CHAPTER SIXTEEN
WINTER
Mornings arrive much quieter now. Not because everything feels softer, but because I no longer wake expecting someone to drag me from my bed before the sun reaches the trees.
Somewhere over the last several days, perhaps a week, perhaps longer, I’ve stopped counting, this old house has begun teaching my body that it is allowed to rest. The nightmares still come.
They always will. Yet instead of cold timber beneath my cheek, or a rough exposed mattress older than my father, I wake tangled in linen so incredibly soft that every morning I have to remind myself I am not stealing it by sleeping here.
The room Death gave me overlooks my sleeping friends.
At first, I was taken aback by it, because what a gift it is to watch over them whenever I want.
I don’t have to face the cold and trek across fields of snow to do it.
To watch over my shoulder and listen out for the distant echo of barking in case the men have arrived.
I can simply be. At peace. At home. The place I’d go only in my mind is the place I now sleep soundly.
Tucked away in the snow surrounded by trees in Death’s company.
I did leave once. The guilt of abandoning the farm gnawed at me until I convinced myself I owed it a visit.
The men hadn’t been back, and that was all I needed to race back here.
The humiliating panic attack never came up again.
Not because it was forgotten or anything, but because Death never asked me to explain it.
He had guided me gently back to the couch that night, placed the blanket that had slipped onto the floor around my shoulders and sat beside me until my breathing no longer felt impossible.
He never asked why I couldn’t answer his question.
Never looked at me as though I’d failed some invisible test. Instead, he spoke about ordinary things until the fear had loosened its grip on my chest, allowing my thoughts to find their way back to me one careful breath at a time.
The move was so human I almost forgot that it is him who will eventually kill me.
That my soul would one day belong to him.
Maybe it already does. Somewhere between the quiet evenings, and a house that has started to feel like home, a real home, I had started leaving pieces of myself here without ever meaning to in a way I hadn’t before.
My mind was here for all those years, but now, so is my heart.
My soul. And I’m not sure when it happened.
He leaves for work every morning before the frost has melted from the cemetery, always making breakfast despite my protests that I am perfectly capable of preparing meals here.
But, I’ve stopped arguing. When he’s gone, I wander amongst the graves that little by little are starting to look a lot clearer.
The snow has begun surrendering to my hands, each headstone slowly revealing the carvings hidden beneath months of frost, and I find myself waking from a long sleep.
I hope I have enough time once spring is here to place flowers for them.
Fresh ones. Not because they asked me to, but because I want them to know that they are loved.
That I missed them terribly when I was away.
By the time late afternoon begins to surrender to evening, I’ve settled into the familiar corner of the kitchen table beside the window where the last of the winter light always seems to linger a little longer than everywhere else.
Dinner simmers quietly on the stove, filling the old house with the comforting scent of rosemary and garlic while I lose myself in one of the dozens of books Death had stacked haphazardly across the floor of the room at the end of the hall.
I’m not entirely convinced they belong to him.
He doesn’t strike me as someone who has the patience to sit still long enough to read stories, though perhaps that’s unfair.
Perhaps I simply struggle to imagine him doing anything ordinary as turning pages.
The one resting open across my lap tells a tale of an ageing queen so consumed by envy that she spends her days chasing the reflection of a girl she cannot bear to let live, believing in beauty is something that can only belong to one woman at a time.
I find myself smiling at the absurdity of it, tracing the edge of the page with my middle finger as I wonder how anyone could spend an entire lifetime fearing another person simply for their looks.
The familiar rumble of tires crunching over the frozen driveway pulls my attention from the page resting open in my lap.
I slip a scrap of ribbon between the pages before setting the book aside, smiling to myself as I cross toward the kitchen.
Dinner has been ready for almost half an hour now, the stew still warm where I’d left it simmering over the lowest flame so it wouldn’t burn.
I’m not sure when I had started waiting for his return, but I feel like I am.
I shake my head, reaching for two bowls from the cupboard, listening as the driver’s door slams shut outside.
Heavy footsteps crunch across the snow before climbing the front steps, and I watch as the front door opens, trying my best not to show my excitement that he’s back.
All pleasantries die on the tip of my tongue when I see the man before me.
He’s covered in blood. Not a little. Covered.
It stains his jacket, his hands, the column of his throat where it has dried in dark crimson streaks, disappearing beneath the collar of his shirt before reappearing across his jaw and into his hairline.
Fresh blood. Dried blood. Someone else’s life painted across every part of him until it becomes almost impossible to recognize him.
For a long moment neither of us moves. His amber eyes search my face with an expression I’ve never seen before.
Not guilt. Shame. Or maybe something much more fragile.
As though he’s waiting for me to finally see what he has always believed himself to be.
I don’t ask whose blood it is. I don’t ask what happened.
Those questions belong to another time. Instead, I set the bowls down on the bench and cross the room slowly, giving him every opportunity to step away.
He doesn’t. When I stop in front of him, my hand lifts almost of its own accord, hovering beside his face for the briefest moment before my fingertips brush the dried blood clinging to his cheek.
His breath catches, and so does mine. Without a word, I lower my hand again and disappear into the bathroom down the hall, and when I return, a warm washcloth rests between my hands.
