Epilogue
This is how it definitely ends…
CASSIDY
NEXT HALLOWEEN
They say a year changes everything.
I don’t know who they are, but I’ll say one thing: they know what the hell they’re talking about.
A year ago, I was living in Shadowvale, smelling of coffee and fried food, my feet aching, my heart lonely. I jumped at every little sound, sure that Ryan would find me, while presenting a face to the world that said I wasn’t afraid. That I was ready to move on.
And I was. Now, did I expect my ex to track me down? I’d hoped he’d given up, but yeah… I think I always knew that Ryan would find me. That’s the dark and twisted side to obsession. If he couldn’t have me, no one could. If that meant I’d have to die, so be it.
Moving on comes in different forms. Not letting Ryan have any control over me any longer is huge, and learning who I am without him breathing down my neck is what I thought I wanted.
Until last Halloween.
Until I spent a day with Johnny Gray.
Until I went for a ride with a ghost and everything I knew… everything I planned for… everything about my life, then and now, changed for good.
Ryan is gone. He can’t hurt me anymore. The man that Ryan Donovan was… I’m untouchable to him now.
I’m finally free, and I have Johnny to thank for that.
He’s been by my side this whole last year.
Helping me make sense of it, the two of us choosing to stay in Shadowvale though we could’ve gone anywhere.
It’s been his home for more than ninety years, and though I only picked it due to a quirk of fate…
a quirk of fate that might’ve been manipulated by a stubborn ghost who saw me waiting at Mac’s Garage and used his spectral energy to blow up my engine so that I couldn’t leave him… well, I like Shadowvale.
Almost like I was always meant to belong to this place.
I’m not Cassie Miller. I’m not the girl who Johnny loved, then lost on that Halloween night when he took on Scotty’s Curve and lost. Whether that same fate threw Johnny a bone, leading a woman who had the same face as his first love to the town he spent seventy years haunting, I’ll never know.
I just know I’m Cassidy Montrose, and I’m his.
He loves me. He told me that on Halloween, after he fucked me, and then again on the night he saved me from Ryan, when he ended my ex. Johnny loves me, and after a year with him, I believe him.
More than that, I love him, too.
I spent two years running from a former boyfriend who didn’t understand that I’d never want him after I saw who he really was.
I now know that every time I sensed someone watching me in Shadowvale, it was Johnny.
From the moment he spotted me in Mac’s Garage, he knew I was meant to be his.
He haunted me, not to scare me, but so that I’d get used to his presence.
So that, on the one day a year he could manifest and be Living, I would feel like I already knew him.
It’s not because I’m the reincarnation of the girl who died with him. No. I’m the woman he chose to spend eternity with, in whatever form it had to take. When he looks at me, I know he sees Cassidy Montrose, while all I have to do is gaze right into his alluring blue eyes and recognize my Johnny.
My husband.
I glance down at my left hand. As a promise that he would always be there for me, that he would never leave, Johnny gave me this ring two days after Halloween last year when the shock started to fade some.
With everything happening, everything changing…
with the world as I knew it shattering at my feet, building something completely new…
he vowed that the one thing I could rely on was him and his love for me.
Did I love him then? Of course not. One whirlwind day with a man out of my wildest fantasies isn’t a love affair.
It was wild and reckless and, sometimes, I wonder if he possessed me a little in the way that I was so eager to go along with everything he asked of me after he walked into the Shadowvale Diner like he owned it.
But there was a spark. A connection. I clung to him because I needed him, and over time, I knew that—while this wasn’t what I expected—I wouldn’t change a thing because it brought me to him.
I love him now. It was impossible not to fall for him.
The cheeky attitude, the kind gestures, the way he obviously adores me…
he swept me off my feet. To be honest, he probably managed that the first time he winked at me, calling me ‘sweetheart’, but though he has a dark side of his own, I’ve been with a monster.
I overlooked the warning signs and paid the price for it.
Johnny won’t hurt me. He can’t. He waited seventy years for me to find my way to him, and now that I have, I’m his.
I’m Cassidy Gray, and though—obviously—we can’t have a real wedding, it doesn’t matter.
Once I realized that I loved him, that I would choose to stay by his side forever, the promise ring he slipped on my finger became a symbol of my promise to him.
It’s me and Johnny. Together forever, until death do we part—
Yeah, no.
Don’t have to worry about that bit, do we? There will be no parting at all, and if giving in to my dark side this past year has made me as obsessive as my new husband, that’s fair. I love him, and if anyone tries to take him from me, I’ll send them to Hell myself.
That happened earlier today. Emily knows our secret. She knows what happened to me, and to Johnny. I don’t work at the diner anymore, though we do visit it from time to time, and I wanted to see if she decorated it for Halloween again this year.
She had. On the wall behind the register, she even put up an aged photo of Johnny from when he was alive.
In sepia tones, turned yellow over the decades, I could look at the picture and see him as he was on Halloween last year, all wicked smirk and humor-filled blue eyes, and the familiar cigarette tucked behind his ear.
Next to Johnny’s picture, there’s one of last year’s staff. I’d forgotten about that. How Em insisted Cookie take one of me and her and Derek while we were in costume. I’m smiling, though I can see the haunted look in my eyes that I’d thought I hid so well back then.
