He watched the rain drag itself down the glass - slow, determined, like it knew the world wouldn't wait but moved slowly anyway. His breath rattled, dry and mechanical, like the wheeze of something forgotten. It had come too far. He had come too far. Whatever came next would be no surprise. There was no salvation in the air tonight - just the sterile hum of the overhead light, the faint, sour scent of damp tile. He imagined the old myths: Valkyries with wind-bitten faces, charging across frozen skies; or Thanatos, pale as linen, gliding silently toward the banks of some Greek river. These were comforts in their own way - fantastical stories told in childhood, now called up like old lullabies for the dying. The drugs didn't make him sleep. They made him still. That was worse. He lay there, unmoving, but wholly conscious - aware of every cold breath, every ache in his limbs, every detail of the bathroom he'd meant to renovate and never did. He could see the jagged grout lines, the patchy sealant. It was all unfinished. Like him. Silas Vane had the kind of beauty that didn't ask permission. It arrived before he did - broad-shouldered, with hands too big for teacups and a face that looked like it belonged in a Renaissance sketchbook, half-forgotten in charcoal. When he smiled - which wasn't often - it was like watching something thaw that had been frozen for too long. He lived alone above a shuttered florist's shop, in a room that smelled faintly of motor oil, old books, and bergamot. The curtains were always drawn, even in summer. He prided himself on the restoration of the little apartment, though often he would sleep on the floor, he said, it reminded him not to get too comfortable. He wanted to repair the decrepit space for himself, something he could create for himself, not destroy.

The drugs didn't make him sleep. They made him still. That was worse. He lay there, unmoving, but wholly conscious - aware of every cold breath, every ache in his limbs, every detail of the bathroom he'd meant to renovate and never did. He could see the jagged tiles cracked. He was clean now, or close enough. Faithful to his routines, to coffee at six and the gym at seven and therapy on Thursdays. But there were nights - always the nights - when the hunger came. Not for the needle. For skin. Heat. The ache of being touched like he was still human. And he was - God, he was. More than most.

Then came the sound. Click. Click. Click. High heels on tile, deliberate and unhurried. He tried to turn his head but couldn't. She was behind him - just off to the left - but all he could do was listen. There was a sigh. Soft. Familiar. The kind that mothers give when they find your mess and love you anyway. A disappointed sort of love.She came dressed not like a shadow, but like the memory of one - her coat long and torn like a veil of ash, the color of midnight drowned in oil. The heels she wore clicked like distant gunshots on the marble floor, delicate, perilous things with high arches that made her seem to float rather than walk. He had imagined Death would be a man. A priest, maybe. Or a skeleton in some fool's cloak. as a vow broken in the night. And her mouth - those lips - were blood-red, but not the red of roses or wine. They were jeweled, inlaid with the gleam of countless rubies, as if she had kissed the cosmos, But when she lowered her cowl, the room chilled - not with fear, but with a strange, mournful grace. Her eyes were not eyes at all, but emeralds - deep and ancient and glimmering as though lit from within. There was no pupil, no white. Just that endless green, the color of envy and old When she breathed, it was winter. Not the kind with snowmen and sleigh bells - but the kind that comes late and hard, when the ground gives no more. And her expression, most terrible of all, was not rage. Not cruelty. But disappointment - quiet, cold, complete. As though she had come expecting more from the world. And was, once again, let down. She took the syringe from his arm in disdain and threw it. Cradled him in her arms and kissed him. He had the sensation of dropping into bed.

