Page 23

The rain comes soft at first, as if the Hollow is trying to mimic mercy. It never quite gets it right. One moment we’re wrapped in the hush of the Hollow’s edge, that soft metallic silence it wears like a veil. The next—we’re standing at the border of something older. Quieter.

It unfolds in the rain, delicate as breath. Thatched roofs, thick with moss. Pale stone walls weathered smooth by time, stitched together with ivy and bone. Smoke spirals up from crooked chimneys, thin and white, caught in the grey. There’s a bell tower in the center, leaning slightly to the left, like even it isn’t sure it still belongs to this world.

Riven stops beside me. Lucien keeps walking. Not fast. Not cautious. Just forward—like if he stops moving, something in him might snap.

The village is small. Maybe twenty buildings. A crooked row of houses at the base of the hill. A fountain choked with vines. A few thin flags torn by wind and rot still flutter above a shuttered door.

And then—movement. They appear slowly. From behind open doors. Beneath overhangs. Around corners.

Women.

Dozens of them.

Their faces are young. Familiar in ways that sit wrong in the chest. They don’t speak. Don’t stare. They just watch.

Lucien goes still. His eyes lock on one of them near the fountain. Pale skin, dark eyes. She tilts her head like she’s remembering something private. Then looks away.

Riven exhales, slow. Controlled. His hands drop to his sides, but I see the curl of his fingers. The way he doesn’t blink.

They recognize us.

I know better than to speak. This village doesn’t want noise. It wants memory.

I let my eyes scan the crowd. One leans against the frame of a weather-beaten house, her gaze catching mine for a second too long. Her smile doesn’t reach her mouth. Behind her, another woman peels an apple with a blade I remember losing years ago.

My jaw tightens. This is not a place meant to be found.

The drizzle thickens slightly, catching in my collar. It smells like ash and wild rose, like something left burning too long on an altar no one tends anymore.

A door creaks open. Another woman steps through. Her hair is twisted with copper wire, her bare feet streaked with earth. She sees Lucien. She smiles. It’s small. Sharp. And then she disappears back inside.

Riven turns to me, voice low. “How far behind are they?”

“Ten minutes, maybe less.”

He nods once.

Lucien shifts his weight. His hands curl slightly. He doesn’t look at either of us. I watch him for a moment longer, then let my gaze return to the village.

We don’t need to knock. These doors open on their own.

And when she arrives, she’ll feel it.

Not the place. The weight we’ve tried to bury. And what it says about the men we were before we ever touched her.

Then the voices begin. Soft at first. Almost incidental.

One of them speaks from the shadow of a porch tucked between two narrow houses. Her voice is low and deliberate, shaped around a memory only she can taste. She doesn’t call Lucien’s name like she wants to hurt him. She says it like it’s something she once loved carving into his skin. He doesn't flinch—of course he doesn't—but I see the shift in him anyway. The hard turn of his shoulders. The line of his jaw dragging tighter, sharper. The past doesn’t move fast here. It coils. Waits.

Another woman emerges, barefoot and lovely, her braids still damp with rain. Her eyes settle on Riven like they belong there, as if they never forgot the shape of his silence or the weight of his hands. She doesn’t speak, not immediately. Just stands in the open with her arms loose at her sides, gaze drinking him in like she’s trying to remember which version of him she preferred—the one who kissed her gently, or the one who didn’t say goodbye.

The door to the cottage across the lane creaks open, a woman steps out like she’s still allowed to look at me like that. Her dress is torn at the hem, her hands ink-stained from whatever spellwork she’s still pretending she understands. She leans against the doorframe, a bottle slung casually in one hand, and smiles with her mouth, but not her eyes.

“Still quoting dead men, ?” she calls, her voice smooth as river stone and twice as cold.

I don’t answer. I’ve already buried the version of me she knew, and I have no interest in digging him up just to let her confirm he stayed dead.

All across the square, more doors open. More women. Some watch from windows, their fingers curled around the edges of curtains like they’ve been waiting for this day longer than they’ll admit. Others step into the rain like it might carry them back to something better. And every one of them turns her eyes on one of us.

Riven’s gaze skims the well near the center of the square, where a woman sits cross-legged on the stone rim, her skirt hitched high over one knee, her hair twisted into knots I remember pulling loose. She lifts one hand, not quite waving—more like marking him. Claiming her share of whatever this is.

He doesn’t move.

And neither does she.

Lucien walks forward like he’s counting steps to something he can’t name. Not escaping. Not confronting. Just moving, like if he stops, the past might catch up and strip him bare.

Then the women begin to laugh.

Not in unison, not coordinated. Just the scattered sound of remembered sins being spoken aloud for the first time in decades.

