Page 71 of Creeping Lily

TITAN

I wasn’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 even nature 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 in that 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.

The real Baby 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—louder than the clock ticking, louder than the trees groaning outside the window.

I read the papers again. Slower. Desperate for the possibility that I’d misunderstood. That I’d twisted the words into something they weren’t. But no. There it was. Every line, every signature, every seal of finality.

I wasn’t Lincoln Walker. I wasn’t even anyone.

For a long time, I sat there, the papers clutched in my hands, my knuckles bone-white. As if gripping them hard enough would force an explanation from the dry ink. But there was none. Just betrayal, pressed flat between pages.

My father had known. He’d known every second of my life. And he’d kept it buried, like my very existence was something to be ashamed of.

My mother… she hadn’t known. Not until I told her.

I remember dialing her that night, my hands shaking, my throat raw from smoke and whiskey and grief. I asked her if she knew who I really was. Silence stretched across the line, and in that silence, I heard her heart shatter. I heard the truth.

The wind howls through the trees now, dragging me back to the present, back to the lodge looming in the distance.

My fingers twitch, itching to break something, to tear this place down brick by brick until nothing is left.

But I stay still. Because movement feels dangerous, like the memories will consume me all over again if I stir.

This place didn’t just take my past. It poisoned my future.

Eight months after I ran, I thought I’d outrun the truth.

But pain has a way of hunting a man down.

I was living in someone else’s house, hiding in the shadows, convincing myself I could fade away.

Then the fire came—smoke, flames, screaming wood.

The house went up like it had been waiting for the chance.

And me? I ran back inside. To save strangers. People I barely knew .

I made it out. Barely. The burns still claw my skin, bright reminders of that night. Not reminders of heroism—reminders of failure. Proof that I couldn’t even succeed at dying.

So I let the fire finish the job.

I didn’t stay for the aftermath. Didn’t wait for the ash to cool. I disappeared into the night and never looked back.

Lincoln Walker died in those flames.

Titan was born from the smoke.

A man with no past.

No family.

No name worth saving.

A man who lived in the shadows.

But standing here now, staring at the hunting lodge, it’s like the past crawls out of the walls and sinks its claws into me.

Every splintered memory, every scream I tried to bury, it all comes crawling back, gnawing at my skin, tearing open wounds that never healed.

The weight of it presses down on me, heavier than the scars carved into my back, sharper than the ache that lives in my chest like a second heart.

This place is a mausoleum of everything they ever took from me. My childhood. My name. My goddamn humanity.

And now they have Lily, and they think they can keep her.

They’re wrong.

Lily isn’t theirs; they can’t have her. She isn’t their prize, their toy, their offering to whatever sickness runs in their bloodline. She’s not theirs to break. She’s mine.

The Walkers don’t understand what they’ve done.

They raised a ghost. They built a monster out of the ashes of a stolen baby and the bones of a dead one.

They think their name is untouchable, that it can shield them from the evil underneath their skin.

But that name destroyed me. And now it’s my turn to destroy them.

I take a step forward, the crunch of frozen earth beneath my boots loud enough to echo in my skull. Each step feels like I’m stomping on a grave— their grave, already dug, waiting only for me to throw their bodies in.

The hunting lodge looms closer, a black skeleton against the sky, windows like hollow eyes that watched me suffer and said nothing. But the fear that used to keep me shackled here, the pain that once made me their prisoner—it dissolves. Burns away in the furnace I’ve built inside my chest.

Titan has no family. Titan has no past.

Titan is the reaper they made without meaning to.

And tonight? Tonight, that reaper starts with Lily.

I’m not coming for justice.

I’m not coming for redemption.

I’m coming to take her back.

And I’ll drown this entire bloodline in their own screams before I leave her behind.