This Halloween, we slid onto the vinyl seats, sharing a massive slice of cherry pie that was almost as good as The Pie Chart. Em watched us with a small smile while Cookie slammed dishes around on the other side of the service window.
They hired a new waitress. She fit into my dress, and she was a lot more confident when it came to greeting customers and taking their orders than I had been.
But she eye-fucked my husband while I was sitting right there—and that just didn’t work for me.
When my hand slid over the hard tabletop, reaching for the knife Em used to slice the hunk of pie in two, Johnny chuckled and rubbed the edge of his boot along the side of my calf.
“You still love me, sweetheart?” he asked, a tease in his voice. The lust in his striking eyes was for me and me alone, but there was a hunger, too, that said the idea of me murdering a woman for staring at him had him ready and raring to go.
My fingers curled around the knife. A year of fucking a man who spent seventy years as a ghost in the most haunted town on the East Coast has changed me. Last year, I would’ve said that no man was worth getting all murderous over.
But that was before I met Johnny Gray.
I smile at my husband. “Always, baby.”
Em knows our secret, and she knows when to protect it—and when to protect her waitresses.
Before I could lift the knife and do anything with it, she called for Flora to help Cookie in the kitchen, while Johnny leaned over the table, cupping the back of my neck, swallowing my jealous curses in a kiss so possessive, I almost climbed over the table so I could fuck him.
I have more class than that. I waited until we were in the back seat of the car he stole and hot-wired for our Halloween date to shove him to his back, and fuck him until he promised that I’m the only woman for him.
I still don’t know what I was doing when I let him touch me last Halloween. When I kissed him like he was real even after I knew the truth. When I tossed away everything I thought I knew, letting myself believe in something dangerous and strange and impossibly perfect.
One thing for sure? I don’t regret a second of it.
I don’t miss whatever life I might’ve had if I’d chosen differently. If I’d run. If I’d said ‘no’. If, like with Ryan, I disappeared, though I’m sure that Johnny… he would’ve chased me, too. And I would’ve wanted him to.
He didn’t have to, though. Because I said ‘yes’. I said ‘forever’. And I’d promise it all to him again, this Halloween and next Halloween and every one that follows.
I don’t care what I sacrificed. I don’t care what I lost.
Because when I look at him, I don’t see a ghost. I don’t see the boy who died in 1953.
I see Johnny.
I see always.
Last Halloween changed everything for the both of us.
Nothing was more clear than when the evening passed, the two of us finding our way to the wooded area off of Scotty’s Curve.
Not because his death curse insisted that he run the same race that killed him every Halloween for more than seventy years, but because we wanted quiet. We wanted privacy.
We wanted to lay out on the grass by his grave, fuck under the stars, and tell each other that this… this was simply meant to be.
Wearing nothing but Johnny’s white t-shirt—my clothes scattered to the earth—I rise up to my feet. He’s sprawled out on his back, arms folded behind his head, cigarette tucked behind his ear. His lips quirk into a well-pleasured grin as he watches me sway, giddy beneath the moonlight.
“Was it that good for you, Cassidy?”
Cassidy. I get a secret thrill every time he uses my name.
I told myself in the beginning that if he ever fucked up and called me Cassie, he’d regret it…
but he hasn’t. I don’t mind being his ‘sweetheart’, but the proof that he sees me for me and not a replacement for her…
if he hadn’t already pulled his jeans back on, buttoning them up after we were done, I might’ve showed him my appreciation with my mouth.
Instead, I return his smile and nod.
Johnny sits up, pushing himself to his feet in one fluid yet undeniably sexy motion.
He reaches for me, his need to always be holding me, touching me, keeping me close another small thing that deepens my grin.
Ryan thought he could own me. Johnny caresses me like I’m precious, like I’m giving him a gift by letting him pull me into his arms.
Our bodies flush, I hear a song playing on the wind. An old song, though not as old as Johnny, and I murmur it to myself as he holds me close, swaying to music only we can hear this Halloween.
Tonight you’re mine—
I breathe out the final word on the line: “... completely.”
You give your love so—
“Sweetheart,” he murmurs, burying his face in my neck. “I fucking love you.”
I rub his back. “I know, baby. I know.”
It’s been a year since that Halloween night—since I saw him beneath the flicker of the street lamp and the moonlight, leaning against that old Mustang like he’d been waiting for me his whole damn life before he drove away believing it would be another year until we could be together again.
Instead, it was one day, but that doesn’t change a thing. He’s waited forever for me, and that’s what I’ve promised him.
The world feels quieter now. The wind’s a little softer, the night a little less fearsome. Shadowvale still holds its secrets, still whispers through the trees, but I don’t flinch anymore when it does. I don’t look over my shoulder for ghosts.
Because I already found the only one I’ll ever love.
He’s dancing with me, one hand in mine, the other resting on the small of my back like it belongs there—and it does. It always will.
The song is still playing just for us. We’re moving slowly to it, a mimicry of the sweet way he just fucked me with the October moon bathing our naked skin, swaying together like we’ve done for the past year. Only this time, unlike when he drove away, I know he’s not going anywhere.
And neither am I.
We’re bound to each other. Bound to Shadowvale.
Tonight he’s mine, and he always will be.