Chapter 10
I keep screaming until he pulls me hard against his chest, one hand pressing flat between my shoulder blades.
"Shh," he murmurs, low, steady, entirely unbothered by the sound tearing out of me.
"You won't always feel like this, you know.
Soon enough you won't even notice your own reflection sliding back into view — it'll simply be there, the way it should have been all along.
Trust me, love. I told you I'd fix you. This is fixing. "
I try to calm myself, I do, but every direction I turn, I find my own face waiting — flushed, undone, everywhere at once — so I do the only thing left to me and bury my face against his chest instead.
The chest of a stalker. The chest of the one place in this entire nightmare that somehow, sickeningly, feels safest. The screaming finally stops.
The shaking doesn't. My fingers curl into the fabric of his shirt and hold on like it's the only solid thing left in the world.
A knock sounds at the door before it opens without waiting for permission. A woman's voice follows — low, rich, dripping with a kind of practiced, effortless allure, the sort of voice built to be listened to.
"Mr Castellan. There's been an incident requiring your attention."
I don't look up to see her. I can't.
"Speak freely," he says, not loosening his hold on me an inch.
"Antoinette Smith has been found dead in her home." A pause, deliberate. "I'm beginning to think this one may be connected to you in rather more ways than you've accounted for."
Something low and dangerous rumbles out of his chest — not quite a growl, not quite a word — and I feel it more than hear it, vibrating against my ear.
"Take Ophelia home," he says finally.
"Yes, Mr Castellan."
He lifts me into his arms without asking whether I can walk, and carries me out of the room.
I hear the woman's heels clicking behind us, unhurried, following at a precise, practiced distance.
Tucked against his chest, eyes still half-shut, I catch a glimpse of a door as we pass — dark wood, silver script above the frame reading The Six Who Speak As One. The coven's door, then.
Castellan. Rhys Castellan. I turn the name over in my mind. Is that really him — the man Amara described, the owner of all this? Should I say it aloud, test whether he answers to it?
"Who's Antoinette?" I ask instead, my voice thin. "Dead — connected to you — what does that mean?"
He doesn't answer. He simply carries me out into the cold night air, toward a long, sleek car, entirely black — bodywork, windows, even the leather seats inside gleaming like wet ink under the carnival lights.
He sets me gently onto the back seat, and before he steps away, his mouth finds my neck once more, lips grazing the mark already blooming there. "My succubus will take you home," he murmurs against my skin. "Keep you safe the whole way. I'll be back before sunrise, to watch you sleep."
I don't answer. There's a driver up front, silent, and the woman — succubus, apparently — slides in beside me a moment later, arranging herself with the kind of unhurried grace that makes even sitting look like performance.
He shuts the door himself. "I'll see you soon," he says, and it lands less like a farewell and more like a promise wearing a threat's clothing.
The car pulls away.
I keep my eyes low, careful, deliberately not looking at the woman beside me — though even sideways, half-seen, she's impossible not to notice.
Dressed entirely in black — a fitted gown that clings like water, a slit cut high along one thigh, a choker of dark stones at her throat — she sits with the kind of ease that suggests she's never once in her life worried about how she looks doing it.
Her hair falls dead straight and black past her waist. Even seated, her body carries itself like something built to be watched.
Why does she smell so good?
She laughs, low and warm. "Afraid of me, are you?"
I look away instantly, unsure what to say.
"You can speak your mind, sweetheart," she says. "I'm here to serve you tonight, not judge you for it."
"Are you," I manage, "the succubus?"
"I am." Something amused threads through her voice. "Name comes from the skill, love, not from being some mythological bloody creature. Though I won't pretend I don't enjoy the confusion."
I try to laugh. It doesn't quite land.
"Is Mr. Castellan your boss?" I ask instead.
"He is." A pause, and I can hear the smile in it. "Though you, darling, ought to be calling him Rhys."
There it is. Confirmation, plain and simple. Rhys Castellan. The walking sin Amara described. The owner of it all.