“Still got that knife in your boot, Vale?” one says. Her voice is lower now. Private. And not speaking to me anymore.

Another from somewhere behind us adds, “He used to quote poetry while fucking. Kept it in his coat pocket. One hand between your legs, the other on a leather-bound tragedy.”

The third is bolder, her voice warm and wicked. “Lucien didn’t talk at all. Not even when he came.”

Lucien stops.

Not for long.

But long enough.

And then the air changes. Not visibly. Not with sound. But I feel it, the way you feel a storm break behind your spine before the clouds ever shift. The women sense it too—their postures lengthen, soften, straighten. Their lips still mid-sentence. One woman steps back beneath the eave of a house, brushing damp hair off her brow as though something holy—or terrible—is about to cross the threshold.

And then she does.

Luna steps into the square like she’s always belonged in the center of every reckoning. There’s mud at the hem of her coat, damp curls clinging to the slope of her jaw, and her gaze moves like a blade across the space. She sees them. Every one. She sees the way their mouths curl. The way they don’t look at her, but at us. Like we’re the secret, and she’s the consequence.

She doesn’t stop walking. Every man standing near her carries something suddenly exposed, raw in a way we didn’t want her to see.

And then, of course—Silas.

He stumbles into the square half-soaked, his coat askew, and his grin twisted in something too bright to be sincere. The moment his eyes land on the women, he freezes mid-step like he’s walked into a room he forgot he burned down.

His voice cuts through the heavy quiet, too loud, too casual, fraying at the edges like a man already preparing his apology.

“Oh no. Nope. Absolutely not. I know this vibe. This is ex-village energy. I’m allergic. Someone check my pulse—I think I just flatlined from recognition trauma.”

One of the women laughs softly from beneath a porch awning, her fingers curled around a chipped ceramic mug. “Silas.”

He takes a step backward, then forward, then sideways like he might dodge fate by waltzing. “Hi,” he says with a pitiful sort of charm, offering a lopsided smile. “You look great. You all look great. Is it, uh, hot here? Just me? No? Cool, cool.”

Another woman leans out of a second-story window, her voice far too amused. “You cried when I left.”

“I had a sinus infection,” he fires back, the words too fast, too desperate. “I was very congested. There was weeping involved. From my face holes.”

Lucien mutters something under his breath, likely unprintable. Riven snorts. Luna doesn't smile. But she doesn’t look away either.

Silas, unable to stop himself, beelines toward her like she’s the only port in a storm made of his worst decisions.

“Okay,” he says in a low, urgent voice, reaching for her hand and tugging her toward the well. “New plan. We don’t sleep here. We don’t blink here. We find a nice abandoned cathedral full of snakes and curse sigils and death traps—anything but this hellmouth of horny regrets. Come on, sugar, we can still make a clean escape.”

Luna stares straight ahead, her fingers slipping from his like she’s already made her decision.

“You know them?” she asks, voice quiet but not soft.

“Know is a strong word,” Silas hedges, already backpedaling. “More like… acquainted. Briefly. Romantically. Biblically. Emotionally. We exchanged fluids and mistakes. But listen, that was a long time ago, and I have grown so much since then. Like emotionally. Spiritually. Sexually.”

She doesn’t blink.

“You’re not helping your case.”

Another voice from behind her cuts in, syrup-smooth and dangerous. “Still wearing the necklace I gave you?”

Silas turns as if struck. “I thought that thing was cursed! I threw it into a river!”

The woman smiles. “I know. I pulled it out.”

Silas groans like a man being dragged to his execution. “Oh, come on. That’s not fair. You always knew how to make a dramatic entrance. Why are you like this?”

Luna watches all of it. She doesn’t ask for details. She doesn’t demand explanation. She’s already understood the only thing that matters. The men she loves were made from other women’s wreckage. And now she’s standing in the village they built out of it.

The square distorts around her before anyone speaks her name. Not with sound. Not with magic. Just the kind of quiet that exists when something once buried rises and everyone remembers too late that they never dug deep enough.

Maeve doesn’t walk—she arrives. Fluid and effortless, like the village unfurls to make space for her. The women drift back as she moves through them, not out of fear, but reverence. Not one of them looks surprised to see her. As if she’s always belonged here and simply decided, today, to step out of whatever quiet corner of afterlife she made hers.

Her coat is pale—cream and gold thread, the kind you don’t wear unless you never expect it to stain. Her boots are clean. Her eyes are softer than I remember. That’s what makes this worse.

Lucien sees her and stops breathing. Riven doesn’t blink. Caspian looks like a man watching a ghost he might hug if no one was watching.

