XXXIV
Heaton’s mouth curved—a devastating tilt that wasn’t a smile so much as an admission.
“Took you long enough, October.”
He took one deliberate step closer, his legs brushing the edge of the mattress. Cold moved with him, slipping beneath the blankets and over my skin.
“But let’s be honest,” he said, leaning down until his face was inches from mine. “You’ve known what I was since the moment I stepped into your orbit. You were just waiting for a reason to say it out loud.”
“Like . . . ” My voice came out thin. “A ghost ghost? Rattling chains? Walking through walls? Victorian child at the top of the stairs?”
A low, dry sound escaped him.
“No chains, Madeline.” His silver eyes dropped to my mouth, heavy and unblinking. “Unless that’s a particular fantasy of yours.”
My heart betrayed me with one hard, stupid kick.
His voice lowered.
“In which case, I’ve had a century to learn restraint.”
I wanted to tell him to go to hell.
I wanted to tell him my only fantasy involved him falling off that cliff without me.
Instead, I swallowed hard and asked, “How long have you been . . . ”
“Dead?”
He said the word without flinching.
“One hundred and twenty-six years,” he breathed. “Give or take a few months of static.”
“But how?” The word scraped out. “How do you look so real? I can see you. I can feel the cold of you. You’re here.”
“Corporeal,” he offered, clinical and detached. “Solid enough to touch. Solid enough to be a problem.”
“Solid enough to pick me up and step off a cliff?”
I could still feel the phantom imprint of his arms around me.
A hollow sound—the ghost of a laugh—left him.
“Not usually.” His eyes flicked toward the frosted window. “Not without a cost.”
He moved with slow grace back to the chair beside the bed. Shadows gathered in the corners behind him, leaning toward the hem of his coat as if they recognized their own.
“It’s energy,” he said. “Emotion. Atmosphere. Ghosts feed on whatever the living world leaks—fear, grief, devotion. Anything strong enough to leave a mark.”
His gaze shifted toward the dark bones of Winter Quarters beyond the glass.
“Most of us stay close to where we died. That’s what keeps us intact.” His eyes returned to mine. “The farther we go, the worse it gets.”
“And when you leave?” I asked. “When you’re with me at school?”
“Then I drain,” he said, his voice brutally honest. “Slow at first. Then fast. Like a battery bleeding out in the snow.” His expression closed.
“It isn’t just weakness. That would be too merciful.
You start to come apart. You lose the ability to think human.
To feel human. Eventually, all that’s left is hunger. ”
The fire crackled low in the hearth.
“Not the kind you can reason with,” he continued. “Not the kind that cares about names, or faces, or whether the thing in front of it deserves to live. Just need. Light. Warmth. Anything bright enough to keep the dark from swallowing what’s left of you.”
My mouth went dry.
“People?”
His gaze slid back to mine.
“Most living things barely register. A dim glow. Cool. Weak. Easy to ignore.” His voice dropped. “A mouthful of warmth and nothing more.”
“And me?”
For the first time since he’d started explaining, Heaton looked like he regretted every word that had brought us here.
“Yours is different.”
He swallowed hard, studying my face not with awe, but with the cold, assessing precision of a jeweler eyeing a raw diamond.
“Madeline,” he said, “you burn.”
My pulse stumbled.
“Not glow. Not flicker. Burn.” His eyes moved over my face as if the truth were written under my skin. “You’re not just energy. You’re a storm with a heartbeat. The brightest thing I’ve seen in a hundred years.”
The room seemed to tighten around us.
The fire leaned toward me.
Or maybe I only imagined it.
“There’s nothing dim or shallow about you,” he said. “And that is not a compliment.”
His hand curled around the bed frame, knuckles bleaching white. Anger lived in the grip. But beneath it, coiled like a frayed wire, was fear.
“I shouldn’t have let you go.”
“That wasn’t your call to make,” I said, my voice rough with pain.
A breath left him—half scoff, half surrender.
“Believe me,” he muttered, “I’m painfully aware—but I’m also the one who has to keep saving your reckless ass, aren’t I?”
