Chapter 6
I couldn’t stay in the bath chamber. The heat, the steam, the impossible clarity of his face in the painting—it all pressed in on me, a tangible weight.
I dressed with clumsy fingers, the memory of his hand on mine like a brand, and I fled.
The corridors of Black Hollow seemed to drink my panic.
My footsteps echoed too loudly on the runner, the sound swallowed by the dark wood paneling that felt closer, hungrier, than before.
I wasn’t walking with purpose. I was just moving, a frantic animal looking for a corner that didn’t smell of my own fear and the terrifying, possessive want that had bloomed beside it.
I turned a corner, my breath coming in short gasps.
The long hallway ahead was one I’d walked a dozen times.
It led to the library’s east wing. I knew the pattern of the wallpaper here, the exact spot where the floorboard creaked.
I took three steps. And the world ended.
The corridor didn’t terminate in a door or another junction.
It just… stopped. The walls, the ceiling, the floor—they frayed into a raw, seeping edge.
Beyond that edge was not darkness, but a churning void of grey static.
Shapes flickered within it—the ghost of a staircase, the suggestion of a window looking out on a storm, a fragment of a ceiling rose—all of it melting and reforming in a nauseating pulse.
It made no sound, yet it screamed a low, hungry frequency that vibrated in my teeth.
Virgil stood before it. His back was to me, his arms spread wide as if he were bracing against a gale.
The muscles in his shoulders were corded tight beneath his shirt, his entire body a rigid line of resistance.
I saw the tremor in his outstretched hands, a fine, constant shake.
He was holding it back. Not with magic I could see, but with sheer, brutal will.
The void pushed against him, and he pushed back, a man trying to stop a tide with his bare hands.
My fear, that cold, familiar tide, surged up my throat.
It tasted like bile. It felt like the walls of my chest were collapsing.
And as it rose, the void seemed to pulse, to swell.
A crystalline snap echoed from its depths, like a shattering chandelier heard from miles away.
A new fissure of wrongness spider-webbed across the remaining patch of solid floor at Virgil’s feet.
I had caused this. My turmoil wasn’t just in my head; it was a poison in the house’s veins.
My anxiety was the fuel for this hungry, grey maw.
“Virgil,” I choked out. He didn’t turn. The strain in his posture deepened.
A low groan escaped him, a sound of physical pain.
“Anna.” My name was ripped from him, raw and stripped bare.
It wasn’t a call for help. It was a demand. An anchor point. “Anna, choose!”
Choose what? To not be afraid? I was terrified.
To want him? I did, with a ferocity that scared me more.
To accept this? My mind recoiled. The void rippled, responding to my internal chaos.
Another crystalline shatter. He was breaking.
I could see it. The perfect order he maintained, the control he exerted over the manor, was tearing at the seams. And I was the one pulling the threads.
I stood there, useless, my body locked. I wanted to help.
The desire was a physical ache, a yank behind my ribs.
But all I had was this storm inside me—this mess of fear and want and sheer, overwhelming need.
Choose. The word wasn’t his anymore. It was mine.
I looked from the terrifying, formless chaos to the rigid, straining line of his back.
The man who had kissed me, who had let me see the vulnerability in his eyes, who was now holding my personal nightmare at bay until his bones cracked.
I didn’t choose calm. I didn’t choose reason.
I chose him. With a sound that was half-sob, half-defiance, I moved.
Not away from the void, but toward it. Toward him.
The static roar grew, the grey tendrils licking closer as if sensing fresh prey.
I ignored it. My focus narrowed to the space between his shoulder blades, to the tremble I could now see running the length of his spine.
I walked into the chaos. Not with grace, but with a furious, desperate want.
I wanted his hands on me. I wanted his mouth on mine.
I wanted to drown out the static with the sound of his breath.
I wanted to own the fear by owning the man it was trying to destroy.
I reached him. The air here was charged, prickling against my skin.
I didn’t hesitate. I slid my hands around his waist, pressing my front to the solid heat of his back.