He awoke to see Delphine his lover. She moves like smoke through the corridors of memory and myth - a woman small in frame, but whose presence carries a strange gravity. Her long, raven-black hair is streaked prematurely with silver, the kind of gray that suggests curses more than age, like moonlight caught in a thundercloud. Her skin is pale, nearly translucent, as if she were made of something that shouldn't be exposed to sun or scrutiny. Her green eyes hold a sorrow that has seen too many betrayals, too many absences that never became distance. Athletic in a quiet way, she moves with the discipline of someone who has survived - lean, wiry, and shaped by necessity rather than vanity, though she leans into vanity all the same. Her elegance is meticulous, a mask worn over old wounds. Lipstick too red, perfume too sweet, skirts just a whisper too short - everything designed to distract from the scars, the ones beneath her skin and the faint ones lining her collarbone like forgotten handwriting. Delphine speaks carefully, almost musically, but her words are rationed, reserved for those she trusts, which are few and far between. When she does open her mouth, it's either to enchant or confess - rarely both. Her humor is biting, a defense sharpened by years of regret. She's motherly to the broken and cruel to the whole, as if anyone not hurting is someone she cannot understand

His eyes searched hers like they might hold the exit from the dream. "I was dead, Del," he whispered. "I relapsed, and A Harbinger took me." She pulled him in, wrapped herself around him like silk wraps a wound. "No one's dying tonight," she murmured against his ear. "Not you. Not me."

And then something broke in him - some final thread pulled too tight too long. He gripped her, suddenly, with the panic of a drowning man who's just remembered what air tastes like. He rolled over her, pressing his face to her neck as though he could hide from the world in her skin. She didn't resist. She never did, not with him. "Delphine," he breathed, her name a prayer and a surrender. She felt him tremble - not with fear now, but need, hunger long buried beneath guilt and restraint. He kissed her like he was trying to reclaim something, or maybe bury it deeper. Either way, she understood. Her hands traced the curve of his back, gentle as rain. "Come home, Silas," she whispered. "Come home to me." And he did. There was nothing gentle in it, only the desperate rhythm of two people who had lost too much and found each other anyway. She held him as though he might vanish again, and he clung to her like her body was the only solid thing left in the world. When it was over, he lay against her chest, breath slowing, eyes closed. She cradled his head, humming something soft and half-remembered. In the dim room, with the neon casting bruises of color across their skin, Delphine kept her eyes open. Watching. Delphine lay there in the dim hush of the hotel room, her limbs like warm wax, still pliant from the storm they'd weathered together. She pressed herself against Silas's back, arms wrapped around his ribs, cradling him like a mother would a fevered child. She rocked him slowly, rhythmically, her lips brushing the nape of his neck with breaths instead of kisses. She listened until his breathing deepened into sleep, slow and steady like the tide retreating.

Only then did she slip away.

She moved carefully, like a thief, ghosting out from under the blanket and padding across the worn carpet. The bathroom light hummed as she flicked it on - harsh, yellow, unkind. She cleaned herself with a cloth, her movements practiced and silent. Her skin was still flushed from his touch, but already cooling.

She looked up.

The mirror was old, spotted with age, like a surface that remembered too much. And there, just beyond her own reflection, she thought she saw it - Death. Just a flicker, a shape behind her shoulder, hollow-eyed and still, the same way she used to see it as a child in Mississippi when the nights were hot and the air was full of cicadas and dread.

She blinked.

It was gone.

She exhaled. Too many hours in the air yesterday. Too much not said. Too much felt all at once. Delphine pressed her palms to the edge of the sink and stared at herself like she was trying to see through her own face. The silver in her hair caught the light like threads of winter.

"Not tonight," she whispered to no one, then turned out the light.

She climbed back into bed without a sound, slipping into the hollow Silas had left behind. His warmth still lingered there. She closed her eyes and let herself slide into a sleep so deep it was almost chemical - thick and dreamless, her limbs too heavy to move, her breath barely noticed.

But then -

"Del," Silas murmured, low and rough, his hand finding her hip in the dark. "Delphine..."

She stirred, her body aching, her mind slow to rouse. He turned to her, kissed the back of her neck, her shoulder. His touch was needy, reverent, like he was trying to make sure she was still real.

"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I just - need to be? you again."

