Chapter 34
thirty-four
JULIAN
The silence in the apartment didn't feel like a threat anymore.
It felt like an empty room after a long, exhausting party, the kind where the air is still warm from the bodies that have left it.
I sat on the hardwood floor, my back pressed against the cold plaster of the wall, and waited for the sound to return.
It was gone. The melody that hadn't been mine, the one that had tasted like Dominic’s cologne and smelled like rotting silk, had finally thinned out.
It settled into the back of my mind like a ghost note, that faint, barely-there vibration a pianist feels in the keys when they haven't quite struck them.
It was permanent, a quiet resonance that told me my music would never be entirely my own again.
I could feel the residue of what had passed through me, a faint metallic hum in my marrow, but as I looked at the three men around me, I decided I could live with a scar.
A scar isn't a wound. It's just proof that you didn't break.
Rowan was beside me, his massive frame slumped in a way I’d never seen before.
He looked solid, but he looked hollowed out, his shoulders dropping as the adrenaline finally leaked out of him.
He didn't say anything, but he didn't have to.
He was there. He reached out, his hand heavy and warm as he clamped it onto my shoulder, anchoring me to the floor.
I leaned into the weight of him, letting his exhaustion match my own.
Across the room, Theo was leaning against the window frame.
He looked like a sketch of himself, all sharp angles and pale skin, but his eyes were present.
For the first time since I’d known him, there was no camera between him and the world.
The strap hung loose around his neck, the lens cap on, the glass eye finally closed.
He looked at us—really looked at us—without trying to frame the moment or capture the light.
He just existed in the ruin of the room.
Oleander was on the floor a few feet away, his legs tucked up against his chest. The space where the notebook had burned was a charred circle on the floorboards.
He had his phone pressed to his ear, his knuckles white.
I could hear the tinny, frantic vibration of a voice on the other end.
Liliana. She sounded like she was a thousand miles away, shouting into a void she couldn't see.
"It's over," Oleander said, his voice scraped raw. He stared at the ashes of his past, his dark eyes tracking the way the grey flakes drifted in the draft from the shattered window.
I could hear her voice through the receiver, sharp with a desperation that made my chest ache. "Oleander? Oleander, talk to me. Are you okay? Tell me you're okay."
Oleander closed his eyes. He looked like he was memorizing the feeling of the floor beneath him, the way the air felt without the pressure of a dead man’s ghost. "No," he whispered, and for a second, the room went very still. "No, I'm not okay. But I'm going to be."
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. I heard a shaky breath, a sound that was half-sob and half-laugh. "That's the first honest thing you've said to me in two years," Liliana said, her voice cracking. "Don't you dare hang up. Don't you ever go silent on me again."
Oleander didn't hang up. He just let the phone rest against his shoulder, his eyes finding mine.
I reached out, sliding my hand across the floor until my fingers brushed his.
He gripped me back, his palm damp and shaking, but his hold was a lifeline.
It was a choice. Every touch in this room was a choice now, stripped of the influence of things that didn't belong to the living.
Rowan shifted, pulling me closer until his arm was a heavy bar across my back, his fingers digging into my arm.
He was checking for a pulse, I realized.
He was making sure we were all still here, still beating, still tethered to the same reality.
Theo watched us for a heartbeat longer before his legs seemed to give out, and he slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor too, his knees knocking against Rowan’s boot.
The four of us sat there in the wreckage of the apartment.
Outside, the fog pressed against the broken glass, but it didn't look like a wall anymore.
It just looked like weather. It was just water in the air, grey and cold and mindless.
The shadows in the corners were just shadows, cast by the streetlights and the furniture, no longer reaching out with fingers that felt like ice.
"My piano is going to need tuning," I said, the words feeling small and ridiculous in the quiet. I didn't care about the tuning. I cared about the fact that I could think about the future, even a future as small as a technician arriving with a wrench and a pitch pipe.
Theo let out a breathy, jagged laugh, his head thudding back against the wall. "Your piano is the least of our problems, Julian. Look at this place. It looks like a bomb went off. A very specific, very angry bomb."
"It was an exorcism," Rowan grunted, though his voice lacked its usual bite. He sounded like a man who had finally put down a weight he’d been carrying for a decade. "Whatever it was, it's gone. I can't feel it anymore. The air... it doesn't taste like copper anymore."
"What about the structure?" I asked. "The one in the woods."
Rowan shook his head slowly. "I'll go out there when the sun's up. But I don't think there's anything left to find. Whatever was holding it together fell apart when he did."
Oleander looked at Rowan, then at Theo, then back to me.
He looked at us like he was seeing the architecture of a new house, one he hadn't realized he was building.
He didn't look like a man haunted by a husband.
He looked like a man who had survived a crash and was surprised to find his limbs still worked.
"We're still here," Oleander whispered, and it sounded less like a statement and more like a discovery. He squeezed my hand so hard it hurt, and I didn't mind. I wanted the pain. I wanted the pressure. I wanted everything that proved the world was still solid.
Rowan’s grip tightened on my shoulder, his thumb tracing the line of my collarbone through my shirt.
He was looking at Oleander, his expression a complicated mess of protectiveness and something that looked a lot like awe.
Rowan didn't do vulnerability well, but he was doing it now, sitting on a dirty floor in a ruined room, refusing to let go of the people who had survived the night with him.
"Yeah," Rowan said. "We're still here. And nobody’s going anywhere. Not tonight. Not ever."