Chapter Forty Harper
Chapter Forty
Harper
The phone call came right after my shift.
Unknown number. A man’s voice, low, urgent, familiar in the worst way.
“Harper, it’s about Violet. She’s hurt. She’s asking for you. I’m outside the coffee shop.”
My stomach dropped. Violet never asked for help. I grabbed my bag and pushed through the back door into the alley.
But this wasn’t Grayson. The man waiting beneath the broken security light was tall like him, dressed in a similar black coat, but something was off.
The posture was too rigid, the shoulders a fraction too narrow, and the tilt of his head wrong under the flickering light.
It was deliberate. A cruel mimicry meant to lure me closer.
The second I registered the differences, real panic swelled in me.
The cloth clamped over my mouth from behind, smelling like chemicals and rust. Then nothing.
A day had passed. Maybe two.
I woke in a damp basement cell, wrists bound with rough twine that cut into my skin. The only light came from a couple of small windows in the stone wall. The air was thick with mildew and something metallic—blood, old and new.
Footsteps approached. Measured. Patient.
The door opened, and a man stepped in. My vision blurred at the edges, the dim light playing tricks.
The face staring back at me was older, sharper, with faint lines around the eyes and a jaw shadowed by stubble.
But those ocean-blue eyes . . . they were unmistakable.
No. It can’t be.
I blinked hard, shaking my head as if to clear a nightmare. “This isn’t real,” I whispered. “You’re not . . . you can’t be him.”
Ten years. A decade since I’d last seen that face, since my parents ripped us apart and he vanished like smoke.
I’d convinced myself he was gone, that he’d moved on.
But whatever this was, whatever he’d become, hadn’t crossed my mind.
I’d never pictured him standing here—my captor—looking at me like I was a long-lost prize.
Lucien Voss.
The realization hit like a physical blow, stealing my breath. My heart slammed against my ribs, confusion swirling with raw shock. Why him? How? The boy who’d been my everything—my escape, my first love—was the person who’d taken me?
“Hello, Harper,” he said, voice soft and certain. “It’s time to come home.”
I jerked against the bonds, the twine burning my wrists. “Lucien? What . . . what the hell is this? Let me go.” My mind reeled, fragments of memories crashing in of stolen kisses, whispered promises, and the night everything shattered.
This had to be a mistake. A cruel joke. He couldn’t be the one who’d done this.
He knelt so we were eye level, the way he used to when we were teenagers hiding from our parents. “You’ve been running long enough. The Shadowed Veil has been waiting for you. It’s time you took your place and fulfilled your rightful role.”
His blue eyes held the same intensity they’d had at sixteen, but now they carried something colder.
Conviction.
I shook my head, the words not making sense.
Growing up, my parents had been strict—zealous about purity, about rules, about keeping the world at arm’s length, but I’d never known they were part of anything called a cult.
They’d just been . . . my parents. Controlling, yes.
Terrifying when angry, absolutely. But a cult?
No sermons in basements, no robes, no blood rituals.
Nothing like the horrors I’d later learn about the Bleeding Ground.
Lucien’s mouth twisted, almost pitying, as if he read my mind.
“You never saw it because they protected you from the full truth. The Shadowed Veil broke away from the Bleeding Ground years ago. We are purer. More devoted. My family stayed loyal to the Shadowed Veil, while yours stayed original, convinced their doctrine was perfect. When they caught us together . . . it was decided you were meant for something higher. Something cleaner. A living embodiment of the Veil’s ideal. ”
The revelation landed like a slap. All those years of suffocating rules, the sudden disappearance of Lucien after that night, my eventual escape . . . it hadn’t been ordinary fanaticism. It had been this. A splinter sect, hidden in plain sight and waiting for me.
“You took me,” I stammered, still shaking my head in denial. “You? After all this time . . . why?” My voice rose, laced with disbelief. It didn’t make sense. The Lucien I knew would have fought for me, not stolen me away like this.
“I saved you,” he corrected gently. “From a half life. From loneliness. From them.” He meant my parents. “You belong here. With me. With us.”
I stared at him, searching for the boy I’d loved, but seeing only a stranger wearing his face. Confusion knotted my thoughts. Shock turned my limbs heavy. Ten years, and this was our reunion? In bondage and captivity?
His eyes lingered on my face, searching. In the quiet stretch between us, I felt exposed. Every flicker of shock, every buried memory of his touch, and every unspoken question laid bare under his gaze.
Lucien saw the confusion warring with recognition, the way my breath caught when his fingers brushed my cheek.
He was waiting for my surrender to happen.
Proof that the girl who’d loved him fiercely at sixteen was still there, buried beneath ten years of running.
Proof that the life I’d built without him had been hollow, incomplete.
He leaned in a fraction closer, his voice dropping to barely above a whisper. “I see it, Harper. The way you’re looking at me. You feel it, too. You never really left.”
I wanted to scream that he was wrong, that he was delusional. I wanted him to know the tremor in my chest was rage, not longing. But the words wouldn’t come. My silence betrayed me, and he drank it in like confirmation.
Finally, he stood and left. For a moment he hesitated at the threshold, his back to me, shoulders tense beneath the dark fabric of his shirt.
His hand rested on the doorframe, fingers curling as if fighting the urge to turn around .
. . to reach for me again, or maybe to walk away from everything he’d become.
A flicker of something raw crossed his profile. Maybe doubt, or memory, or even the ghost of the boy who’d once promised me the world. Then it was gone, schooled into the calm mask of conviction he wore so well.
The door closed behind him with a heavy thud, the sound final and echoing, sealing me in near darkness once again.
I counted heartbeats until I couldn’t anymore, until my mind spun with questions that had no answers, and memories I’d tried so hard to bury.