“For how long?”
His head tilts, just slightly. “Always.” The word could’ve sounded poetic. Romantic, even. But coming from him? It sounds like a sentence. Like I’ve never actually been alone, just waiting to be claimed.
I should be panicking. My brain should be clawing at escape plans. My body should be laced with adrenaline. It isn’t because none of this feels foreign. It feels likeinevitability. Like the moment before a candle dies, where the flame flickers, then folds.
He raises his hand again, slower this time, and brushes something invisible from my cheek. His glove just grazes smoothly.
There’s nothing there, but my knees buckle, and he catches me. Not rough, not possessive… just sure. One steady palm pressed against my shoulder like he’s been doing this for centuries. “You’re unraveling,” he says quietly. I nod. Not because I agree…but because denial feels irrelevant at this point. “You’re not alone.”
The words should feel comforting. They don’t. Because they’re not comfort. They’re context. “Why not?” I ask. My voice sounds far away, like it’s had to travel through something thick to get to him.
“Because you’ve reached the edge.”
“Edge of what?”
His eyes flick toward the room. “Of yourself.”
I want to laugh. A sharp breath of disbelief catches in my chest. Because he’s not wrong. I’ve changed. I don’t know when it started, or how far it’s gone, but I can feel it in my bones now. In the way the world folds whenI walk into it. In the way people look at me, like I’m becoming.
I used to be a girl behind a bar. Now I’m something that they watch. The horsemen. The shadows. The veil. And now Death himself.
He leans in, just slightly. The air around him bites with a chill—not physical, but carved from existence. The void where his breath should be whispers against my skin like a secret. “I’m not here to claim you,” he says.
My breath stutters. “Then why?”
His lips barely move, but the words cut like they were carved into stone. “I’m here to see what you become.”
It doesn’t sound like hope. It sounds like design. Like this was always going to happen, and I’m just catching up to the story. I don’t know what expression crosses my face, but his lips tilt. The barest echo of a smile. Like he already knows how the story ends.
Then he’s gone, no shift in the air or blur of movement. It’s just silence where his presence used to be.
And on the floor, a single black feather. The only evidence that the moment ever happened. Without it, it would be as if he was never here. Like I imagined it all.
I didn’t imagine anything. The cold still clings to my bones…but the flame in my chest? It burns.
The feather smolders on the floor. Not visibly. There’s no flame or smoke. There is just the lingering heat of something impossible. It pulses with a slow, dark energy that curls the edges inward like it’s folding into itself, like it’s being unmade from the inside out.
I don’t touch it…I don’t even want to look at it. Because I know if I do, I’ll feel it again.
Him.
And I don’t think I’ll come back the same.
The apartment is too quiet. It’s the silence left behind after a storm. The couch doesn’t hold me when I sit. It braces. I sink back and stare at the ceiling, legs drawn to my chest, arms wrapped around them like a barricade. My skin still remembers his touch, cool and light as ash. My shoulder tingles where his hand steadied me, and for a sick second, I want it back. I want that stillness again. That clarity.
I know what he left behind.
Permission.
To break. To burn. To become.
And just when I start to come apart, the door swings open slowly like it resents being used.
There is no knock because Riven doesn’t fucking knock. He fills the door frame and then crosses the threshold like it is his and I’m the one intruding in his space.
His hair is soaked, curls plastered to his brow, jaw clenched so tight it’s a miracle it hasn’t splintered. His coat swings open like wings as he stalks inside, boots thudding heavy, slow, inevitable.
He’s a storm in a tailored shell.
