I stand in the middle of the empty square. The air is thin. Cold.

  My world has collapsed to the size of this village.

  The path to Larkvale is a line erased by Belladonna's watchers. The birds in the trees have gone silent.

  The tavern is hers. The Elders' hall is hers. She's boarded up the world.

  I turn. My house waits.

  A cage.

  And if I break it, Evangeline and Pip get hurt.

  Every direction is just another goddamn wall.

  And the Voice in my head is the floor, waiting for me to fall.

  "James."

  My head snaps up. A flash of her eyes, bright and hard, before my stare finds the stones at my feet. Vera.

  She crosses the square, her shoulders set, her hands fists. She stops close, invading my space. Her stare burns the side of my head. I keep my eyes on the frost, on the line between two cobblestones. Anywhere but her face.

  "I saw you go into the tavern," she says. "I was waiting."

  A half-step closer. The crunch of her boot on gravel.

  The line between the stones blurs. Vanishes. Her face is there.

  "It's time. I found a way past the patrols. We get in tonight."

  "No." My eyes fall back to the ground. To the frost at my feet.

  A breath hisses through her teeth. Her shoulders tighten. The fists at her side uncurl, then clench again.

  "Look at me," she says.

  The muscles in my neck are stone. My chin lifts by an inch. Then another. Her face comes into focus.

  "Last night you were ready to kill for this. Now you can't even look me in the eye. Did you go soft?"

  "I'm not a coward," I snarl. "There's a difference between being brave and being stupid."

  "Fine." She says the word and turns to leave.

  Her body is already moving, leaving me behind. Then her feet stop, her back to me.

  "A caged beast doesn't wait. It gets hungry. You stay in your cage. I'm starving."

  I look past her at the treeline. A cold sweat slicks my palms. Her plan is a noise that will draw Belladonna's watchers.

  I gesture toward my house. "I have a family to protect. A future. What do you have? A ghost?"

  I watch her back. The muscles between her shoulder blades bunch into a single, tight knot. Then she turns, slow.

  "You're right," she says. Her voice is quiet. Steady. "You have a family to keep. I have one to reclaim."

  She closes the distance until her face is inches from mine. "He's there, James. My Thomas. They turned him into one of them. I'm not going to Darkwater for a war. I'm going for him."

  "That's suicide," I plead.

  "No. It's a rescue."

  "You have a son!" I grab her arm.

  She peels my fingers from her arm, one by one. "And he has a father," she says, her voice low.

  She places her hand on her scarred cheek, her thumb tracing the pale, dead tissue. "I know his face better than I know my own. I'll find him under there."

  A strange, fierce tenderness enters her voice. "My son will learn you don't abandon your monsters. You bring them home."

  She jabs a finger into my chest, a hard point of bone. "You stay here and protect your son. I'm going to find my husband."

  I watch her go. The path she takes is a straight line toward the swamp.

  Her shoulders are straight. Her pace does not change. She does not look back.

  I stand there, rooted to the cold stones. A muscle in my jaw tightens. Then again. A dry, useless chewing on a thought I can't swallow.

  A wish for a ghost I could chase.

  I turn and start the walk home. One step. Then another.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  "James."

  Ward's voice. The sound cuts through the quiet. I stop but keep my back to the forge.

  "The well," he says. "I checked it. It's clean."

  A simple task. Go to the well. Fill a bucket.

  Something a good husband would do. Something James would do.

  A reason to go back. A reason to face her.

  My chin dips in a nod I'm not sure he can see.

  I turn from my house and head for the well.

  The air by the well smells of damp stone and something else. Something sweet. Rotting fruit.

  I get closer. The smell gets stronger.

  There's something by the well.

  Under the oak. A bundle of rags. It moves. A slow rise and fall. Breathing.

  I slow my steps. A beggar? Here?

  Then I see the robes. The black wool. An Elder's robe, shredded and fouled.

  My heart gives a single, hard kick against my ribs.

  I take another step.

  The head lifts.

  Not a face. A ruin of wet, hanging flesh. The jaw is gone, replaced by a weeping hole from which a pale, segmented worm of a tongue protrudes.

  But the eyes are there. Her eyes.

  Ursula.

  I stumble back, a hand flying to my mouth. A dry, useless heave.

  She doesn't react. Doesn't move. Just watches me with those two, sane eyes.

  Leave. Just leave. Go back to the house empty-handed.

  But Evangeline's face swims into view. Pip's. The clean water. The one honest thing I can give them.

  Look at the bucket. Look at the winch. Don't look at her. One task. Then home.

  I force myself to move, my wooden leg a clumsy drumbeat on the stones.

  I brace for a scream. A lunge.

  Nothing. Only the sound of her wet breathing.

  The scrape of the bucket on the stone lip. The first, tortured groan of the winch. Every sound is a new reason for her to attack.

  She doesn't.

  My head turns. A slow, unwilling motion.

  Her head lifts.

  The eyes in that ruin meet mine. They are curious. The detached curiosity of a child seeing a strange new bug.

  That is worse. God, that is so much worse.

  I look away, my focus finding the dark water, the descending chain. Anything but her. The chain's shriek is a welcome pain.

