Page 148 of Creeping Lily

And then he placed the blood-sealed confession in my hand, like he was giving me not a letter, but his soul.

I unfold it now, and my chest locks tight. His handwriting—messy, tilted, angry with itself—slashes across the page. These aren’t lines of ink. They’re scars.

“Lily,”it begins. “By the time you read this, I’ll probably be gone. Maybe I’ll be dead. Maybe I’ll be someone else. But I need you to know why. I need you to know none of this was your fault.”

My throat sears as though I’ve swallowed fire.

The discomfort coils through me, too heavy to stand against. My knees buckle, surrendering me to the floor, where I fold into myself—legs tucked beneath me, body bowed—as the words pull me deeper.

It isn’t just reading. It’s trespassing into the innermost corridors of his mind, a cruel bird’s-eye view into the genius I once admired from a distance. Now I see everything: his brilliance and his ruin, the way his thoughts bleed, the shadows of his heartbreak pressed into every line.

Each sentence cracks against me like glass shattering under skin. Every revelation digs deeper, splintering my chest until my heart feels like nothing more than a vessel stabbed open, hollowed out by daggers disguised as words.

The room tilts. The walls lean in. The silence thickens until I swear I can hear the throb of his pain echoing inside my skull. My mouth tastes of iron, though I haven’t bitten my tongue. It’s just the sensation of being cut open, gutted by truths too brutal to carry.

I try to look away, to fold the pages and set them aside, but my fingers won’t obey. They clutch tighter, as if the pages have grown hooks that sink into my skin, binding me to his torment.

And in that moment, I understand: this isn’t reading.

It’s drowning.

Every line drags me deeper under, and the deeper I sink, the more I realize—I was never meant to surface.

He writes of exile, of the Walker house that was never his home. He confesses to nights in a bedsit, ceiling cracked like a spiderweb, staring upward as if the plaster could whisper who he really was. He describes the fire—not accident, but execution. Smoke choking him, flames clawing at the walls, the panic when he realized someone deliberately lit the fire. And then the moment he ran back inside for the landlady’s cat, because everyone was watching, because he needed them to believe he perished.

And they did.

Blood, bone, enough DNA to bury him. Lincoln Walker died in the blaze that consumed the house. But Titan Ward—burned, scarred, reborn in vengeance—walked out of those ashes and he never looked back.

He tells me about Goliath. He doesn’t write it like salvation. It reads like recognition. They didn’t rescue him. They weaponized him.

“They wanted a soldier. I wanted a war. We understood each other better than we understood anything else.”

I have to set the letter down, but my hands won’t be still.They shake, reaching back for it like it’s oxygen. Three pages. Three blood-stained pages that carry his ruin.

By the time I reach the end, my vision is swimming.

“I’ve never been good at words, Lily. Never been good at people. But you… you undo me. You’ve always been my undoing. You’re not a chapter of my life. You’re the whole damn book. And if I burn again, if I fall again, if I vanish for good—you should know this much: I have loved you. I will love you forever and beyond all reality. Because you areitfor me. You always were. You always will be.”

The words disintegrate beneath my tears. I can’t see them anymore, only feel the weight of them pressed into my bones. I clutch the letter to my chest, desperate, like if I press hard enough I can conjure his heartbeat back into the ink.

This isn’t just his story.

It isn’t just his confession.

This was his goodbye to me.

A sound tears out of me, raw and feral, something I don’t recognize as human. I claw at the floor, nails splintering, fists pounding wood until my skin splits. None of it touches the real pain—that he lived through fire, through exile, through becoming someone else—and all of it without love.

“How?” The word cracks out of me, half scream, half sob. “How could they not love him?”

My voice ricochets off the walls, wild and broken. I rock forward, snatching the letter back, pressing it so hard to my chest it might fuse to my skin. My heart is a drumbeat of fury and despair, thudding loud enough to bruise my ribs.

Lincoln Walker. My Lincoln.

A boy with a heart so rare, so unguarded, so precious—and they tried to erase him. His family. His own blood. They saw something precious and they destroyed it.

The thought shatters me. I choke on it, sobbing until I gag, bile rising sharp in my throat. I stagger onto my knees and double over, retching, body convulsing with grief. When it’s over, I curl into myself on the floor, cheek pressed to the letter, whispering against his bloodied seal like a prayer.