"He seems rather taken with you," Succubus goes on, conversational, as though we're discussing the weather rather than a man who put a knife to my throat twice tonight. "Never seen him like that before, if I'm honest. He's never once had me babysit a woman he was fucking."
I want to say we aren't. That this isn't what it is. But on what ground, exactly, when he had his mouth on me not an hour ago and I barely fought him for it?
I look out the window instead. "You can drop me here," I say. "I can walk the rest."
"Absolutely not," Succubus says, warm but immovable.
"Walking alone at this hour, love? Whitby's full of things far scarier than me — and that's saying something, given present company.
Rhys himself, for one. Those six women we keep, for another.
You'd do well not to wander that carnival's shadow alone, not until you understand exactly what you've stepped into. "
I don't answer. I turn the thought over privately instead — how strange it is that a place should feel this frightening and this magnetic all at once, especially after tonight, after he showed me my own reflection upside-down without letting me scream myself apart, after I didn't even notice the moment it finally came back to me.
We ride the rest of the way in silence.
The car stops outside The Tin Heart. A man steps up to the window, murmurs something to the Succubus — "all clear" — and she reaches into her seat and produces my own keys, the ones I dropped in the street when I first ran from Rhys and never once thought to retrieve.
"Yours, I believe."
"Thank you," I manage, and step out.
I want to look back at the car, but the windows are tinted glass, and I won't risk it — not tonight, not after everything. I go straight to the door, let myself in, lock it behind me, and hurry through the dark, powerless house to my room, feeling my way by memory alone.
At my window, I watch the black car sit there a long while before it finally pulls away.
I take off my boots. The candles have burned down to stubs. I lie on my side atop the covers and stare at the necklace still curled in my palm — I never dropped it once tonight, and I never once used it either, not that it seemed to matter.
I think of his mouth. His hands. Everything he did to me in that room of glass.
Is this a good idea? I should stop this. I should never let this happen again.
But then — how else am I meant to heal? Is there truly another way, one that doesn't run straight through the very thing that terrifies me?
I don't have an answer before sleep finally claims me.
I wake to a black rose resting on the pillow beside my head.
I sit up fast, scanning the room — empty, of course, though the window stands wide open, curtains flaring gently on the morning breeze. I lift the rose to my nose and breathe it in, and my heart kicks hard enough that I have to steady myself with a sharp breath.
He was here tonight watching me sleep. Just as he said he would.
I set it carefully aside, shower, and dress for the day — deep charcoal grey today, a Victorian mourning dress in all but name, high collar, jet buttons marching down the bodice, black lace gloves I rarely bother with but feel, this morning, like armor.
My boots lace to the ankle, low-heeled, practical.
Downstairs, I put the kettle on and start a proper fry-up — eggs, a rasher of bacon I've been saving, toast scraped thin with the last of the butter — the kind of breakfast that takes just enough concentration to keep my hands from shaking.
My father shuffles in mid-way through, holding his head like it might come loose from his shoulders. "Anything for a hangover?" he mutters.
I don't answer. I keep cooking.
"Ophelia." Nothing.
"Ophelia." I still say nothing.
"Bloody hell, that's disrespectful, that is. I'm your father."
I set the pan down harder than I mean to.
"Disrespectful?" The word comes out sharper than I've ever let myself sound in this kitchen.
"Are you having a fucking laugh? You call that disrespectful — after you left me last night?
Ran off and left me with a man you don't even know, begging you to help me, and you just — you just left. "
He blinks at me, startled, then his face hardens into something uglier.
"You expect me to fight that man? Do you have any idea who that is?
That's Rhys Castellan. The most feared man in this entire town.
People round here reckon he's Dracula walked straight out of the old stories — men who cross him just vanish, Ophelia.
Gone. Nobody ever finds them, nobody ever asks twice, because everybody knows better than to ask. "
I stare at him. "I've never heard anyone say that. Not once.”
Not even Amara, and she sounded half in love with the man. If there is a man who is like a ripper in this town, wouldn't I have heard people whisper about it at the very least?