Page 3 of All Ghosts Aren’t Dead (The Forgotten #1)

SAMUEL

H e looked like a prayer gone wrong, blood-soaked and quiet. Half ghost, half human—a little too alive to haunt but too hollow not to.

Cross-legged and still, his posture was almost meditative, palms upturned and resting lightly on his knees. Like he was waiting for permission to breathe.

The moonlight hit him in patches, and for a moment, I swore I could feel his anguish. It sank into the air and settled in my chest, stirring something primal beneath my ribs.

My protective instincts roared to life, awareness tapping at the base of my neck, and before I realized it, I was crouching beside him. “Hello.”

Blue lifted his chin and blinked up at me with a wide, guarded gaze. Long lashes swept the tops of his cheeks, revealing stormy eyes. A barely-there sound spilled from between his lips, and he started tugging at his earlobe.

His eyes narrowed as he scrutinized me, picking at threads of his shirt before asking, “Are you here to punish me?”

“I’m sorry?”

“The policeman said I wasn’t in trouble, but I was a bad boy.” His throat worked around the words. “Bad. Bad. Bad . ”

Chest collapsing beneath thin fabric, his expression twisted into something heavy and sad. Emotion melted off him, so full of pain and life. It only made the death he surrounded himself with seem that much stranger.

Gray eyes touched mine, his lips blood red when he whispered, “I don’t want to be punished anymore.”

My muscles stiffened, his words tumbling over me like a weighted kick to the chest.

“I’m not here to punish you,” I told him, placing my hand on the wet ground. The leather gloves I wore tightened around my fingers as I flexed them. “My name is Samuel.”

“Sam…u…el.” Syllable by syllable, he tested the weight of my name, and then his nose scrunched as though he didn’t like the way it sounded. “Samuel was a priest. God’s first prophet.”

“I see, and you don’t like prophets?”

He lifted his fist and punched at the wet concrete.

Once.

Twice.

Three times before lifting his chin and whispering, “No . ”

A warning burned in the single word, something coiled and violent beneath it.

“I killed them, and I… I’m not sorry. They were mean . Mean. Mean. Mean.” The words left him on a breathless sob. “I was bad .”

“I don’t think you’re bad.”

He looked at me, eyes wide—too dark and too trusting.

Something inside him loosened then, barely.

Hope swept across his features, blooming for the briefest of seconds before it was shadowed by skepticism.

“I know of a place where there are others like you.”

“There are others like me?” He blinked. “Are they being punished?”

Eyes closed, I curled my hands into fists and counted to ten.

Who the fuck was punishing him?

“No.” Somehow, I managed to speak softly, tone barely above a whisper, even as I was pummeled with an urge to protect.

Protect.

Protect.

I dropped one denim-clad knee to the concrete. His chest expanded, and I swore he was holding his breath as he watched me lower myself to cracked ground, tucking one leg beneath the other and mirroring his position. “No one is being punished. Not anymore.”

He didn’t speak, just stared at me, head tilted like he was searching for the lie hidden beneath my words.

“The boys… they’re with us because they have nowhere else to go. They’re like you, not because of what you did, but because of what was done to you.”

It was an assumption—one I had no business making—but there was something in the way he flinched at kindness.

It was… familiar , and for all the blank spaces in his file, I didn’t need it to tell me he hadn’t grown up safe.

“I’m not pure. Is that okay?” He squirmed a little. “Can I still go with you?”

What the fuck did that mean?

“Father says it’s an ailment from the devil.”

The ground shifted beneath me. Christ . I was glad his father was rotting in a pool of blood.

“Is that why you think you’re going to get punished?”

“Punishments rid us of corruption. If I’m cleansed enough, the angels might fix me.”

Conviction burned in his voice. I watched his hands open and close before he tugged on his ear again and stared up at me like he was waiting to be proven wrong.

Something ugly twisted in my gut.

Not rage. No . Rage was clean—familiar. This was something else, something sharper and more dangerous.

“No one is going to fix you.”

“But…” He blinked again, as though the words didn’t make sense in his language. “I’m broken.”

Ah, fuck .

“So am I,” I whispered, and the softest gasp burst from his lips. “So are the other boys. No one is going to fix you, because you’re not something that needs fixing.”

Silence stretched between us.