  The bucket hits the water with a distant slap.

  I hold my breath in the new quiet. And I look.

  Her head is lowered again. Her hands are in her lap.

  They are pleating a single, brown leaf. Over and over. The gesture is delicate. Human.

  A memory surfaces. Nora's hands, dusted with flour, making the same precise folds in a piece of pastry.

  Bile rises in my throat.

  I crank the winch. The chain shrieks, pulling the bucket from the well's throat. My eyes flick between the rising bucket to her busy, monstrous hands. I cannot look away.

  A shape forms from the brittle leaf. A bird? A boat? I don't know. I don't want to know.

  The bucket clears the lip of the well. I grab it, stumbling back. Cold water sloshes over my boots, a shock of clean cold against my skin.

  I turn. I run.

  I don't look back. But the image is there.

  Her hands. Making something small.

  Wrong. It's all just wrong.

  I don't stop until my hand is on the latch of my front door. I burst through, my chest heaving.

  The house is quiet. Empty. The bucket thuds on the floorboards.

  My eyes find the floor. The rug is askew. The blood is a dark stain seeping from beneath it.

  It has to be gone before they return.

  The lye is under the sink. The chemical stings my nose.

  The painting comes down. I scrub the red handprint from the wall, my knuckles raw against the plaster. Then the floor. The red thins, spreading, a pale pink stain in the wood.

  It is not gone. It will never be gone.

  Then the poker. I take it to the cellar. In the far corner, a single foundation stone is loose. I work my fingers into the crack, prying it free. The space behind is a pocket of cold, dead air.

  I slide the poker inside. The stone grinds back into place, sealing it in the house forever.

  I stare at my hands, red from scrubbing.

  They are the hands that held Pip. Now they bury a murder in its walls.

  I step back into the main room. My eyes find the hearth. A line runs through the stone. A crack.

  A memory surfaces. Evangeline's hand on the stone. Her voice, thin with worry. 'It'll shatter one day, James.' His reply. 'I'll get around to it.'

  He never did.

  But I will.

  These hands. They are a killer's hands. But they are also his. They know the heft of a hammer, the bite of a chisel against stone. They know how to build.

  I find the tools he bought and never used. A bag of mortar, stiff with neglect. A trowel, its edge still clean.

  I clear the cold ashes, scooping them out. I wrestle the cracked stone from its bed, the strain a sharp, clean burn in my muscles.

  The stone resists. I put my weight into it. A sharp pain lances through my back.

  Good.

  My hands are slick with wet mortar when the front door opens.

  Evangeline. Pip is a small shadow at her side. His eyes are wide, fixed on the hole where the hearthstone should be.

  Her hand gives his a small squeeze. "Go on to your room, sweetling," she says, her eyes on me, not on him. "Daddy's just fixing something."

  He looks from the gaping hole, to my hands, to his mother's face. He gives a slow, uncertain nod, then vanishes down the hall.

  The door to his room clicks shut.

  Evangeline doesn't move. Her eyes are on my hands. Following the trowel. Judging the work.

  The scrape of my trowel on stone is the only sound. Then her voice. Flat. Empty.

  "There was a crack like this in my old cottage. In the wall by my bed."

  I keep my focus on the stone. On the line of the crack.

  "The wind made a sound," she says. "A low whistle. All night. The sound of the cold getting in. My father stuffed it with rags. It never worked."

  She pauses. I wait for her to continue.

  "He always said he'd get around to fixing it. He never did. I learnt to sleep with the cold."

  The trowel in my hand feels heavy. I set it down.

  "A hearth is different, though. It's meant to be the one place the cold can't touch. I keep imagining it breaking. In the deep of winter. The cold, getting in. All over again."

  She comes and sits with me in the dust and ash. Her knees make a soft sound on the floorboards.

  She picks up the trowel and holds it out. Her fingers brush mine as I take it.

  I don't flinch. A strange calm settles in my chest.

  We find a rhythm. She mixes the mortar. I lay it. No words. Just the scrape of the trowel, the wet slap of the mortar, the soft thud of the stone settling into its new bed. The sun moves across the floor, the light shifting from grey to gold.

  I watch her for a moment. She catches my eye. A small, firm nod passes between us. We get back to work.

  The sun sets. The room fills with shadows. We finish. We stand back to look.

  The crack is gone, filled with a dark seam of new mortar. The scar is still there, but the stone is strong. Whole.

  I look at her. A question in my eyes.

  A tear cuts a path through the dust on her cheek. She wipes it away with the back of her hand. "I stopped asking you to fix it," she says. Her voice is a quiet, broken thing. "I learnt not to ask for things that will never happen."

  Her eyes, which had been on the stone, lift to my face. The guarded stillness in her face gives way.

  "But you did it anyway."

  A film of moisture covers her eyes, catching the fading light.

  "Thank you, James," she whispers.

  The hope in her eyes is a physical force. It hits the centre of my chest.

  My heart seizes.

  Followed by a deep, pulling warmth.

  And in her eyes, for the first time, I see a man I could be.

  A husband.

  Yes. I could be him.

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