Page 5 of All Ghosts Aren’t Dead (The Forgotten #1)

BLUE

H e didn’t tell me the rules.

My skin was itchy. Little beads of sweat slid down the back of my neck and along my spine. I recoiled against the sticky texture, swallowing back a gag.

My nose started to tingle and heat gathered behind my eyes, but I clenched my jaw and bit back the emotion with a growl.

I hated feelings.

I always seemed to have the wrong ones.

“Blue?”

I kept my eyes down, staring at the tips of my shoes. I could see my toes rippling beneath the fabric as I moved them.

A creak echoed around me, touching the tips of my ears. I turned and blinked at the boy who waited beside me.

Simon.

He didn’t look like a soldier.

His hair was blond like mine, but his was prettier—warm and golden, and all shimmery. He had it tied in a lopsided knot on the top of his head, loose strands falling against pink cheeks.

He looked… alive.

I don’t think I’d ever looked that way before.

“Would you like me to show you around?” he asked.

No…

Yes…

I… wasn’t sure.

My lips parted, but I couldn’t find words—not any that’d make sense anyway.

It happened all the time.

Letters got scrambled in my brain and then all tangled up in my throat.

God was kind enough to make twenty-six of them, all strung together in something called the alphabet, but none of them liked me.

It’s the evil.

You have to purge it, Son.

Purge. Purge. Purge.

“He didn’t tell me the rules,” I blurted, sweeping my head up. “I told him I was good at them, but he didn’t… he didn’t give me any.”

Samuel was gone. He’d disappeared somewhere into the house, and I stood at the front door, counting the claps his shiny shoes made against the wooden floors.

One. Two. Three. Four.

One. Two. Three. Four.

No rules meant more chances to mess up.

“How will I know how to be good?” I rubbed at my arms and glanced down the hallway—the one Samuel vanished into.

It was like everything else I’d seen of this place. Massive.

Samuel had pointed out the house the second the car breached the iron gates, like he thought my eyes were too tired to find it.

It was dark and crawling with ivy, built of stone and sharp angles. There were three chimneys and tall points that stretched into the foggy sky.

The car curved around an empty fountain and stopped beside the front steps. They were wide and shallow with cracks in the concrete. Weeds sprouted from the edges, and aside from Samuel, it was the first thing I saw that I liked.

There were cracks in me, too.

The windows had colors in them. Not paint. No. It was glass, and they looked a lot like the ones in the church, but these were better somehow.

Inside, it was quiet. Everything was still… except for me . I ignored the way my knees started to vibrate, as if they were yelling at me to kneel right there on the old, tasseled rug.

No.

I didn’t want to talk to God, not ever again , and I wasn’t all that sure he’d even show up.

Simon offered me a friendly smile. The sweater he wore was pale blue with big, brown buttons down the front. Knit sleeves were pushed up to his elbows, and he wore purple socks on his feet.

My ear burned as I tugged on it, confused.

“Are you good?” I asked.

His smile grew, and the smallest laugh left his chest. “I suppose that depends on your definition of good.”

“Samuel said he wasn’t good.” I peered over my shoulder.

Come back.

“Sam is the best thing that’s ever happened to most of us,” Simon said. “Half the boys here credit Sam with saving their lives, but the dude is not great at accepting compliments.”

“Oh.” My eyebrows lifted, and I rubbed at the wrinkle it created on my forehead. “Did he find you under a bridge, too?”

“Not quite.”

Simon tipped his chin, gesturing toward a wide, spiral staircase. The banisters had symbols etched into them, and even as I craned my neck, I couldn’t see where they led.

“Can I show you around?”

I nodded but found my feet shuffling backward, closer to Samuel and that dark hallway I don’t think I liked very much.

“We can start there, if you’d prefer. That hallway is pretty tame compared to the rest of the house. Sam’s office is at the end, but the rest of them branch off in some way or other.”

“The rest of them?”

“We have six instructors and a psychologist on staff. This place is a fucking maze, but all the office doors are labeled. Just make sure you knock before walking in, okay?”

“There are boys who don’t knock?”

Disrespect is a sin.

Sinners. Must. Repent.

My neck warmed. “Do… do they get whipped?”

Simon jerked. Something moved across his face, an expression I couldn’t read, and then it was gone.

“No.” His lips parted like there were more words on his tongue, and I waited for him to speak, but he cleared his throat and smiled at me instead.

