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FOURTEEN

LENORE

Exhaustion knocked me out. I don’t even remember falling asleep. But I woke up at the sound of chains rattling in the air. When I blinked my eyes open, a single red rose was on the floor beside me.

I once read that if you want a rose, you have to learn to love its thorns.

Was this his idea of love?

Here I was again—second-guessing myself like a fool. And still, my heart held onto some small, stubborn hope. Because I did cry for him. I did love him. I still do.

Back when I had no home, when I ran from the one I had, I used to imagine he’d come for me. My prince on a white horse, riding in to rescue me. He was supposed to be my happy ending.

And now? I’m clinging to hope for a damn horse.

Is this karma? If it is, what sin am I paying for? Or maybe my life’s just been one long, cruel joke. A story written in spite, not love.

When I first met him, I didn’t even know what love meant.

But I looked at him and I saw it—or thought I did.

After so many jerks, and so many lies, I clung to the illusion.

I spun the fantasy over and over: him waiting for me in a little cottage on a lonely hill, far from the world.

I’d run into his arms, he’d lift me like I weighed nothing, carry me inside.

We’d make love. He’d call me his, I’d call him mine.

The next morning, we’d walk hand-in-hand, talking shit about everyone else and laughing, just us, real and raw. Our own tiny universe, untouched.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

Is it really that easy to dream a better life? Maybe that’s why I slept so much. In dreams, I was safe. In dreams, I didn’t have to wake up and face the truth.

And now that I’ve seen him again... he’s nothing like the version I kept locked in my head. That version, the one I made up—I miss him. I miss that stupid first love, that soft illusion. Not the man standing here now.

Even roses feel empty. Just flowers. And me? Just a person. A person who wants, and needs to be seen, to be loved, to be understood.

I sat up slowly, eyes adjusting. Troy was gone. I guess he was getting rid of them now.

I got to my feet and stepped forward. He was working on something near the wall, his focus pulled away.

That’s when I saw skulls. Some stripped clean. Others with scraps of flesh still clinging to bone. All collected in the walls like a mosaic wall he built for himself.

My stomach flipped. I moved one foot at a time, trying not to make a sound. I reached the first step.

Then he tilted his head.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” he shouted, standing up.

My heart exploded into motion. Panic took over.

I ran. My legs were barely under me, tearing up the stairs as he came crashing after.

The basement door flew open, and I rushed into the stairwell, lungs burning.

I didn’t stop. I just kept running, desperate to reach the upper floor, to find a door I could lock behind me.

The stairs weren’t supposed to be this long.

I counted ten when I was a child. Eleven if I skipped the broken one that always moaned beneath the heel. But now, as I clawed my way upward with a bruised knee and raw palms, there were at least twenty. Maybe more. Each one groaned like something alive. Hungry.

My fingers slipped on the old banister. The varnish had peeled away long ago, leaving it as raw and splintered as my skin.

Behind me, the basement door hung open, exhaling cold breath like a wounded animal. The damp was inside my bones now. I still smelled him. The way he smelled in the dark, metal, cedarwood, sweat.

My body called Dorian even when I didn’t want it to.

Up. Up. Up. Don’t look back.

The house sighed around me. Wood popped. A low creak stretched across the ceiling like footsteps walking overhead. But I was the only one upstairs.

Wasn’t I?

I reached the top and froze.

There was a door where there hadn’t been one before.

Pale green paint. Cracking in long strips like old scabs. It breathed, or maybe it was just my breath bouncing off the silence. Either way, the air felt too thick to pull in and too heavy to let go.

The doorknob was made of brass, warm as skin. It turned too easily in my hand.

The door swung open, and I stepped inside.

The first thing I noticed was the smell.

Sweet. Decaying. The scent of peppermint crushed beneath rotting fruit. Like something trying too hard to cover its death.

The room had no windows. Just walls that stretched high, smothered in peeling wallpaper. A sickly green, weeping from the corners. Beneath the curled edges, there were words.

Not words. Accusations.

Scrawled, carved with fingernails, etched in what I hoped wasn’t blood.

LIAR. YOU WILL PAY. NOT TRUE. DREAM. NIGHTMARE. RUN. STAY.

They covered the walls like wallpaper of their own—layered over and over until the letters bled into one another like bruises. There was a movement to them. As though, if I looked long enough, they’d rearrange themselves into something new.

