slow inhale, concern flickering across his dark eyes. His tongue skims his lower lip, nervous, as if the words might bite back.
“She had a stepbrother,” he says finally.
“He abused her. Constantly. He lashed out, beat her, tore her down in every way a person can be broken. She lived in silence, and she’d scream at me when I tried to stop him—when I broke his ribs, his fingers, anything I could reach. She kept saying it wouldn’t help.”
He pauses. “So one day… I killed him.”
A sharp, molten jealousy surges through me. I bite my upper lip hard enough that the skin pales beneath my teeth. When I swallow, the emotion goes down like hot coals, leaving a trail of heat that burns all the way through me.
“After that, she couldn’t even look at me without flinching,” he says, voice thinning, fraying at the edges.
“She said I disgusted her. She broke up with me, told me I needed help. I couldn’t let her go—I didn’t understand how she could let go so easily.
So I started following her. Everywhere. And then I found out she’d been having an affair.
Long before I ever touched her stepbrother. ”
My lips part, and my head shakes before I realize I’m doing it. The pain in his voice is muted but relentless, the emotion seeping out of him like rain through a cracked ceiling—steady and unavoidable against the roar of distant thunder.
“I messed with the brakes, Estella,” he adds. “But I didn’t know she’d decide to take a drive with him that night.”
The pieces slide into place, one by one, clicking with quiet inevitability. I watch him, the panic beneath his skin buzzing like a live wire. A bead of sweat gathers at his temple, trailing down despite the freezing air pressing against us. The catacombs do nothing to cool the fever of his fear.
It’s not fear born from guilt that coils inside him. It’s the quiet, insidious fear that hisses he won’t be accepted after this—that I will look at him the way she once looked, with revulsion, with disgust carved deep into my bones.
I close my eyes, struck by a brutal, precise comparison. I remember what I did to the man who was my first love—how tightly I held him, how my love wrapped around him like a noose he couldn’t escape. I loved him until he couldn’t breathe. I loved him until he killed himself.
We love too hard. We obsess, we possess, we consume.
And betrayal is the one sin we will never, ever forgive.
“You’re not broken, Dante,” I murmur, stepping into him, cupping his face with both hands. His skin is warm, feverish under my palms. “You don’t need to be fixed. If someone couldn’t accept your love, that doesn’t make you a monster.”
His brows knit together, the anxiety melting into something darker, something fierce and hungry. He grips my hands as if anchoring himself to me. “I will kill anyone who even looks at you,” he says, voice low, shaking with conviction. “Do you hear me?”
A sharp, electric fear slices through me—the kind that doesn’t repel but drags heat lower, pooling thick and molten in my stomach. It makes me tremble as I lick my lips, tasting the intensity of his words and the quiet, mad obsession he has with me.
“Yes,” I breathe.
“I don’t care how innocent they are, or what they have,” he says, the words rolling out low and deliberate, like the slow draw of a blade. “You are mine. And I am yours. I’d die before I let that change.”
The pull in my core tightens, sharpens, coils like a fist clenched around a live wire. My bottom lip slips between my teeth, pressure blooming against the skin as I let every syllable he just spoke sink into me.
It lands like a claim. Like a promise.
Like possession wrapped in fire.
A goddamn threat that burrows into my bones, settles there, and feels better than anything else in this world.
Because I, without hesitation, too, will do anything for him.
Somewhere deep in the night, something rough skates across my arm, moving to my wrist. The touch drags my mind upward, piercing slowly through the thick cloud of sleep. The heaviness clings to me, as if I’m wrapped in the clutches of a fog that doesn’t want to let me go.
The coarse texture slips to my other wrist. A soft groan lodges in my throat when something warm and wet presses against my lower stomach. The sensation is fleeting at first, blurred by the lingering haze smothering my awareness. But then it comes again—clearer this time—and the fog begins to thin.
Blinking my sleep-riddled eyes open, I squint into the darkness, trying to peel away the blur. My body tries to shift instinctively, but the moment I move, tightness bites into my wrists, forcing me back onto the mattress.
Another groan rises, this one scraping free, but it’s crushed against something sealing my mouth—sticky, firm, muffling even the vibrations of my breath.
The world slides into focus in fragments: the faint hum of the city outside, the dim spill of streetlight through the balcony doors, the breeze dragging its fingers across my skin. Awareness floods in, washing away the last traces of sleep.