Chapter 33
thirty-three
OLEANDER
The air in the apartment felt thin, as if the oxygen were being replaced by something ancient.
I stood at the center of the living room, the floorboards groaning under the collective weight of four men who had no business being in the same room, let alone the same life.
On the coffee table, Dominic's notebook lay open, its manic symbols seemingly vibrating against the wood, the ink appearing wetter and darker than it had a moment ago.
Rowan stood to my left, a wall of muscle and silent fury.
To my right, Julian leaned against the wall, his long fingers twitching against his thighs as if he were trying to play a piano that wasn't there.
Theo was behind me, his camera strap clicking against his chest, but he wasn't looking through a lens. He was looking at me.
"It's happening," Theo whispered. "The light. It's not reflecting off the walls anymore. It's being swallowed."
He was right. The shadows weren't just pooling in the corners.
They were rising, thick and oily, flowing toward the center of the room like a tide.
The temperature plummeted until I could see my own breath.
Then, the smell hit like it always did, added with the sharp scent of the soap Dominic used to buy from some boutique he loved.
The darkness hardened. One moment there was only a blur of grey-black static, and the next, Dominic was standing there.
He looked more real than I'd seen him since the funeral.
He was wearing the charcoal suit I'd picked out for his final gallery opening, the one he'd told me made him look like a man who knew exactly how much the world owed him.
His dark hair was perfectly faded, his jawline sharp, his eyes locked onto mine with a terrifying, familiar intensity.
He tilted his head, that slight, predatory movement he used whenever I was about to apologize for something I hadn't done.
He looked like the man I had loved for nearly a decade, and that was the cruelest part of the haunting.
The expression on his face was a blend of adoration and absolute, unyielding ownership.
"Oleander," he said. His voice didn't come from the air. It came from inside my head, vibrating against the back of my teeth. "You look tired, darling. You always did let yourself go when I wasn't there to mind you."
I felt a tremor start in my knees, the old, reflexive urge to straighten my posture, to become the version of myself that he found acceptable. I felt Rowan step closer, but I held up a hand. This wasn't a fight for a protector. This was a conversation I should have had while he was still alive.
"I'm not doing it, Dominic," I said, my voice steadier than I felt. "I'm not looking away this time."
Dominic's smile stretched, a fraction too wide. "You were always so dramatic. It was one of your few charms. Come here. Let's close the notebook. We can go back to how it was. Just the two of us, in the quiet."
I looked at the notebook, then back at him. I had spent years treating his love like a storm I had to survive, rather than a partnership I was supposed to enjoy. He had used my avoidance, my quiet nature, my desperate need for peace, as the very tools to build my cage.
"I loved you," I said, and the words felt like they were being pulled out of my throat by a hook.
"I loved you so much that I let you erase me.
I watched you buy those books, Dominic. I watched you draw those symbols in the margins of our life, and I stayed silent because I was afraid that if I spoke, you'd stop looking at me.
I was a coward. I let my own silence become the soil for whatever you were growing. "
The darkness around his feet began to pulse, matching the beat of my heart. His expression shifted, the adoration curdling into fury. "You would be nothing without me, Oleander. You were a flickering candle when I found you. I gave you a hearth. I gave you a name that meant something."
"You gave me a name that was poison," I countered.
"And you were right, I was a flickering candle.
But you didn't give me a hearth. You built a chimney and waited for me to burn out so you could keep the ash.
I should have stopped you. I should have walked out the first time I saw you looking at me like I was a piece of furniture you hadn't finished staining.
I will carry the guilt of that, Dominic.
I will carry the fact that I let this happen. But I am done carrying you."
The air erupted. A sudden, violent surge of pressure that sent the furniture skittering across the floor. The coffee table cracked down the middle, the wood splintering. The windows shattered simultaneously, glass raining inward.
Julian was thrown backward, his back hitting the wall. Rowan moved faster than I could track, catching him before he could slump to the floor, shielding him from the glass. Theo lunged forward, his hand clamping around mine, his fingers cold and trembling but his grip absolute.
"Oleander, get back!" Rowan roared over the wind.
I didn't move. I was the anchor, the weight at the end of the line, and the only way to stop the sinking was to cut the rope. The shadows were clawing at me, cold fingers dragging across my skin, trying to pull me into the center of the vortex where Dominic stood, his face a mask of distorted rage.
"I'm closing the door," I said. "Do you hear me? I'm closing it!"
Dominic's form blurred, his features stretching. "You don't know the words! You don't have the power to stop what I started! You are the bridge, Oleander! You are mine!"
"I don't need a ritual!" I screamed back. "I don't need your symbols or your blood or your secrets! I just need to stop wanting you to be here! I'm letting go, Dominic! I'm choosing to be alone!"
I reached inward, past the fear, past the grief that had become a comfortable, rotting blanket, and found the one thing I had been protecting all these months: the hope that he would come back and tell me it was all a mistake.
I took that hope and I crushed it. I looked at the man I had built my life around and I saw him for what he was, just a man who was so afraid of being forgotten that he tried to swallow the world.
The grief in my chest began to change. It didn't vanish.
You don't just stop hurting because you want to.
But it transformed. The links of the chain melted, the iron turning into something softer, something internal.
It shifted from a weight that held me down to a scar on the inside of my heart.
Something that would always be there, something that would always ache when the weather changed, but something that no longer had the power to move my limbs.
The wind died instantly. The shadows retracted as if burned, retreating into the cracks in the floorboards. The notebook on the table burst into flames, the pages curling into black ash.
Dominic's shape began to lose its coherence.
The charcoal suit faded, the sharp jawline softened, and for one final second, the monster vanished.
It was just him. The Dominic I had married, the man who used to read poetry to me in bed, the man who had been my entire world.
His expression was confusion. Pure, unadulterated confusion.
He looked around the room, his eyes lingering on Rowan, then Julian, then Theo, before settling on me. He looked like a man who had just woken up in a house he didn't recognize. His lips moved, forming my name one last time, a silent, hollow sound that carried no weight at all.
Then, like a photograph dropped into water, he dissolved. The grey tint bled out of the air, the cold snapped back into the natural chill of a Hollow Vale autumn, and the silence that followed was so absolute it felt like it might never be broken.
I stood there for a long time, staring at the empty space where my husband had been. My hand was still in Theo's. Behind me, I heard the ragged sound of Rowan's breathing and the soft, shaky exhale of Julian finding his feet.
The room was a wreck. Shattered glass covered every surface, the smell of smoke and ozone hung heavy, and the apartment felt empty. For the first time since I had crossed the town line, I was actually alone in my own head.
"Is he gone?" Theo asked.
I looked at the blackened remains of the notebook, then out the shattered window at the fog that was finally, mercifully, beginning to thin. I felt the weight of the three men behind me and the strange, impossible life we had started to build in the ruins of my past.
"Yes," I said, and the word felt like the first breath I'd taken in years. "He's gone."