He hasn’t moved. His eyes never leave me as I unfold the cloth and reach up once more, gently pressing the heat against his skin before wiping away the blood one careful stroke at a time, revealing the man I’ve come to care for beneath it.
“Ghost…”
His voice is barely more than a whisper. I glance up, amused by his nickname for me because while I might not be dead yet, I think it’s fitting considering it is he who will eventually take my soul away.
“You don’t fear me.”
It’s not a question, but the low murmur of his voice hangs in the short space between us anyway.
The truth is, I do not fear him at all despite the fact that I probably should.
But I never have. There has always been something safe about the angel of darkness that overpowers any fear I might have had if our situation were different.
The cloth rests against his cheek, my fingers curled around the edge of it while I study the face beneath the blood I’d spent the last several minutes quietly washing away.
Up close, I can see the tiny scar tucked beneath the line of his jaw, the faint shadow where his beard has begun returning after shaving it the other day, and the exhaustion sitting heavily behind his eyes that have witnessed far more death than any one man ever should.
It occurs to me then that no one has ever cleaned the blood from him before, if his reaction is anything to go by.
My finger brushes absentmindedly across the corner of his mouth where a final streak of crimson has dried against his skin, and the moment my touch leaves him, I miss it. The thought steals the air from my lungs.
“I’m not afraid of you.”
The confession slips free before I can swallow it back down, quiet enough that I almost convince myself they were only thoughts and I didn’t just say them aloud to the man covered in blood.
His gaze searches mine with an intensity I feel everywhere, making the room around us disappear until there is nothing left but the space between us, shrinking with every passing heartbeat, neither of us moving yet somehow finding ourselves closer than we had been only moments before.
I can feel the warmth radiating off him now, the clean scent of spice fighting against iron and melted ice, and somewhere beneath it all is the familiar comfort I have begun associating with peace.
With happiness. With normalcy and everything else in between.
“You should be,” he says, though there is no conviction behind the words. They sound rehearsed, like I had heard him say them to me before. Perhaps he has.
But I don’t believe him.
I never have.
Because no matter what happens to me. No matter what he does to me.
Nothing could come worse than the horrors I have already faced in this lifetime.
Maybe when he takes me into the next, things will be different for me.
Maybe he’ll come with me. Stay with me there.
The place that only he knows. I want him to take me there.
I want him to be the one to save me from this world.
To rid my head of all the thoughts left behind by rot and cruelty.
I don’t want to give those thoughts life anymore.
I want to be who I need to be for him. For me. I want to be free.
Death makes me feel…free.
If this is truly the face of the man destined to carry my life from this world, then maybe dying was never the thing I was supposed to fear. Maybe I had spent four years surviving only to discover he was always going to be the one to meet me at the end of the line anyway.
He studies me for so long I begin to wonder if I’ve said something aloud without meaning to, his heavy eyes searching mine with such care and patience that has somehow become as familiar to me as breathing.
Then, almost reluctantly, the corner of his mouth lifts into the smallest of smiles.
His hand rises almost absently before stopping halfway between us, hesitating as though even he isn’t certain what it had intended to do.
For one single second, it simply lingers there, suspended in the narrow space separating us, his bloodied inked hands curling slightly before he exhales a quiet breath and lets his hand fall again.
“You know,” he murmurs, his voice rougher now no doubt from the exhaustion lining his words, “you’re making it very difficult to remember why I keep telling myself to stay away from you.”
His words awaken something deep inside me, something I barely recognize but somehow understand all the same.
No one has ever looked at me as though they were fighting themselves simply to remain where they stood.
No one has ever chosen restraint over instinct.
My gaze drifts slowly to his mouth before I can stop it, and his follows.
The tension rippling between us tightens until it feels almost tangible, winding itself around every shallow breath, every hesitant second, every inch of space between our faces that suddenly seems impossibly vast and yet far too small.
Neither of us speaks. Neither of us dares.
I can feel his warmth against my skin from where I stand, the steady rise and fall of his chest, the ghost of a breath brushing across my flesh with every quiet exhale.
His eyes search mine as though he’s looking for permission he refuses to take without being given, while I stand rooted to the floor, unable to remember what it felt like to want something this desperately.
Not survival.
Safety.
My fingers, still curled loosely around the now bloodstained cloth, tremble almost imperceptibly as they linger against the line of his jaw, neither of us acknowledging that I should have stepped away several seconds ago.
Instead, I find myself memorizing him. The golden hue of his eyes softened by the warm glow of the kitchen light.
The tiredness etched into a face that had somehow become the one I searched for every day that I had been away without ever admitting it to myself.
“Ghost,” he whispers. A prayer. A promise.
A warning. Wrapping itself around the name I’ve come to love with such tenderness that something inside me gives away, the final thread tethering me to every reason I had for keeping my distance drifting silently to the floor between us.
For so long I had believed Death would one day steal my final breath, I still do, yet standing here, I realize he has been doing something far more dangerous all along.
He has been giving them back to me, one careful breath of life at a time.
Before fear has the chance to remind me who we are, who he’s supposed to be, the frightened girl buried somewhere inside me can retreat behind the walls she’d spent years building, I rise onto the very tips of my toes, close the last fragile inches separating us, and press my mouth softly against his.
Because I choose to. They stole my name, my freedom, and years I’ll never get back, but they never earned this.
This choice belongs to me.
And that is my power.