A wrinkle appeared on the bridge of his nose, cheeks bulging as they filled with air, then hollowing as he released it.

“What would I have to do?” he asked, more curious than afraid. “Are there rules?”

“There are,” I nodded. “There’ll be structure and training. You’ll have responsibilities.”

His mouth twitched.

“I’m really good at rules,” he said, a little breathless. “ The best . I follow them even when I’m asleep. I… I can learn new ones, too. I promise I can.”

“I believe you.”

Pride swept across his cheeks, and he climbed to his feet with his chest thrust out. Licking his bloodied lips, a small grin took over his face, and he rocked up on the balls of his feet. “Should we go now? I can follow you. I’m the best follower.”

My lips parted, and the indifference I usually wore began to crack along its edges. His eagerness was… charming.

Palm to the concrete, I pushed myself off the ground and stood, adjusting the sleeves of my jacket. His eyes seemed to trace me, head to toe, before lingering on the ground and flicking over to the bodies.

He stared down at them—his mother and father—dressed in death the way a child might dress dolls.

The space between his shoulders rounded. He opened his mouth to speak, but seemed to have trouble finding words. Nimble fingers went back to his earlobe, tugging and tugging and tugging, before he finally spoke. “I made them pretty so the angels would find them.”

His eyes slid back to mine, then rounded with a mix of caution and hope. “What will happen to them?”

My throat tightened. “I’ll make sure they’re taken care of.”

“They have to stay together, okay? You have to bury them just like that or they won’t be pretty anymore.”

“They’ll stay exactly the way you laid them down. You did a good job, Blue.”

Lashes swept low, his throat bobbed, and then he nodded. It wasn’t shy, but sharp— certain —like he was begging to believe me.

He stood a little straighter, though his hands hadn’t stopped moving—tugging on his ear, tapping at his thigh, twisting them in the ends of his sleeves.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

He pressed a hand to his stomach and nodded so fiercely that my nostrils flared.

When was the last time he was fed?

“Samuel?” The tips of his hair brushed the edge of my jawline when he shuffled close to me, our chests nearly touching. “Do you know there’s a man watching you?”

“I do, yes. He’s my boss.”

“Oh.” His head tilted a little, eyes peering over my shoulder to scrutinize Ben’s shadow. “What is he the boss of?”

“The mafia.”

Several beats of silence went by before his gaze found mine through his lashes. “I—I don’t know what that word means.”

There it was again… the duality.

Innocence vs. Naivety.

Purity vs. Sin.

How could he not know?

Benjamin Thomas was one of the richest men in the country, and though the general public wasn’t privy to the fact that he moonlighted as a mob boss, the rumors surrounding him were heavy enough that I’d assumed the simple sound of his name would spark recognition.

“Mr. Thomas, the mafia , owns the place I was telling you about. The one with the boys. If you’d like, I can explain it, and you can decide if you’d like to join us.”

“Oh.” He sank his teeth into his bottom lip, chewing aggressively before sucking the whole thing into his mouth. “I… get to decide? I’m not very good at choosing stuff,” he said, so fucking soft I had to strain to hear him. “Father said my brain is broken.”

“Father can go to hell.”

He made a stricken noise, flinching once before his eyes widened. Slapping a hand over his mouth, his rigid neck turned left to right, double checking we were alone. A beat went by, and I watched his chest collapse right before a giggle escaped between the cracks of his fingers.

I smiled.

“I’m allowed to say no?”

We were just strangers, but he looked up at me then like he’d known me his whole life. Gray eyes glimmered with unbridled, unearned trust, and I knew I could never let him down. It was a level of responsibility that was somewhat foreign to me, but I found myself grasping it.

How the fuck could I not?

“You can say no,” I confirmed.

His nose wrinkled, uncertain, and then he tapped the pad of his fingers against his denim-clad thigh in an obsessive, ritualistic way.

One. Two. Three. Four.

One. Two. Three. Four.

His mouth parted, then closed.

“I’ll be Blue,” he finally whispered, strong and resolute, like it was more than just his name. “Blue. Blue. Blue.”

His eyes caught mine, and they shimmered with an intensity that beckoned me into his space. The moment lingered, delicate but unbreakable, and with the softest of sighs, he whispered, “All the best things are blue.”