I felt him jolt, a shock going through him.
His arms wavered. “Anna,” he gritted out, a warning.
I ignored it. I turned my face into the space between his shoulder blades, inhaling the scent of him—old books, clean linen, and the sharp, electric tang of his effort.
Then I shifted, sliding around his side, staying within the circle of his straining arms. I faced him.
His eyes were wide, pupils blown with strain and something else—a wild, desperate hope.
Sweat beaded on his temple. The void swirled behind him, a monstrous backdrop.
I didn’t have pretty words. I had hands that shook as I brought them to his face.
I had a mouth that was dry with terror. I rose onto my toes, my gaze locked on his.
And I kissed him there, on the precipice.
It wasn’t gentle. It was a collision. A claim.
My lips crushed against his, and for a second, he was frozen, still holding the weight of the crumbling world.
Then a shudder wracked him. A groan, deep and ragged, vibrated from his chest into mine.
His arms fell from their wide stance, coming around me instead, dragging me flush against him so hard the breath left my lungs.
He kissed me back like a drowning man finding air.
His mouth was hot, desperate, his tongue sweeping past my lips to tangle with mine.
The taste of him was urgency and salt. The static roar seemed to recede, pushed back by the louder sound of our ragged breathing, the wet, frantic slide of our kiss.
My fingers fumbled at the front of his shirt.
The simple, orderly row of buttons. My knuckles brushed the hard plane of his stomach beneath the fabric.
I tore at them, not with grace, but with a single-minded need to feel his skin, to prove he was solid, that he was here, that he was mine to break and mine to hold together.
The first button gave way. Then the second.
I spread the fabric apart, my palms sliding over the hot, smooth skin of his chest. His heart hammered against my hand, a frantic, living drum.
He broke the kiss, his forehead dropping to mine, his breaths coming in harsh gusts.
“Anna,” he whispered, the word a prayer and a surrender.
Behind him, the void gave one last, pulsing throb of grey light.
Then, with a sound like a sigh, it began to recede.
The frayed edges of the corridor knitted themselves back together, the wallpaper smoothing, the floorboard solidifying.
The ghost-shapes dissolved into nothing.
He had held it. And I had held him. We stood there in the suddenly ordinary, silent hallway, my hands splayed on his bare chest, his arms like iron bands around me.
The crisis had passed. But the need it had unleashed between us hadn’t.
It pulsed in the air, thicker and hotter than any steam from the bath.
It was in the way his cock, already hard and insistent, pressed against my stomach through our clothes.
It was in the wild, possessive light in his eyes as he looked down at me. The house was stable. For now.
But we were not.
The corridor was solid again. The air was still.
But the frantic drumbeat of his heart under my palms hadn’t slowed.
My fingers curled against his skin, my nails digging in just enough to leave faint, crescent moons.
A claim. I felt the fine tremor that still ran through him, the aftershock of holding back the end of the world.
He didn’t pull away. His arms tightened around me, crushing me against the hard wall of his body, against the undeniable ridge of his erection straining against his trousers.
The silence was a living thing, charged and waiting.
“You chose,” he said, his voice rough, scraped raw from the effort.
It wasn’t a question. I tipped my head back to look at him.
His eyes were dark, the pupils blown wide, swallowing the storm-grey of his irises.
The controlled archivist was gone. In his place was something wilder, something hungry. “I chose you.”
A muscle ticked in his jaw. His gaze dropped to my mouth, swollen from his kiss. “That’s not a gentle choice, Anna. It’s a claiming.” His hand came up, his thumb brushing my lower lip. “It makes you responsible.”
“For what?”
“For me.” The words were simple, devastating. “You don’t get to stoke this and walk away. You don’t get to feed the chaos and then hide from the consequences.”
My breath hitched. The cold stone walls of the hallway seemed to press in, witnesses to my folly. I’d walked into the storm. Now I had to live in its eye. “I’m not hiding.”
“Prove it.”