Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
“To die for him is sacred. Prove yourself worthy, or leave this earth for you are not ample to join us in our fortunes.”
—Sacred Text of the Hollow Bridegroom
Lenoria had never liked being still.
Stillness belonged to the ones who’d already crossed over, and though she’d worn death’s colors for a time now, it no longer fit her.
She sat curled on the couch, tucked inside another one of his too-large shirts, listening to the way he turned pages at the kitchen table like he was searching for God in his father's handwriting.
She already knew where God was.
He was sitting three feet away, jaw tight and brow furrowed, reading ancient warnings he wouldn’t heed.
The journals were strange—old leather, warped and stained with time—but she could smell their importance.
Her body knew. Her bones knew. She had been raised to revere texts of her own, the scribbled notes of the elders who served the Hollow Bridegroom long before she was born.
Isaac’s father had chronicled the rituals like they had and she was curious how much of it aligned with the teachings she’d been brought up learning.
She stood and padded across the floor, silent on bare feet. Her fingers brushed the back of his shoulder, shy but hungry for connection after the morning they’d shared. She peered over the edge of the journal.
“Will you read it to me?”
Isaac didn’t look up.
“It’s not a bedtime story.”
“It is to me.” Her voice softened as she leaned closer. “It feels like all the stories I grew up with. Only now it has your spin to it, or your family’s, I guess I should say.”
He turned the page instead of answering, but she didn’t move away. She rested her chin against his shoulder, absorbing the warmth of his body even though her skin ran colder than the room around them, he felt like fire. She wanted to be pressed against it until she melted into him completely.
The screen of his phone lit up between them. Another call from his mother. The eighth today since this morning when he’d spoken to her. He turned it facedown without answering before finally looking at her.
She waited for him to speak.
“There’s something in the journals,” he said quietly. “Something my dad wrote about. A ritual.”
She blinked, drawn closer by the hush in his tone. “The burial?”
He shook his head.
“No. Something else. A kind of…second passage. It’s supposed to happen only if the vessel doesn’t fully die. If she comes back…changed.”
She swallowed. “Like me.”
He nodded.
Lenoria took a step toward him. “What kind of ritual?”
He hesitated but eventually flipped to a marked page near the back of his dad’s journal, and offered it to her.
“If the girl rises but does not rot, she may be touched by the Bridegroom himself. The flesh must be joined to the one who calls her by name. With this coupling, she may be the gate to hell. If he accepts her, body and soul, then he becomes the key. If he buries her with his own hands, and takes the space beside her, then He becomes the lock.”
Lenoria looked up at him slowly and pulled a strand of blonde behind her left ear. “You think it’s us.”
Isaac leaned back against the metal counter, arms crossed tight over his chest. “My father wrote most of this years ago. Before I was even born. But there are drawings underneath this passage that’s making me wonder about all of this. There’s one of two people laying in the grave together.”
“And they look like us,” she said softly, “don’t they?”
His voice cracked a little. “It shouldn’t make sense, but it does. You came back different, Lenoria. You weren’t whispering like the others. You knew me. And, for as long as I can remember I have had my thoughts overrun by some beautiful blonde spirit I needed to be close to.”
“Did you come back to learn about your father and what he knew about us? Or did you come back to look for me?”
“It’s like we’ve both been…conditioned,” he said after a long pause. “My father. Your upbringing with the sisters. My mother leaving town when I was born. The rituals. It all feels like there’s an entire pre-destined—”
“Rite,” she finished for him. “This binding.”
She moved closer. Stopped just in front of him, still clutching the journal in her hands.
“What happens next?”
Isaac’s eyes flicked to her lips, then her chest, then lower—where her bare legs peeked from beneath the hem of his shirt. He exhaled, slow and quiet. But she saw the way his jaw flexed, the way his fingers curled against the counter behind him.
“We find out if it’s real,” he said. “Or if we’re both just going mad.”
Lenoria smiled. It was slow and eerie and holy. “It can be both.”