Chapter 31
thirty-one
OLEANDER
THIRTY MINUTES AGO
The light in the apartment retreated, pulling back into the corners, leaving the center of the living room a hollow, grey bowl of silence.
There was no sound of traffic from the street outside, no hum of a refrigerator, no distant siren.
Hollow Vale had gone quiet, as if the town were holding its breath.
I sat in the thickening dark and thought of the three men who were likely looking for me. Rowan's steady weight, Julian's precise hands, Theo's searching gaze. They felt like a different world. But this room belonged to the cold.
"Dominic," I said. "Come here."
The air crystallized. I watched my breath bloom in front of me, a white cloud that didn't dissipate.
Then came the smell. Sandalwood and expensive wool, a faint, sweet sharpness that used to mean safety.
It was the smell of the man who had curated every inch of my life until there was nothing left of me but the shape he'd carved out.
A shape began to coalesce in the corner by the bookshelf.
It didn't step out of the shadows. It was made of them.
A silhouette wearing the shape of the man I had buried, gathering the darkness until it had weight and edges.
The broad shoulders. The sharp, clean line of the fade.
The solid, terrifying presence of a man who never asked for permission to exist.
The distance between us seemed to collapse. I looked directly into the hollows where his eyes should have been, into the wrongness of that familiar face.
"Oleander," he said. It wasn't a whisper or a trick of the wind. It was his voice, the baritone that used to vibrate against my collarbone when we danced. "You look tired, Lee. You look like you've been fighting for something that isn't yours."
"You're dead," I said, my voice steadying. "I saw the dirt. I felt the cold on your skin. You aren't here."
"That doesn't matter here," he replied, and the shape of him shifted, stepping forward.
The floorboards didn't creak. The air just moved around him, heavy and smelling of our old apartment.
"In this place, nothing is truly gone. Only tucked away.
You know that. You've been tucking yourself away since the funeral. "
He reached out a hand. It looked solid, the fingers long and blunt, the skin a pale, shimmering grey.
I could almost feel the phantom pressure of those fingers on my jaw, the way he used to tilt my head up so I had no choice but to see him.
For a heartbeat, the familiar pull of it was so strong I almost leaned into the void.
"Surrender, Lee," he murmured. "Stop trying to carry the weight of those men. They don't know you. They know the wreck I left behind. Come back to the quiet. Come back to the devotion."
The temptation pressed down on me. If I stayed here, if I let the shadows take me, I wouldn't have to worry about Rowan's violent protective streaks or Julian's haunting melodies or the way Theo looked at me like I was a puzzle he was desperate to solve.
I could just be the ghost of Oleander Voss, kept safe in a dark room by the only man who had ever truly claimed me.
The door would quiet. The guilt would stop screaming.
I could fall backward into the grief and let it swallow me whole.
"It's so easy," Dominic whispered. "Just stop fighting. Let them go. They'll forget you eventually. Everyone does. But I never will."
I reached for my phone. Not because I was calling for help, but because I needed a tether to a reality that didn't smell like sandalwood. My fingers were numb, fumbling with the screen until the light blinded me. It was 3 AM in London. She wouldn't be asleep.
Liliana answered on the first ring. "Oleander? What happened?"
I looked at the shadow-man standing in my living room, his hand still extended. "He's here, Lili," I whispered. "He's standing right in front of me. He wants me to stay. He says it'll be quiet. He says he'll take care of me."
A sharp intake of breath on the other end. "Tell me exactly what he said, Ollie. Every word."
I repeated it. I told her about the offer of surrender, about the quiet, about the way he looked at me with that soft, sad smile. I told her that I was tired, and that for the first time, Dominic was being kind. He was giving me a choice.
"A choice?" Her voice cut through the static. "He's giving you a choice?"
"Yes," I said, watching the shadow-Dominic tilt his head. "He's being gentle. He's not shouting. He's just waiting."
"Oleander, listen to me. That isn't Dominic.
The real Dominic didn't give choices. He didn't wait for you to decide.
He maneuvered. He manipulated. He built walls around you until the only door left was the one he held the key to.
If that thing is being tender, it's because it knows that's the only way to get you to walk into the dark on your own. "
The silence that followed was absolute. The shadow in the corner didn't flicker, but the temperature dropped another ten degrees.
Liliana was right. The real Dominic Ashworth had been a man of iron and ego.
He didn't ask for surrender. He assumed it.
He didn't offer a quiet life. He demanded a devoted one.
"It's not him, is it?" I asked.
"No," Liliana said. "It's the version of him your guilt built. Or it's the town wearing his face because it knows you're the only thing keeping the door open. Don't you dare give in, Oleander. Don't you dare let that ghost win because he's finally learned how to pretend to be nice."
I looked at the manifestation. For the first time, I saw the seams. The way the shadows didn't quite hold together at the edges. The way the scent of sandalwood was too perfect, too curated. It was a memory projected onto a void. It was a trap made of my own longing for an easy end.
"You aren't him," I said to the shape. "He would have just taken my hand and told me we were leaving. He wouldn't have waited for me to say yes."
The smile didn't falter, but the shape began to bleed at the edges, the solid greys dissolving back into the black of the room.
The scent vanished, replaced by the sharp smell of copper and wet earth.
The cold remained, but it was no longer the cold of a person.
It was just the atmosphere of a town that wanted to be fed.
"I'm still here, Lili," I said into the phone.
"Good," she whispered. "Now get out of that apartment. Go find those men. Go find someone who's actually breathing."