Chapter 3
three
OLEANDER
It felt like someone or something was sitting in the velvet armchair in the corner of the living room, legs crossed, fingers steepled, watching me with the infinite patience of a predator waiting for its prey to stop twitching.
Every time I turned my head, the air seemed to settle, as if a presence had just shifted out of my line of sight.
I couldn't stay there. The leather-bound notebook I’d found earlier sat on the kitchen table, its manic symbols and Dominic’s cramped, feverish handwriting humming with a frequency I could feel in my teeth.
I grabbed my coat and fled, the heavy brass key biting into my palm as I locked the door against the silence that no longer felt silent.
The streets of Hollow Vale weren't an improvement.
After a day of being here, the eeriness of the town felt worse, almost heavier than when I arrived.
I walked toward the center of the grid, until I saw the dark wood facade of the bar.
I pushed open the old door, heat hitting me first, followed by a scent that was both sweet and heavy, like rotting lilies and expensive tobacco.
It was dim inside, lit by amber and red lamps that made the dust motes look like sparks of fire.
A piano sat on a low platform in the far corner, its lid closed and the bench empty, but the air around it felt expectant, as if the wood were vibrating with songs it hadn't yet been allowed to play. It was really beginning to worry me that everything felt... alive here. I went straight to the bar and climbed onto a stool that felt too high, my feet dangling like a child’s.
"Whiskey," I said to the bartender. "Neat. The strongest one you have."
He poured a glass of something amber and pushed it toward me. I drank half of it in one go, the liquid searing a path down my throat. It was exactly what I needed. I wanted the edges of the world to blur until the memory of Dominic’s handwriting was just a smudge of ink in the back of my mind.
By the third glass, the tension in my shoulders had started to dissolve into a dull, manageable ache.
The room felt softer, the voices of the few other patrons blending into a low, oceanic hum.
I let my gaze wander, cataloging the bottles behind the bar, the way the light pooled on the polished mahogany, and then my eyes snagged on the far end of the room.
He was sitting in the deepest shadow, a man who seemed to be made of different material than the rest of the world.
He wasn't moving. Everyone else in the bar was shifting, leaning into conversations, checking phones, or tapping fingers against glass, but he was a statue.
He was big, broad-shouldered and solid, with long, dark hair that fell past his shoulders and obscured half of his face.
A beard, thick and shot through with silver at the edges, covered a jaw that looked like it had been carved from granite.
He wore a heavy dark coat thrown over what appeared to be a bare chest, or perhaps a shirt unbuttoned nearly to the waist, revealing skin that looked weathered and tough.
He was holding a glass of dark liquid, but he wasn't drinking.
He was just... being. And the shadows around him were wrong.
They didn't fall away from him; they clung to him, dense and ink-black, pooling across his shoulders and down his arms as if the dark were a physical garment he had chosen to wear.
I stared, the whiskey having stripped away the layer of my brain that usually cautioned me against looking too closely at dangerous things.
He felt it. The weight of my gaze must have been a physical pressure, because he looked up. His eyes caught the red light from a nearby lamp, and for a second, they looked like polished glass, pale green or grey, sharp enough to cut through the gloom.
He studied me with the unhurried, predatory attention of someone who had just decided the rest of the room no longer mattered.
I should have turned back to my drink. I should have looked at my hands, at the bar, at anything else.
But I was trapped in the gravity of those eyes, and I couldn’t look away.
Then, he moved. It was a fluid, deliberate motion, surprisingly graceful for a man of his size.
He picked up his untouched glass and stood, crossing the bar with a stride that suggested the crowd was merely a minor inconvenience he chose to ignore.
He didn't stop until he reached the stool beside mine, sitting down so close that I could feel the heat radiating off him.
He smelled of cedar, woodsmoke, and something darker, more metallic underneath, the scent of cold earth and old iron. I could see the pulse in his neck, the way his hair was matted and wild. He set his glass on the bar and stared at the reflection of the amber lights in the dark wood.
"You look like you came here to make a bad decision," he said. His voice was a low, resonant rumble that I felt in my bones more than I heard with my ears.
I didn't answer. He finally turned his head, those pale, piercing eyes pinning me in place.
The silver in his beard caught the light, making him look older and more ancient than what I assumed was his early thirties.
"You smell like cold rooms and old grief," he said.
"You smell like things that should have stayed buried. "
I tightened my grip on my glass, the condensation slick against my palm. "I'm just living there. It was left to me. I didn't ask for any of... whatever this is."
"Nobody asks for Hollow Vale," he said, leaning in closer.
His shoulder brushed mine, and the contact sent a jolt of electricity through me that made the fine hairs on my arms stand on end.
"But you're here. And the shadows are already starting to gather around you like they recognize the scent of your grief. "
I swallowed hard, my throat feeling tight and dry despite the whiskey. "You talk like the town is alive."
"It is," he whispered, his face so close I could see the individual flecks of grey in his irises. "And it's hungry. You shouldn't be here alone. Not with whatever you brought in your luggage."
I didn't know him, didn't even know his name, but I could feel the pull of him, a magnetic force that was stronger than my fear. He reached out, his hand resting on the bar inches from my own. I watched the way the shadows seemed to bleed from his skin onto the wood, creeping toward me.
"I'm Rowan," he said, the name sounding like a warning. He looked at me, waiting, and the silence stretched until I realized he was asking without asking.
"Oleander," I said. It felt like handing a stranger a knife and trusting him not to use it. The way he repeated it just once, under his breath, made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It sounded like a violation and a prayer all at once.
"You're going to want to finish that drink, Oleander. Because we're leaving."
I looked at his hand, then back up at his face.
The part of me that wanted to survive, the part that Liliana kept trying to reach over the phone, told me to run.
To get out of the bar, out of the town, and never look back.
But the part of me that was tired of being numb, the part that was drowning in the silence of that empty apartment, was already reaching for the glass.