Chapter 3
I didn't let him see that I was shaking.
When we left the morgue, I walked as I always did—head high, steps measured, face unreadable beneath the veil of my mask. Dorian spoke, once or twice, but I gave him nothing in return. Just silence, the kind that stretched too long and frayed at the edges like old fabric.
It wasn't strength. It was survival. The moment I let someone see my fear, they'd name it something else. Madness. Guilt. Witchcraft.
They always had. They always will.
By the time I returned to the apothecary, night had fallen. The fog had thickened into something viscous, nearly visible in the flickering gaslight outside. My shoulders ached. My gloves felt too tight. The flower on the windowsill was still there, redder than before, as though it had been drinking something warm and iron-rich.
I lit a single candle and climbed the stairs to my room.
The boards groaned underfoot like they remembered something too.
I stared at the floor beside my bed for a long time before I knelt.
The knife I used wasn't ceremonial—just an old iron letter opener with a chipped tip. I pried at the warped wood until the plank came free, the scent of dust and time hitting me all at once, causing me to cough. Beneath it, wrapped in oiled cloth, lay the thing I'd buried more deeply than the dead.
A journal, half-burned, its spine warped from heat, the leather curling at the corners. My fingers trembled as I unwrapped it.
The pages inside were scorched, but not unreadable. The handwriting was mine—shaky, childlike, clumsy. Some of it was crossed out, rewritten, circled in charcoal. A nervous shake to each letter.
"Heartbinder. Blood Moon."
"Cassian says it doesn't hurt if I don't cry."
"The lilies were glowing. They drank the snow."
"Mama wouldn't watch."
The entries tumbled over themselves in fragments. Symbols. Broken phrases. Sketches of a ritual circle, uneven and frantic. One page showed a figure drawn in red ink, arms spread, a white mask on their face.
And always, his name.
Cassian.
A boy with pale eyes and a soft voice. He used to hum lullabies when the others weren't listening. He held my hand while the knife carved the first glyph. I remembered the shape of his fingers. I remembered the warmth of his touch before warmth became something dangerous.
I turned to the final page—mostly burned, but some words remained, etched deep in the paper.
"Something went wrong. Fire. Screaming. They tried to—"
The rest was black ash.
My head throbbed. I let the book fall shut, holding it to my chest.
Somewhere far below, I heard footsteps pause outside the apothecary door. A whisper. Then they moved on.
They'd started watching me. I knew they would sooner or later.
The next morning, the rumors bloomed like mold.
Two of the butcher's sons crossed the street when they saw me coming. A priest tightened his grip on his collar and muttered a blessing I hadn't heard since I was a child. Someone spat on the stones behind me.
It wasn't new. But it had grown teeth. Sharp piercing teeth.
The Council of Stones had sent their watchers, subtle only in theory. A man in gray lingered near my door at dawn. A woman with ink on her fingers visited the fishmonger across the square twice in the same hour. They didn't look at me directly.
But I felt it.
They were waiting for me to bleed guilt.
By evening, Dorian returned.
He didn't knock this time, didn't mutter a joke or pretend to be amused. He stormed in like a storm that hadn't decided who to strike yet.
"You've been hiding something."
I didn't look up from the tincture I was mixing. My hands remained steady.
He slammed a stack of parchment onto the counter. "Three more deaths. One every night. All of them with spider lilies. All of them smiling. Smiling!!" he let out in a tense and angry tone,his voice shaking.
I stirred the brew. Slowly. Precisely.
He grabbed the edge of the table. "Gods damn it, Lenora—talk to me."
I did.
But not the way he expected.
"Lucien," I said.
The silence snapped taut.
Dorian froze.
His eyes sharpened, as if narrowing might protect him from what I'd just said. "What did you say?"
I finally looked at him. "Lucien. Your brother."
He took a step back. Not out of fear—no. Something worse. Shock. Confusion. The kind of ache that hadn't healed.
"Don't," he whispered.
"I saw him," I said, voice low. "When I touched you, that day in the crypt. You were kneeling at his grave, but you weren't crying. You were praying. Begging. For something to take his place."
His hand clenched at his side.
"You said you didn't believe in god," I added. "But you begged anyway."