It was different from the last smile.

“Would you like to see the offices?”

Yes.

I shook my head, rocking a little on my toes. “Samuel said to follow you. He said he’d check on me later.”

“Sam never stops working.” Simon walked past me, flicking his chin toward the staircase. “The dude sleeps at his desk.”

That made me frown.

Samuel should be worthy of a bed—he might not have been a prophet, but he was a savior.

He saved me. He saved all the boys.

Simon said so.

“I’ve tried to take some of his workload, but there’s only so much I’m permitted to see.”

We moved through the downstairs first—the kitchen, the common room, and the little infirmary tucked behind a door with a silver handle.

I nodded at every doorway, trying to remember which was which, but the shapes got slippery in my head.

I worried I’d lose them later and make him angry, but Simon didn’t look angry.

He just looked back every so often, like he thought maybe I’d run away.

I didn’t bother to tell him I’d already run away.

Simon climbed the stairs next, one hand moving across the smooth, dark railing.

“Do you work here?” I asked him. “Samuel said you were like me.”

“Oh, I am. I’ve been here since I was fourteen, so nearly ten years now.

Most of the boys move on from the program around their twenty-first birthday, but I wanted to stay.

On paper, my title is liaison, but I really just want to help boys like you, us , transition from a world that hurts to one where we do the hurting. ”

“Do you hurt people?”

“Not often.” Simon stepped on the landing, pivoting to face me.

“We all ended up here because we had nowhere else to go. It isn’t charity, fuck if the mafia can even comprehend that word, but we don’t suffer here.

We get smarter, and meaner, and stronger.

Men like Ben and Sam give us a purpose, and we work our asses off to make sure they never regret it. ”

My stomach flipped, and I slapped my palm over my mouth just in case I vomited.

Regret.

That word.

It was one of Father’s favorites, and it had a lot of friends.

Cursed.

Damned.

Abomination.

“I’m a hard worker,” I rushed out. “I promise I am. I’m a good listener, too. The best.”

“You’re going to do great,” Simon said. His hand was heavy as it found my shoulder, and he gave it a gentle squeeze. “Half this job is following orders and the other half is violence.”

Oh.

“I can be violent. I look clean now, but that’s only because Samuel told me to wash the blood off.”

Simon blinked, and then he grinned. It moved up his cheeks slowly, but it wasn’t the kind of smile that made my skin crawl.

“Will I be a liaison?”

“As long as you serve the mafia, you can be whatever you want. There are former Forgotten boys all over the world.”

“I get to choose?”

No. No. No.

My stomach got tight. “I’m not good at choosing.”

Simon’s chest fell, and his eyes shut for the briefest of moments before they opened again.

He swallowed before speaking.

“It’s overwhelming to go from a padlocked cage to one you can break free of. The world feels too big, and all the questions make your head hurt, but it’ll get better. If anybody knows what it’s like to argue with your own thoughts, it’s us.”

Us.

I hesitated. My fingers twisted in the hem of my sweater, and my voice came out quieter than I meant it to. “What about Samuel?”

Simon’s brows lifted a little, like he hadn’t expected me to ask.

I wasn’t sure why I did.

Except… maybe I actually was.

Samuel didn’t look at me the way my father did. Nobody had ever looked at me like that—like I was real and not a mistake God forgot to fix.

“Sam was the first.”

I blinked. “First what?”

“The first Forgotten,” he said, like it was a secret .

“He came before the program had a name. Before there were contracts or rules. Before any of us, there was him.”

My stomach did a strange little drop, like my insides had missed a step on the stairs. “What happened to him?”

“Nobody knows. Not really. I mean, we know some things—he was found, he was young, he wouldn’t talk. They say he didn’t make a sound for almost a year. Most of us here are shaped by the program. Sam is the program.”

That… didn’t make any sense.

Samuel was good.

The idea of someone being cruel to him made something sharp settle under my ribs, twisting around like a screw.

I didn’t like it.

I wanted to break it, just like I broke Mother and Father.

Maybe that’s what Samuel meant when he said there was a purpose here. Maybe it wasn’t punishment or purity.

Maybe it was just violence.

“Whatever made him, it left its mark. And we’re all just trying to live up to it.” Simon tapped two fingers together and gestured around him. “Ben might own the house, but Sam built the family.”