She could've said no. Could've rolled away and disappeared back into that heavy place. But instead, she turned to him, her eyes half-closed, her voice barely a breath.

"You don't ever have to ask, Silas."

And so, again, she gave him everything.

Even what she didn't have left.

Loving him the only way she knew how - with all the fire and ruin she was made of.

He took her wrists - not roughly, but with a kind of finality, as though folding a letter he'd never send - and raised them above her head. There was a silence in the motion, a quiet plea disguised as dominance. It was not her surrender he was after. It was his own.

Silas was coming apart like wet paper, slowly, deliberately, in the only dialect he had ever been fluent in: touch, tension, the sweaty grammar of need. His skin glistened, the kind of sheen you see on summer asphalt or a man too long without rest. And then, quite suddenly, he let go.

He framed her face between his hands, thumbs brushing along the high bone of her cheeks, memorizing her like she was a photograph he feared might fade. She didn't speak. Only tilted her chin a little, offering him that rare, unguarded stillness. The kind you don't earn. The kind that's simply given.

"You need me," she used to say, a simple truth dressed in flirtation. But tonight, it was he who needed her, in that soft, frightened way men do when the night presses in too close.

Her fingers found his jaw, that patchy beard he never quite managed to grow properly, and she traced his lips like they were a wound. You're more than the worst thing you've done, her touch seemed to say. You're not just what they called you. Not just the addict. Not just the dealer. Not just the convict.

And it undid him - her believing. He looked at her, the girl who'd never known a cellblock's stink, yet carried her own ghosts with the kind of grace he could never fake. She never asked him to hold them. She just kept showing up, which - if he were honest - sometimes made him want to scream. She should've run. Should've chosen someone good. Someone clean.

But she hadn't.

She was his, and not in the way men boast, but in the way lost things sometimes find a place to settle.

He touched her then like a man afraid he might drift off the edge of the world. "Open your mouth," he said, almost tenderly. She gave a surprised laugh, small and unguarded, then did as he asked. What followed was base, raw, a gesture that might've humiliated another woman - but she only kissed him deeper, dragging him into it, baptizing him in that dark, private sacrament.

"You're my baby girl," he murmured, voice rough with promise. "I won't let anything happen to you."

And when it ended, and she lay across his chest like a blanket he wasn't sure he deserved, he kissed her temple with a reverence he didn't know he was capable of.

That's when he saw it.

Not clearly - no, it came like things often do at the edge of sleep. A tall figure, darker than shadow, with a cigar glowing at its mouth and a dog at its side. Leashed. Tense. Familiar. A page torn straight from the quiet madness of his dreams.

He blinked. The room was empty again.

He pulled her closer, his nose in her hair.

"I didn't know you enjoyed being your own cuckold," the Harbinger said. Her voice was mild, but her words sliced clean. She brought the slim cigarette - more green than tobacco - to her lips, lips red as a bitten cherry, as though kissed too long by something unkind. The tip flared. Her eyes, a green that recalled bottle glass and heartbreak, lit from within. Each of her fingers was lacquered black, glistening like a moonless sea.

Death turned his head toward her, swift as a reflex. He drew on his cigar with the deliberation of someone who wished to say something meaningful and could not find the way. One eye, red as garnet, sagged slightly in its socket - tired, maybe, or simply ancient. The ember at the end of the cigar flared, throwing jeweled light across the planes of his face.

"I miss it," he said at last. "I hate that we always bring them here when they're at peace. And you - " he pointed with the cigar, a steady, gnarled gesture " - you're no less to blame than I am. You brought him here. You always do. To the last place he felt safe."

He lowered his hand to the great hound's head and patted it with something like reverence.

Smoke trailed from their mouths, weaving into the still air, wrapping around each other like the lovers they were fated to follow.

The Harbinger smiled - just barely - and a trace of laughter, brittle and unfinished, escaped her. "How can you bear to watch it happen over and over without fury?"