And then she says it—“Hello.”

Like it hasn’t been over a century since she last saw us die a little for her.

Lucien is steel beside me. But not untouched. Riven, silent and unmoving, watches her with that unreadable expression he wore the day he buried someone he swore he'd never love again. And I—I can’t help the way my chest tightens, because there was a time her voice was the only one I trusted to say my name without trying to own it.

Maeve doesn’t reach for anyone. Instead, her gaze lifts and finds Luna.

And everything in the square shifts again. She doesn't smile—not yet. She just looks. Long enough to register the balance. The way we all unconsciously align around Luna, as if drawn by orbit instead of loyalty.

“You,” Maeve says, not coldly, not sweetly. Just—you. Like an answer to a question she hadn’t let herself ask until now.

Luna doesn’t react. Her posture remains fluid, but I feel the fire beneath her stillness. This isn’t jealousy—it’s something older. A primal recognition between women who’ve both loved monsters. Women who never needed to raise their voices to be heard.

Maeve’s gaze flicks from Silas to Elias to Riven, lingering longer on Lucien. “So this is what you needed,” she murmurs, not accusatory, just aware. “One woman to do what I couldn’t. Or wouldn’t.”

Silas shifts beside Luna, visibly uncomfortable but not foolish enough to interrupt.

Lucien finally speaks—low, quiet, knife-edged. “That’s not what this is.”

“No?” Maeve asks, still looking at Luna. “Then what is it?”

No one answers.

Caspian steps forward, his voice careful, stripped bare. “She didn’t replace you, Maeve.”

“I know,” Maeve says, meeting his gaze briefly before her eyes return to Luna. “She made you stop grieving me.”

It shouldn’t feel like an accusation. But it does.

Riven moves first. Only a step. But his body places itself near Luna’s like a shield he doesn’t know he’s drawing. It’s instinct. It’s unthinking. It’s telling.

Maeve notices.

“I see,” she says quietly. “Even Riven.”

That’s when Luna finally speaks.

Her voice is steady, unapologetic. “Do I need to apologize for what they gave me?”

Maeve studies her a moment longer, and then something cracks—not bitterness, but the quiet unraveling of expectation.

“No,” she says. “But I think I might need to apologize for what I left them with.”

Elias clears his throat, eyes darting between them like he’s reading a battlefield and already losing the war. “Is it weird if I say I missed you?” he mutters, clearly regretting it mid-sentence. “Because I did. Like, in a sexy ghost-of-Christmas-past kind of way. You haunted the shit out of me. In a good way. Mostly.”

Luna glances at him. He shrinks visibly.

Silas claps a hand to his shoulder. “I’ve never seen you crash and burn in slow motion like that. It was beautiful.”

Maeve smiles faintly, not at them—but at Luna. And for a moment, it’s not sweetness. It’s sorrow.

“You should know,” she says, voice softer now, “they aren’t easy to love. Not because they’re broken. But because they don’t know how to stop carrying what they’ve already lost.”

Luna’s expression doesn’t shift. “I’m not here to fix them.”

“Good,” Maeve says. “Because they’d let you try. And you’d bleed yourself dry doing it.”

The breeze moves, gentle and strange, and for a heartbeat, I could swear the Hollow itself is listening. Maeve steps back, giving Luna the space she never had. Not defeated. Not gone. Just quieter. She looks at each of us again—Lucien, Riven, Ambrose, Silas, Elias, Caspian, me—and I see it in her eyes. She isn’t angry we’ve moved on.

She just finally believes we have.

And maybe that’s what hurts the most.

The Hollow has no gods, but Maeve walks like one. And maybe that’s what made her dangerous—her softness didn’t demand worship. It invited it. Quietly. Thoroughly. Until you believed you’d found something pure inside the ruin.

Now, standing here in this village of ghosts and guilt, I feel what I haven’t let myself feel in years.

Grief.

Not for what we lost. For how little we had the right to keep.

She turns slightly, her attention flicking between the men who once would’ve set fire to realms for a moment more of her. Silas, fidgeting with the leather wrap around his fingers like he wants to say something idiotic and knows he shouldn’t. Caspian, watching her with that slow-burn melancholy only he can carry—an ache too worn to wear openly, but too deep to bury.

She pauses when her gaze touches Riven. He doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. But the weight of it is carved across his features. Not longing. Something harder. Something rooted in the way you look at someone you carried until they couldn’t breathe, and still wouldn’t let go.

Maeve steps closer, only a pace. Just enough to close the space between memory and regret.

“You still flinch when you breathe around me,” she says gently, like she’s not accusing him. Like she just wants to set the record straight before time folds in again.

