I know this.
I know what it means.
But the knowledge hovers just beyond reach.
I dig deeper, and find nothing substantial. Just fragments and shadows, stories that contradict each other, but underneath it all is a current of genuine terror. People who have seen something they shouldn’t have. Warnings to stay away from certain coordinates, certain stretches of road where the forest grows too close and too dark.
The sun rises while I’m still searching, light creeping across my floor in shades that remind me of fire in a crystal dome. I close my laptop with shaking hands.
I try to return to normal.
Go back to work, editing photographs, responding to emails, planning projects. My boss is understanding, but I see the way he looks at me sometimes, worry creasing his forehead.
He’s not unjustified.
Because the dreams don’t stop.
They intensify.
For the next four nights, more vivid until I wake with ash and snow on my tongue, phantom sensations of cold that burns. I dream of chains that sear like brand, of darkness with weight. Of a voice that speaks my name like a curse and prayer tangled together.
Roxy.
Not Vale… justRoxy.
Said in a tone that suggests ownership, possession, the kind of claiming that should terrify me, but instead makes something in my chest tighten with longing I can’t begin to explain.
I wake from these dreams disoriented and aching, hands reaching for something that isn’t there, loss carving through me despite having no memory of what I’ve lost. It’s maddening, unbearable, like grief for a person I’ve never met, for a life I never lived.
Three weeks after the accident, I find myself standing in front of my bathroom mirror at two in the morning, studying my reflection as though it might offer answers. The bruises have faded. The cut on my temple has healed to a thin pink line that will eventually disappear entirely. But there’s something different in my eyes now, something haunted and searching that wasn’t there before.
I look like someone who’s been fundamentally altered and doesn’t understand how or why.
“What happened to me?” I whisper to my reflection, and it stares back with the same desperate confusion, offering nothingexcept the certainty that the answer exists somewhere in the blank spaces of my memory, waiting to be remembered.
Or waiting to find me.
I glance past my reflection, down the short hallway toward the spare room I had turned into something between an office and a shrine before I found myself with a gap in my memory and a trip to the hospital. One wall is covered from corner to corner, paper layered over paper, photographs pinned beside notes written in my own handwriting that I don’t remember writing. Strings of red and black thread crisscross between points that mean something, even if I don’t yet understand what.
I keep going back to it and standing there for hours, tracing connections with my eyes. Trying to feel the logic behind it all, the shape of a life I was clearly living before everything went dark.
None of it feels random.
None of it feels finished.
Because sometimes, in the space between sleeping and waking, I swear I hear engines.
Motorcycles growling through the night.
Getting closer.
Chapter Nineteen
RAZE
Three weeks without Roxy and the clubhouse feels like a burial chamber pretending to breathe.
I stand in the center of the main club room where the crystal dome used to rise, its absence louder than anything that remains. Fine cracks radiating upward through the crystal dome like a spiderweb frozen mid-explosion, the last physical evidence of three centuries of containment undone in a single moment of witchcraft and judgment.