Page 137 of Creeping Lily

69

TITAN

Iwasn’t wrong. They’ve brought her here. To the hunting lodge.

Their cars are scattered across the gravel drive, crooked and careless, a silent confession that the bastards are inside. Engines ticking with leftover heat, headlights still bleeding faint halos into the night—it’s all the proof I need.

I stand at the tree line, swallowed by the forest’s shadows. The pines loom like sentinels, their black silhouettes hemming me in. Frost bites at my skin, gnawing through my clothes, but the cold is nothing. All my focus is locked on the lodge.

The shape of it cuts through the dark like a scar that never healed. My scar. My family’s scar.

The Walker lodge has stood here for generations, a corrupt legacy. Once, it was a fortress. A sanctuary. A place I thought might shelter me from the weight of everything pressing in. Now it’s nothing but a carcass dressed in ivy and stone, bloated with lies and betrayal.

The windows gape like dead eyes, glass black and hollow. The ivy has grown wild in the years since I last stood here, twisting thick around the walls, strangling the stone as if evennature wants it gone. The roof sags, shingles curling like peeling skin, but the bones of the place still stand. Still watching and waiting.

My chest knots, air rasping too sharp in my lungs. The scent of wet earth and pine sap nearly chokes me. It drags me backward—into a past I can’t bury no matter how hard I try.

Because this lodge isn’t just a ruin. It’s a graveyard. Mine.

My boots stay rooted in the frozen dirt as memory claws its way up, merciless. The last time I came here, I wasn’t a man. I was a coward. A coward drenched in Lily’s blood.

The image is seared into me—her body crumpled, broken, eyes fluttering shut while I stood there useless, choking on fear. I ran. Fuck, I ran. Left her behind, left her bleeding, left her to face hell without me.

The shame gnaws at me even now, my hands trembling as if her shame is still slick across my skin. My soul feels branded by it, seared through with guilt.

That night, I staggered through this lodge like a wounded animal. Drunk—not on whiskey, but on grief, rage, the raw acid of despair burning me from the inside out. Every wall closed in until I snapped.

I wrecked the place with my bare hands. Smashed vases, toppled tables, split wood with my fists until my knuckles bled. I ripped curtains from rods, hurled chairs against stone, clawed at the wallpaper like maybe underneath the plaster I’d find a way out of myself.

Each crash was a prayer. Each splinter of glass, an offering. To the fury that roared inside me. To the hatred that demanded blood for what had been done to Lily.

But the house gave me nothing. No absolution. No solace. Just silence.

And that silence has never left me. It clings to me like smoke in my lungs, like decay in my bones. Because what I found inthat lodge that night wasn’t just violence. It wasn’t just cruelty. It was something fouler, something stitched into the walls and floors like a curse. What waited for me there was worse than anything I could have dreamed up in my nightmares—worse because it was real.

I hadn’t been searching for anything in particular. Just tearing through my father’s desk like a starving animal, desperate for some weapon I could use against him. Some shard of truth sharp enough to cut him the way he’d carved me open. The way he was carving Lily open now—dragging out her suffering, denying her the justice she deserved.

My hands stumbled across a locked drawer. I didn’t hesitate. Rage doesn’t leave room for patience. I forced it open, the wood splintering around the lock with a crack that echoed in the silence.

Inside, beneath layers of dust and stale air, was a stack of papers. Yellowed with age. Edges curled. Forgotten—or hidden.

I yanked them out. And with one glance, my world collapsed.

The words were plain, cold, stripped of any humanity. A contract. A purchase agreement. Inked across the top:1999.

The purchase of a baby boy to replace Baby Walker.

TherealBaby Walker.

The one who’d died hours after being born.

The replacement—healthy, alive, anonymous—was swapped into the hospital crib before the body was even cold.

Me.

The words swam on the page, but their meaning hit with surgical precision, cutting through flesh, bone, marrow. I wasn’t their son. I was the decoy. The stand-in for a corpse.

I couldn’t breathe. My lungs locked, refusing to drag in air. My pulse roared in my ears until it was all I could hear—louderthan the clock ticking, louder than the trees groaning outside the window.