Riven lowers his head slightly, the movement so controlled it borders on reverent. “I remember the sound your ribs made when they cracked under that blade. I remember the color of your mouth when you bled out in my hands.”

She smiles, faint and trembling. “You still say it like you could’ve stopped it.”

“I should have.”

“You did more than anyone,” she whispers. “You stayed.”

The others don’t speak. Not because they’re avoiding it. Because the truth Riven carries isn’t just his. It belongs to all of us. We fought for her. Bled for her. Loved her. But she died anyway.

And now, she stands here—flesh and ghost and memory, made whole by whatever law governs this realm—and we remember what it meant to lose her all over again.

Except—

Luna. She hasn’t raised her voice, demanded answers, lashed out. She’s simply existed. Centered. Entire. And in that stillness, I see the fracture forming not in her—but in us.

Because she’s not a memory. She’s not a past we couldn’t protect.

She is now.

And we all feel it. The recognition. The guilt.

The want.

Lucien doesn't look at her. Hasn’t, in minutes. His attention is fixed firmly on the broken edge of the well, the way old stone warps under rain. For a second, I think he might speak. But Lucien doesn't believe in softness. Or ghosts. Or the kind of woman who loves in layers. He loved Maeve. Maybe not loudly. But deeply. And when she died, I think something in him chose to go with her.

The rest of us didn’t. We stayed. We moved forward. We let something new inside.

We let Luna inside.

Maeve’s gaze drops to the dirt, then rises to meet Luna’s again. No challenge. No pity. Just truth.

“They needed someone to carry them out of the wreckage,” she says softly. “You did what I couldn’t.”

Luna doesn’t flinch. “I didn’t come here to compete with a ghost.”

“I know,” Maeve murmurs. “That’s why you won.”

The quiet that follows isn't empty. It's full. It thrums in the dirt, the stone, the rain still clinging to leaves above. Maeve looks at each of us again, then returns to Riven.

“You loved me enough to let me die.”

He closes his eyes.

“You don’t have to carry me anymore.”

She reaches forward—just once. A palm to his chest, over the heart I know still aches in silence. He doesn’t lean away. He lets her touch him.

Then she’s gone. Not vanished. Not dissolved. Just—moved. Back into the crowd. Into memory. Into the place we left her long before today.

And suddenly, I see it. Not all love is meant to survive. Some is meant to destroy. And some is meant to teach you who you’ll never be again.

I step forward, not out of impulse, but certainty. The others still linger in the aftershock, but my eyes are only for her now.

Luna.

She watches me as I approach, gaze unyielding, jaw set like she's already braced for whatever truth I'm about to offer her.

I stop close—close enough to feel her breath shift, the barest curl of energy flickering across the inches between us.

"That could’ve undone you," I murmur. “Her. All of it.”

Her voice is quiet. “It didn’t.”

I tilt my head, taking her in—not as something to tame, not to console—but something to honor. "You’re not afraid of the dead."

“I’ve lived in their shadow too long to be.”

Gods, she speaks like ruin dressed in warmth. I let my fingers brush hers, slow, deliberate, not asking permission—just making it known that the space between us was never meant to stay untouched. She doesn't pull away.

“I want you to know,” I say, low, certain, “that I’ve loved before.”

Her breath stills, just slightly.

“But I’ve never chosen like this.”

Her throat tightens. And that—that—is the difference. The others still carry her. But I am standing here, offering everything Maeve never asked me for.

A future.

And Luna—She’s not a second chance. She’s the reason I want one.

Lucien

I thought it would feel like resurrection. Seeing Maeve again.

The last woman I allowed myself to love—so soft she made war seem quiet, so steady I let myself imagine forever in the hollow between her collarbones. When she died, it tore something from me. That’s what I told myself. That there was something sacred in the way she broke open in my arms and bled out the last good part of me.

I carried that loss like a weapon. Used it as justification. I loved her. I lost her. I don’t love anymore. And now she’s walked into the square, smiling like she remembers the taste of all our names, and I felt…

Nothing.

No pain. No hunger. No fury.

Just a slow, indifferent silence. Bittersweet. Like a wine gone stale. Like a memory that doesn’t bleed anymore. I needed to see her to understand that. I let her go long before she ever left. And that should be the end of it.

But it isn’t.

Because Luna’s still standing there, not looking at me, not asking for anything, and I can feel the pressure building in my chest like she’s a question I refuse to answer but can’t stop hearing. She doesn’t belong in this. Not in the past. Not in Maeve’s ashes. But she fits into the space Maeve once carved out like it was built for her.

That’s what makes her dangerous.