The words stung because they weren’t wrong.
My fingers drifted to the center of my chest, where the oversized shirt met my skin. The ache there wasn’t like the rest. It burned cold, branching beneath my sternum like the aftershock of a lightning strike.
“And what did you do,” I asked, “to save me?”
He didn’t answer.
That was answer enough.
“Heaton.”
His jaw flexed once.
“You’re not going to like it.”
“Oh, good,” I said. “Something to look forward to.”
He leaned closer, and up close, the cracks showed—his hands unsteady, his shoulders locked too tight, as if he were bracing for an impact that hadn’t come yet.
“I had to stabilize you,” he said. “You were bleeding out.”
“I gathered that part.”
Irritation flickered across his face.
“Fine.” His voice hardened. “I bound us.”
The words didn’t register.
Then they did.
“You what?”
“It’s not romantic,” he said before I could spiral. “It’s not symbolic. It’s structural.”
“Structural?”
“It means I took a gamble on that pedigree of yours, Madeline.” He chose each word with excruciating care. “I knew there was something in you that wouldn’t stay buried. Not once it had something to answer to.”
My hand pressed to my chest without thinking.
The cold beneath my sternum flared, harsh and branching.
I sucked in a breath.
“There’s a connection now,” he continued. “Not one you asked for. Not one I planned.”
I pushed up against the pillows, my shock sharpening into something colder. “And let me guess. You can use it.”
His eyes lifted to mine.
“Yes.”
My stomach turned. “Use it how?”
He didn’t look away.
“I can pull from you.”
The room seemed to tilt.
“Pull what?”
“Energy. Heat. Life.” His voice was flat, but his hands had gone rigid. “The connection gives me a direct path to you. It could stabilize me. Make me more solid for longer. Keep me from coming apart.”
The silence after that was charged and horrifying.
“The problem,” he said, “is that it makes you the source.”
My hand fell.
“You’re joking.”
“I don’t joke about things like this.”
His silver eyes darkened until his pupils nearly swallowed the light.
“Binding what’s left of a soul to a living person? To an Anchor?” His mouth tightened. “It’s a desecration. I’m not just tied to these mountains anymore, Madeline. I’m tied to you.”
He hadn’t just saved me. He had tethered his soul to my heartbeat.
“So, I’m what?” My voice thinned. “Yours to use now?”
Pain moved through his expression.
“No.”
“Sounds like it.”
“It’s not something I plan to use.”
“Plan,” I repeated. “That’s promising.”
A tremor ran through his hands—the only crack in the control he was holding together.
“I’ll keep the pull off you as much as I can,” he said. “But I will not lie. It isn’t a switch I can flip. The temptation is constant.”
His voice became careful.
“Every second I’m near you, I have to choose not to take what I need. To feel your warmth and know I could drink my fill.” He looked away, jaw tight. “It’s a unique hell.”
His eyes snapped back to mine.
“But I didn’t do it for leverage. I did it because you were dying.”
“And now?”
“Now,” he said, “we deal with the consequences.”
I forced the next question out.
“Can you undo it?”
“No.”
That hit harder than anything else.
I nodded once, more to myself than to him.
“Perfect.”
His attention shifted to the oversized shirt I wore, to the places beneath it where the bond still burned cold.
“I’m aware that the marks are unpleasant for you.” He pushed off the bedframe, creating a sliver of space that felt more like a line being drawn. “It won’t be a regular occurrence.”
The finality in his voice was a lie.
I could feel it.
“Unless?”
He didn’t answer right away.
Instead, he took one step toward me and stopped at the edge of the mattress, his shadow falling over the bed.
“Unless I have to.”
His eyes locked onto mine.
“Unless the alternative is watching you die in front of me again.”
The words were ground out, laced with a fury that wasn’t aimed at me, but at the memory itself.
“In which case,” he said, “those marks will be the least of your problems.”
He leaned in, and the room seemed to shrink around him.
“Because if it’s you or me, October . . . ”
He paused, letting the weight of his words crush the air between us.
“It won’t be you.”