Chapter 19
nineteen
OLEANDER
I woke up before dawn. The apartment was cold, the kind of cold that settles in your bones, but the weight of Rowan beside me kept the worst of it at bay.
He was breathing in that heavy, rhythmic way he had, the one that sounded like the town itself was exhaling through him.
I didn't move. The silence in this town was always listening.
The piano note from last night was still ringing in some back corner of my mind.
A single strike on an instrument no one had touched, played by a room that should have been empty.
I'd watched the key press down with my own eyes.
The bench had been vacant. Julian had been standing in the doorway with his hands held out like a man proving he wasn't armed.
And Rowan had pulled me closer with one arm while his other hand reached for something on the nightstand that I realized, with a cold lurch, was a knife.
None of us had slept well after that.
I shifted slightly and Rowan was awake instantly. No slow transition. His eyes snapped open, sharp and grey in the gloom, and his hand moved to my waist. His grip was firm, almost bruising, as if he needed to verify that I was still solid.
"You're thinking again," he said.
"Hard not to," I whispered. "The air feels heavy today. Like something's coming."
Rowan sat up, the blankets falling away. He looked toward the window where the fog was pressing against the glass. "It's getting personal," he said, his words clipped. "The piano. The shadows. It's testing the locks, Oleander. It wants to see if we'll break before it even has to touch us."
The guilt tightened in my chest. This was my legacy. Dominic hadn't just left me an apartment. He'd left me a haunting that was now bleeding into the only three people who made me feel like I wasn't already a ghost.
"I should go back to my place," I said. "If it's targeting me, I shouldn't be here. I'm putting you and Julian at risk."
Rowan turned back to me and the look in his eyes stopped me. He reached forward, his hands cupping my face, his thumbs pressing into my cheekbones with a possessiveness that should have terrified me. Instead, it was the only thing keeping me from floating away.
"Don't you ever say that again," he said. "You think you're the only one with ghosts? You think this town waited for you to start its games? We're in this because we chose to be. Because I chose you. You don't get to run back to that dead man just because the walls are whispering."
He was breathing hard, the heat radiating off him in waves. I reached up and covered his hands with mine.
"You're shaking," I said.
He pulled his hands away and clenched them against the mattress. He wasn't just shaken by the piano. He was looking at his own hands the way he sometimes did, like he expected them to be stained with something he couldn't wash off.
"The last time it felt like this," he said, his voice dropping so low I had to lean in. "The electricity. The way the air tastes. The last time..."
He trailed off. His jaw tightened and he looked away, toward the door, toward something I couldn't see.
I didn't push. I knew what it felt like to carry a secret that was too heavy to put down but too dangerous to hold.
"You don't have to tell me," I said. "Not yet."
"Not yet," he repeated, and the way he said it told me the story was coming. Just not today.
We sat there in the quiet for a while, Rowan's hand finding mine on the mattress, his thumb running back and forth across my knuckles in a slow, absent rhythm. The apartment was still. The piano in the living room was silent, but the silence felt provisional, like it could end at any moment.
Soft footsteps from the hallway made us both tense.
Then Julian appeared in the bedroom doorway, holding two mugs of coffee.
He looked like he hadn't slept at all. His eyes were drawn, the skin beneath them darker than usual, and his shoulders carried a rigidity that didn't belong on a man standing in his own home.
He looked at us in the bed, at Rowan's hand over mine, and something moved across his face that I couldn't quite read. He stood there for a long moment, the steam curling up from the mugs, and I could see him making a decision.
"It played again," Julian said. "At four. One note. The same one."
Rowan's grip on my hand tightened. "You should have woken us."
"You needed sleep." Julian set the mugs on the dresser.
He was still standing in the doorway, his body angled half-in and half-out of the room, as if he hadn't decided yet whether he belonged in this particular scene.
I recognized the posture.It was the same one I'd had at their front door the first time Rowan invited me over, the same threshold calculation.
Rowan lifted the edge of the blanket. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to.
Julian looked at the open space beside me, then at Rowan, then back at me. The pause lasted long enough for me to feel every second of it. Then he crossed the room and got into the bed.
He settled on my other side, his back against the headboard, his body close but not touching.
The mattress dipped under his weight and I could feel the warmth of him through the sheets, a different warmth than Rowan's.
Rowan was heat like a furnace, constant and aggressive.
Julian was warmth like a room you'd been away from and just come back to.
For a minute, nobody moved. The three of us just sat there in the grey light, listening to the apartment breathe.
Then Julian's hand found mine under the covers.
His fingers laced through mine, careful and deliberate, and I felt something shift in my chest that had nothing to do with the paranormal.
It was the first time Julian had reached for me.
Every other touch between us had been incidental, accidental, or mine. This one was his. He was choosing it.
I didn't look at him. I was afraid that if I looked at him, he'd pull away, the way a wild animal retreats when you acknowledge it's come close. I just held his hand and let the contact say what neither of us could.
Rowan noticed. Of course he did. His thumb paused on my knuckles for a fraction of a second before resuming its slow rhythm.
He didn't comment. He just shifted his weight slightly, settling deeper into the bed, and the three of us sat there in a silence that felt, for the first time, like something we were building together instead of something the town was filling with ghosts.
"Whatever played that piano," Julian said, "it knew the melody. It wasn't random. It was the same note the melody starts on. Like a calling card."
"Or an invitation," I said.
"Or a threat," Rowan said.
Julian's fingers tightened around mine. "It's in the instrument now. Not just in my head. It's physically in the piano. I could feel it when I walked past this morning, like the wood was humming."
"So we get rid of the piano," Rowan said.
"That won't stop it." Julian's voice was steady but I could feel the tension in his hand. "If it can play without me, it doesn't need the instrument. It just likes using mine. Taking something I love and making it into a weapon. That's personal, Rowan. Whatever this is, it's choosing targets."
The word landed in the room and stayed there. Personal. Whatever Dominic had left behind, it wasn't ambient. It wasn't just the town being the town. It was choosing targets. Julian's music. My guilt. And whatever Rowan carried that he wouldn't name.
"We need to talk to Theo," Julian said. "He's been photographing things he won't show us. I think he knows more than he's saying."
"Theo always knows more than he's saying," Rowan muttered. "It's his whole personality."
I almost laughed. It wasn't funny, not really, but the sheer normalcy of Rowan being annoyed at Theo while the three of us sat in bed processing a haunting felt like the most human moment I'd experienced in weeks.
Julian must have felt it too, because his thumb moved across the back of my hand, a slow, grounding stroke that mirrored Rowan's on the other side.
I was held between them, my left hand in Julian's, my right hand in Rowan's, and the weight of it was the closest thing to safe I'd felt since I arrived in Hollow Vale.
"I'm not leaving," I said. I wasn't talking about the apartment.