I stepped further in. The wooden floor creaked beneath me, and as I looked up, there was only one thing in the center of the room now. A dollhouse.

A miniature of Thorn Hall, down to the crooked shingles and broken front gate. The windows were dark, just like the real ones. The front door was slightly ajar. My stomach flipped as I looked down. Teeth.

The entire floor was made from human teeth, fitted together like puzzle pieces, stained and polished, making the floor of the dollhouse look like marbel. I couldn’t breathe.

I backed up, but the door had closed behind me. The knob was gone.

On a shelf behind it stood thirteen dolls. Each wore a tiny white dress with a lace hem, stained at the edges. Their hair was blonde, red, black, brown, strawberry-gold. Their glass eyes caught the low light and reflected it like the eyes of animals in the dark.

I inched closer. Something about them made the skin on my neck pull tight. They weren’t like the dolls I used to collect. These were… older. Real.

One had a scar just below her eye, shaped exactly like the one I had from falling off the swing in the orchard when I was nine. Another had a chipped front tooth. One had fingers burned down to the nub.

No.

My stomach clenched as I reached out and touched one of the dolls’ heads. The hair was soft. Too soft.

It wasn’t synthetic.

It was human.

I pulled back my hand like I’d touched something alive.

I stumbled toward the dollhouse, needing to look away from the row of tiny eyes. But the house didn’t offer comfort either. The miniature rooms were perfect. Too perfect. They mirrored the real Thorn Hall precisely. Even down to—

I blinked. Leaned in.

There was a figure in the miniature basement.

A boy.

Bent over, arms outstretched, pressing something into the wall. A girl knelt before him. Her hair was dark, and long. Tangled.

It was me.

I reached to open the dollhouse roof, to rip the whole thing apart—

Then the smallest doll on the shelf moved.

Her head twisted to the side with a small, mechanical click. Her lips did not part. But a voice poured out of her anyway.

A girl’s voice. Mine. Not mine.

“Run, run, run.”

My body started to shake. Cold swept through me like winter wind under a door.

Then, from behind the door of the room I was in, I could hear Dorian’s voice. He hit the door with an axe, enough to leave the whole big enough to fit his whole head, and as he pulled his head into the whole he licked his lips just before he said, “Here comes the Trouble.”

Calm. Icy. It echoed as if he were everywhere.

I turned. The door was cracking even more as he tried to pull his hand through the hole.

He was smiling. Wild-eyed. Beautiful. Terrifying.

His breath steamed in the cold air.

“I found you,” he said softly. “Trouble.”

He pushed through the opening, and his hand finally opened the door. The sweat slicked his hair to his forehead. There was something creepy in the way he stood like every nerve in his body was stretched to snapping, and he was daring the world to pull first.

“Stay away from me,” I whispered.

But I didn’t move.

His eyes dragged down my body like a touch.

“You were always going to end up here,” he said, stepping closer. “You can run from the house. But you can’t run from what you are.”

“I’m not like you.”

“You are exactly like me.”

He dropped the axe with a thud. It didn’t make a sound when it hit the floor. Just a hush.

He walked toward me.

I backed up. Hit the wall.

There was no escape.

“You’re insane,” I said. My voice broke. “You need help.”

His hand came to my throat—but he didn’t squeeze. Just held it. His thumb pressed under my jaw. He tilted my head up.

“I need you ,“ he said.

The words slithered through me, dark and warm.

My heart beat so hard I thought it might crack a rib.

“I hate you,” I breathed.

“You love me.”

His lips were on mine before I could lie again.

Rough. Desperate. The kind of kiss that tastes like blood and grief and hunger. I clawed at him. Hit him. Held him. He caught my wrists and pinned them above my head.

My breath caught. My knees buckled.

He didn’t let me fall.

“I want to leave,” I whispered, but it was a prayer with no god.

“You never will,” he said against my skin. “This house doesn’t let go. And neither do I.”

He pushed his forehead against mine.

I closed my eyes. And saw the dolls. The teeth. The words are carved into the walls.

Maybe I was dreaming.

Maybe I was still in the basement. Still tied up.

Or maybe this, him, me, the house; was the only thing that had ever been real.

“I’m scared of you,” I whispered.

“Good,” he murmured, kissing the words away. “You should be.”

And still, I kissed him back.

He is going to ruin me. He was my ruin. But even ruins have beauty, and I mistook his wreckage for romance.