"You had no right—"
"You touched me."
"I didn't ask you to see that!"
The words echoed in the silence.
We stood in the half-lit apothecary, shadows curling around us like smoke. My chest ached. I hadn't meant to say his name. Not then. But once the memories came loose, they clawed their way out.
Dorian ran a hand through his hair, jaw tight, eyes burning.
"He drowned," he said finally. "It was winter. I was supposed to be watching him. But I wasn't. I was drunk. Stupid. And when I found him…"
He looked at me as if seeing something he couldn't bear.
"You think you know pain because you see it," he whispered. "But you only feel what others leave behind. I live with what I did."
I took a step back. My fingers curled around the edge of the bench.
"I didn't tell you to come here," I said. "I didn't ask for your help."
"No," he snapped. "You just let people die while you wall yourself in silence."
I flinched, but only slightly. He saw it. He regretted it.
He didn't take it back.
"Don't come to the morgue tomorrow," I said.
"Lenora—"
"I'll work alone."
He didn't argue. He just turned and left.
The door slammed hard enough to rattle the windows.
And for two days, he didn't come back.
It felt like a room that had just been shouted in—still, but shivering from what had echoed.
For two days, the apothecary was quieter than usual. Customers came in with soft voices and eyes that didn't meet mine. Word had spread. I could feel it in the way they lingered too long or hurried out too quickly. Some asked about the lilies.
Most didn't have the courage.
I didn't bother lighting more than one candle. I didn't speak unless forced. I watched the fog slither past the window and tried not to think about Lucien's name on my tongue. The memory had come unbidden—so clear, so raw. I should've buried it deeper.
But Dorian had pried at things that weren't his. He wasn't wrong to want answers. But that didn't mean he had the right to demand them.
Not when I carried my past like a blade turned inward.
I kept to the apothecary. I avoided the mirror. I pretended the glyphs on my back didn't itch like they were waking up.
On the third morning, I opened the door to find a folded scrap of paper nailed to the threshold.
The nail was blackened. Burned.
The paper was damp but legible, the ink scrawled in a hand I hadn't seen since childhood.
"Cassian."
Below the name, a drawing: a spider lily bleeding into the snow.
I read it three times before folding it away into the inner lining of my sleeve.
When Dorian returned, it was without knocking.
Again.
He looked the same and nothing like himself. The mess of blond hair, the storm-cloud eyes, the way he held his shoulders as if they were too heavy to carry anymore.
I was restocking crushed redroot when I heard his boots on the stairs.
"I'm not here to apologize," he said.
I didn't look up. "Of course not."
He walked further in, exhaling like the fog had followed him.
"I needed space."
"You needed to bleed somewhere else."
He stopped behind me. Close, but not too close. "I didn't know you saw Lucien."
I turned slowly.
"I don't choose what I see," I said. "But I never throw it away."
He searched my eyes, looking for the sharpness he expected, but I didn't give it to him this time.
"I'm sorry," he said at last. Quiet. Hollow.
It wasn't for shouting. It wasn't even for leaving.
It was for making me feel like a monster for telling the truth.
"I'm not your confessional, Dorian," I murmured.
"I know."
"And you're not my savior."
"I never wanted to be."
Silence stretched between us again. This one gentler. Worn-in. Like something familiar and aching.
Then I held out the scrap of paper.
He took it, unfolded it, read the name.
"Cassian," he said slowly. "Who is he?"
I let the question hang. "Someone from before."
"Before the mask?"
"Before I knew what I was."
His eyes flicked to mine, sharp again. "You think he's behind this?"
"I don't know. But someone is trying to remind me of him."
He folded the paper again, this time more carefully.
"Why now?" he asked. "Why come back now?"
"Because something was unfinished. And now it's waking."
We didn't speak again until sunset.
He lingered in the doorway, unsure if I would ask him to leave.
I didn't.
Instead, I lit the lantern and let the room glow gold around the jars and dusty scrolls and the one flower on the sill that hadn't withered, even after three days.
He moved toward the window.
"I've seen that flower on bodies. I've seen it sprout from marble, from ash. But never from living ground."
I joined him. We stood in silence, watching the red petals tremble.
