Page 9 of All Ghosts Aren’t Dead (The Forgotten #1)

SAMUEL

S ome days I didn’t feel like a man, just a set of rules in a body that no longer wanted them.

Obligations in skin.

Discipline in muscle and bone.

I wasn’t born that way. The world carved it into me—methodically and without apology. Cold and untouchable weren’t just traits, they were tools. When I saw how well they worked, I yielded them.

Eventually, survival became more than an instinct and a choice I forced myself to make every day. I sharpened it into something that looked a lot like control.

It was bullshit.

People often mistook damage for strength.

The library was quiet when I entered. The kind of quiet that pressed in around the temples.

Dust hung in the slats of morning light that spilled in through the high stained-glass windows.

The walls were lined with stories none of the boys would ever have time to read, spines faded and names long worn away.

Walls of dark wood rose two stories high, broken only by tall, arched windows choked with ivy. Shadows pooled in the corners. There were plants on nearly every surface, softening the stone, climbing toward the untouched shelves.

Simon was already there, seated by the window with his long legs stretched out and a pen tapping against the rim of a worn notebook.

He was the only boy permitted to attend these meetings.

Not because he was finished—none of them ever really were—but because he’d learned how to make himself useful.

A liaison between staff and the program’s broken product.

Part boy, part bridge.

Across the room, the long meeting table stretched beneath one of the tall windows. It was empty, for now, except for a few folders left behind the night before.

Amir would arrive first. He always did.

Punctual to a fault, with quiet eyes and a voice built for soft landings, he had a way of disarming even the most volatile boys. He was calm… until he wasn’t . Amir had seen every shade of madness and hadn’t flinched, not once , at any of them.

There were six more staff members just like him.

Some were recruited—hand-picked by Ben or me for their precision, their loyalty, and their ability to mold trauma into something useful.

Others weren’t chosen so much as left behind.

Forgotten boys who graduated but never really left.

Not because they didn’t want to, but because it was easier than starting over.

We called them instructors, mentors, and experts, but we knew the truth. In the quiet hours, they were no less fucked up than the boys they trained.

The old grandfather clock in the corner ticked steadily, its heavy pendulum swinging in slow arcs. I could feel each second pass in the bones of my jaw, like the countdown to something I hadn’t prepared for.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

The silence that filled the space wasn’t peaceful, but it wasn’t daunting either. It was just… waiting —for the door to open, for Amir to arrive, for the rest to follow in, one by one, each dragging their own shit in behind them.

I stood still for a moment, my hand brushing the back of an old, velvet chair, eyes locked on the sweep of the clock’s brass hands. Simon didn’t speak, but that wasn’t uncommon. After years of shared burden, the quiet between us had long since evolved past discomfort.

His pen tapped against the spiraled edge of his notebook, each clink falling into rhythm with the ticking clock. He parted his lips, started to speak, and then clamped his jaw shut the second our eyes met.

For fuck’s sake. “Speak,” I ordered.

“He ate.” Simon kept his eyes on the page. “Blue, I mean. Didn’t finish it all, but… more than most of us on our first morning.”

Good boy.

The words came before I could stop them—unspoken, but loud in the hollow of my chest.

He wasn’t mine, not technically, but I didn’t give a fuck about technicalities.

Mine. Mine. Mine.

Something in me had already decided.

After years of keeping everyone out, building walls made of rules and routines, and locking every door behind me—there was Blue.

My Blue.

With his shaking hands, wide eyes, and that soft little laugh he always tries to swallow, like it might poison those around him.

He touched me—just barely, and over fabric—but it was more than I’d allowed in years. A fleeting brush of fingers, uncertain and small. What should’ve made my skin crawl somehow leveled me.

It gutted me.

Blue was undoing me. Not loudly and not even on purpose, but he was.

He unlaced me quietly, bone by bone, and I let him.

Why?

I didn’t fucking know, but I thought maybe, somewhere deep in the wreckage of my wiring, I wanted him to touch me.

Even if it hurt.

The door eased open with a tired sigh, wood dragging softly against stone.

Amir entered, skin the color of deep umber, a leather notebook tucked under one arm, and the scent of bergamot trailing behind him. His presence didn’t disturb the air as much as slide into it. His eyes swept the room, pausing briefly on each corner like he was checking for ghosts.

“Morning,” he said, and moved toward his usual seat, opening his notebook as he went. The chair didn’t scrape when he pulled it out. Of course it didn’t. Amir never made a mess of things—just studied those already broken.