The others orbit her like they’ve been waiting their whole lives to be claimed. Riven would burn worlds if she asked him to. Silas can’t go five minutes without throwing himself at her with all the grace of a dog on fire. Elias plays it cool, but he looks at her like he wants to crawl out of his own skin just to be near her. Even —stoic, ancient, so fucking unreadable—has started moving toward her like the gravity in his bones has changed direction.

They love her. Even Ambrose, cracked open and stitched back wrong, holds her like something sacred.

But I don’t.

I can’t.

And yet—when she lifts her gaze, when it lands on me across the square, there’s a stillness that hits harder than any war. Her power isn’t in volume—it’s in presence. It coils around the throat, warm and cold at once, and makes you forget how to breathe the way you used to.

I don’t move. I don't nod. I give her nothing.

But I see her.

She’s not beautiful the way Maeve was. Maeve was serenity, a calm river you wanted to drown in. Luna is a fucking hurricane—wild, erratic, inevitable. There’s something in her that ruins men like me. She doesn’t bend. She doesn’t yield. I don’t know what she wants from me, and that’s why I can't stop watching her. Because whatever this is between us—it’s not love. It’s something worse. She turns before I can read her. A subtle shift. A withdrawal that shouldn’t sting but does.

The others close in, eager to fill the space. Silas with some out-of-pocket comment. Elias, trying too hard not to hover. , always too composed, brushing a hand at the base of her spine like it means something and nothing at once.

And I stand back, watching them all play at devotion, like boys in love with a storm they don’t know how to survive.

She’s not for me.

She never was.

But gods, I want to command her anyway. I want to say her name and watch her stop breathing for it. I want to see her drop every defense she’s ever built and kneel—not because she has to.

Because she wants to.

But that’s not how she looks at me. She looks at me like I’m the mistake she hasn’t decided whether to burn or bury. I hate her for making me wonder if the only reason I’m not in love with her—

—is because she never gave me the chance to be.

I’ve seen women mold themselves for power. For proximity. For survival. They become softer for the ones who crave gentleness. Sharper for the ones who only trust blades. They ask for nothing, give everything, until their skin splits around the shape of the man they want to keep.

But Luna—

She doesn't bend like that.

She shifts. Effortlessly. Not in submission—but in precision. A thousand edges and curves, stitched into the kind of woman who shouldn’t exist. And I watch her, not because I want to, but because she keeps revealing another version of herself I didn’t prepare for.

She rolls her eyes at Silas, letting him be ridiculous, letting him perform his chaos and feel like he’s earned it. She doesn't coddle him, doesn’t tame him—just lets him spin wild, knowing he always comes back to her.

For Elias, she flashes a wicked little smirk when he stumbles over himself trying too hard to be charming. She teases him, but never cuts deep. She gives him the win, then takes it back just to see what he’ll do with it. She lets him be foolish, because she knows he needs to feel like he can still make someone laugh.

Caspian—gods. She touches him like the world hasn’t already tried to carve him hollow. A soft hand at his wrist, fingers curling through his when no one else sees. She doesn’t ask him to be better. She just stays close until he remembers he already is.

Ambrose—the man no other Sin Binder could reach without tearing themselves apart—she challenges. She doesn’t flinch from his obsessions, his contradictions, the way he sharpens every question into an accusation. She leans into his violence, and asks it to be honest.

And Riven—He follows no one. Loves no one unless it’s carved from ruin. And still, he’d slit the world open if she whispered yes.

She gives each of them what they need, not to seduce, not to manipulate—but as if she was built to bear the weight of their wants. And it infuriates me. Because I’ve watched every woman here—hundreds of them, bonded and bleeding, trying to hold us together. They failed. All of them. Not because they were weak. Not because they weren’t enough. But because we weren’t. Because we were gods wrapped in human failure, too stubborn to be shaped by anyone but death.

But she—

Luna doesn’t just survive us. She thrives. And still, she doesn’t touch me. Not anymore. Not after what I said. What I did. What I meant. Even now, as we prepare to leave this village built on grave-thin memory, she walks past me like I’m nothing more than another closed door.

The women of the Hollow don’t speak. They don’t try to follow. They just watch as we pass, as I lead the others through the uneven stone paths and back into the trees that separate this place from the rest of the ruin. I feel their gazes pressing against my spine. The weight of every past life. Every mistake. Every bond we left broken because we didn’t know how to be loved without making it violent.

They stay behind. As we pass the edge of the village, something inside me tightens—not regret. Not grief.

Finality.

Shutting the door on them feels like the last breath of something I didn’t know I was still holding. Maeve. The others. Everything we were when we believed love could fix what we refused to name.

But Luna—