"There's a ritual," I said. "Old. Forbidden now."
"The Heartbinder?"
I turned to him, surprised. "You know the name?"
"I've seen it in Council records. Most of the entries were redacted. Burned. Even whispered, it made people uneasy."
"There's a reason."
"Tell me."
"No."
His jaw tensed.
"You said you wanted to help," I said, softer now. "Help. Don't dig."
He looked at me, and I saw the war behind his eyes. Curiosity. Resentment. And under it all, a flicker of something else.
Fear.
Not of me. Of what I might be right about.
He exhaled through his nose. "All right."
He started for the door.
"Dorian."
He paused.
"If you disappear again, tell me first."
He looked over his shoulder. "Why?"
"Because I might start thinking you're dead."
A faint, bitter smile touched his lips. "Would you miss me?"
I tilted my head. "I'd miss having someone around to be more annoying than the ghosts."
He chuckled once, low in his throat.
Then he was gone.
And I was left alone with the flower, the fog, and the faint memory of a boy who had once tried to save me with a blade in one hand and my name in the other.
The spider lily remained at the window, red as a fresh wound, unmoving even when the wind picked up. I lay still on the cot beneath my window, wrapped in blankets that did nothing for the chill that had settled into my bones.
I stared at the ceiling and remembered the snow.
It had been falling softly the night of the ritual. A thick, pure white. Untouched. I'd been dressed in black silk and silence, led by gloved hands down a corridor lit with candles so old the wax had fused to the walls.
They told me I was being prepared for something sacred.
They lied.
I remember the circle. The glyphs carved into the floor. I remember the hum of power in the air, the way it raised the hairs on my arms. I remember kneeling.
Cassian had been the one to tie the ribbon around my wrist.
He'd whispered, "It'll only hurt for a moment. Then it'll be done."
But it hadn't ended. It had broken open.
Something had gone wrong. Terribly, violently wrong.
A flash of fire. A scream—my voice, or someone else's, I still don't know. Then the snow had turned red, not from blood, but from the lilies that bloomed from the circle's edge like a thousand watching eyes.
The last thing I remembered was Cassian's hands, stained crimson, reaching for me.
And the sky, above it all, weeping light from a bleeding moon.
The next morning, the watcher returned.
A man in charcoal-gray stood across the street, pretending to read a broadsheet that hadn't been printed in years. His posture was military. His gaze never truly left me.
I didn't offer him tea.
Instead, I burned one of the older scrolls in the apothecary's hearth. A warning. A signal. Maybe a mistake.
But I was tired of pretending the world wasn't already staring.
By midmorning, a letter arrived—no seal, no signature. Just a folded piece of paper slipped under the door.
It read:
"Come to the estate. It remembers you.
—C."
I held the paper a long time before folding it into the inside pocket of my coat.
When Dorian returned at dusk, he brought with him the scent of smoke and damp books.
"You're going back," he said. No preamble. No question.
"I have to," I replied.
He crossed his arms. "And you were going to tell me when? After the flowers started growing out of me too?"
"You said not to dig," I said. "So I didn't."
He huffed a breath, rubbing his hands over his face. "Lenora, this isn't just your past anymore. It's bleeding into everyone's present. The Council is circling like vultures, and you—"
"What?" I snapped. "You want me to bare every wound? Every scar? Let you dissect my memories until you can draw maps of them?"
He looked at me, weary and sharp. "No. I want to keep you alive."
The silence between us grew teeth.
"I never asked for that," I said.
He stepped closer. "Maybe not. But you're not the only one who loses things, Lenora."
For a moment, I saw it again—Lucien's name behind his eyes. The boy beneath the water. The scream he never let out.
"I'm going," I whispered. "With or without you."
He looked down. His jaw tightened. When he spoke, his voice was low.
"Then I guess I'm going too."
We stood together in the darkening apothecary, the flame in the lantern flickering between us like a heartbeat.
Outside, the fog thickened, cloaking the streets in shadow.
And far beyond the square, past the cathedral ruins and the broken iron gates, the old estate waited. Half-buried in snow, half-forgotten by time.
But not by memory.
No.
It remembered.
And so did I.