He tried to study me once, and fuck if he didn’t try to unwind my scars like they were lines on a map. I wondered what he’d think of my brain today, and the fact that it now belonged to a boy with bitten-down nails, wearing nicknames I couldn’t stop giving him.

Sweetheart.

Baby.

God help me.

The chairs filled slowly, as they always did—some with more reluctance than others. Bishop scratched at the edge of his jaw, nodded once to Simon, then slouched into the chair beside Amir.

Mei took her place near the window, wire cutters at her hip and silence coiled tight across her shoulders, pale skin catching the glassy light.

Imogen followed, clipboard in hand, eyes already scanning the room like she was mentally filing us all away.

Hiro and Sofia came next, quiet as always—steady, unshaken.

Elara slipped in last, blonde hair twisted high and a notebook clutched in one gloved hand. She rarely spoke unless required, and when she did, it was lethal.

Same people.

Same formation.

Same protocol.

Whenever a new boy crossed our gates, we sat together and assessed. We adjusted, documented, and planned the molding of yet another broken boy. It was routine—a structure built on a world of ruin.

Not today.

Today was different, and Blue… he wasn’t like the others.

He was mine.

I dropped into my seat, the chair creaking under the weight of too many years and too many meetings.

“Alright,” I said, fingers drumming once against the table. “Let’s get this shit over with.”

The folders sat in front of them, positioned in a near perfect circle around the table. They were thin but heavy—a boy’s life compressed into half a dozen pages and a grainy photograph.

“You all got the file,” I muttered. “Ben’s report—what he saw at the scene and what we know so far.” I let the silence stretch a beat before adding, “Which is… very fucking little.”

Amir gave a small nod. Sofia had already highlighted half the goddamn page.

“Two bodies. One boy.” I leaned back in my chair, arms crossed. “No birth certificate. No social. No digital history worth a damn. Blue doesn’t exist—not legally.”

“He’s got scars,” Imogen said quietly, eyes still on the file. “Old ones. Topical burns. Linear marks—like fasting belts or prayer cords.”

“He’s underweight,” Amir added. “Malnourished. Not dangerously, but enough that it’s consistent with long-term restriction. His startle response is… severe.”

“Religious trauma?” Mei asked.

“Looks that way,” I said. “Ben thinks his parents were involved with something underground. Not the Sunday morning, praise-his-name sort of thing. Something else.”

Elara made a noise in her throat. “Cult?”

I nodded once. “That’s what it sounds like.”

“They kept him hidden for nearly two decades,” Sofia said. “You don’t do that unless you’re either terrified of the world or convinced it’s evil.”

“He called himself impure,” Simon added from the window. “He kept telling me he didn’t want to ruin me.”

My jaw clenched.

As if he could ruin anything.

“He doesn’t even know what the hell ‘ruin’ means,” I growled. “He’s not bad. He’s just been fed that idea until it calcified.”

“So what’s the ask?” Sofia clicked her pen once. “Are we meant to wait for more information, or start training based on the assumption this was a cult?”

“We’re not assuming anything yet,” I said. “But we’re not blind either. We’ve seen shit like this before, maybe not as deep or as buried, but the symptoms line up. Fragmented sense of self. Ritualized thinking. Guilt embedded so deep it bleeds out of his fucking pores.”

Elara spoke then, fingers steepled over her notebook. “Any sign of coercion training? Indoctrination beyond religious conditioning?”

“Too early to say, but he’s obedient.”

Too obedient.

My gaze drifted to the folder in front of me, then to the gloves that covered my hands.

What would it have been like, if I allowed my skin to touch his?

“Blue panicked when Simon gave him the contract. He couldn’t read it, and based on the way he described it, I’m guessing he has dyslexia. He wasn’t just experiencing fear, but shame, too. He thought the words were God’s judgment.”

“Jesus Christ,” Bishop muttered.

Amir tapped a finger on Blue’s open file. “That tracks with certain reformation cults. Literacy is treated as purity. Punishment for failure is often… extreme.”

“Any chance this was medical?” Hiro asked, speaking for the first time.

“No doctors,” I said. “Ben’s sure of that. Not even psych. Whoever did this doesn’t believe in science, only suffering.”

Mei frowned, one hand resting on the edge of the table. “What are our next steps?”

I reached toward the laptop sitting on the table, fingers hovering over the trackpad.

“We needed more than a guess,” I said. “Ben called in Midnight.”