Death removed his hood. Beneath it was not a skull, but a man's face - worn thin by the centuries. His beard was a drifting fog of stars, each strand curled around a secret galaxy. One eye, gouged by fate, was nothing, but the other glinted, and it was deep garnet. His face echoed hers - sharp cheekbones, a nose that pointed but did not accuse.

He crossed his massive arms, his shoulders rising like dark hills, and said again, "I miss it." His voice was deep and precise, the kind of voice that carried through halls even when spoken low. "Sit with me."

She rolled her eyes, but not unkindly. "How many times are we going to ruin this?"

He grinned - just a flash of gold between his teeth. "Come see."

Bound as she was, not by chains but by fate, she moved to him, walking with slow, serpentine grace. At the sofa, she did not sit demurely - she straddled him, as one might take a seat in a memory they could not forget.

His smile faded to something weightier. He reached for her waist, and at the same time, unfastened the hound's leash with a casual flick. Then, leaning close, his breath warm and old against her ear, he asked softly, "Do you know what it's like, seeing you hanging there?"

He lifted his cigar, like an old man gesturing toward a past no one else could see. "We wait for them to grow. To see each other. To let us see each other. To be reunited, again and again." He sucked his teeth, a small, dry sound, and flicked the ash.

She leaned against the wall now, her green gaze unreadable. But her body soon followed the rest of her will - she walked back to him, slow and sure, until she straddled him once more.

Death pressed his face into her hair and breathed her in, like memory, like regret. He kissed the top of her head, the way Silas did to Delphine.

"We could go home," he said. "Just for a minute. Steal their will. Lock them in this place they never quite leave anyway. I'll stop time."

His hand, once busy with leashes and cigars, now cradled her face with the tenderness of long grief. It was a gesture older than both of them, one he had made a thousand times and would again before the cycle could be broken.

They were not meant to separate, not truly. Their souls had been lashed together at the edge of time, and whether one died sooner or later, the ache for the other never dulled. Their longing was a sickness shared across the boundaries of flesh and form.

The Harbinger touched her forehead to his. She nodded.

And with that, they sank - together - through the floor, and into the quiet dark of Death's house.

Silas woke first, as he always did. Seven a.m., every day.

Sleep never came easy.

The room was dim, hushed. The thin curtains breathed in and out with the breeze like lungs learning how. Beside him, Delphine lay curled under the covers, her bare arm slung across the pillow like something forgotten.

He studied it - the sleeve of tattoos, delicate and deliberate, each one filled in with the precision of a steady hand. Illustrations. Stories.

Not like his: prison-black, born from single needles and traded favors. His were warnings. Hers were memories.

A feeling came over him - wild, stupid, animal.

He rolled onto her with a playful grunt, burying his nose against her neck, nudging and nuzzling like a mutt that didn't know better.

She stirred, giggling, her voice still fogged with sleep.

"You're like an animal," she murmured, scratching his head as if she meant it.

He made a face - cartoonish, confused - arched a brow and snuffled against her stomach, her ribs, lower.

She laughed again. Small. Warm.

"We can't go five minutes," she said.

He wrapped her in a clumsy bear hug, all elbows and sincerity.

"That's because I waited too long for this," he said.

And for a moment, he meant it more than anything.

His mind slipped. Back two months. Back to the gym at the center - the only place they let him go unsupervised once a week.

He hit the bag like it owed him something, fists wrapped tight, sweat dripping to the rubber floor.

That's when he saw her.

Thin, but not fragile.

There was something in the way she stood, balancing on one foot like it wasn't even a thought.

She turned, caught him watching through the glass, and smiled.

A quiet smile, but it stayed with him.

After the session, unwrapping his hands, she floated across the floor like someone late for something.

She stopped to speak to Maurice, the gym owner, and the half-wit who held the pads.

Maurice gestured.

"This is Delphine. John's sister."

She looked him in the eye as she gave him her hand.

"Okay, John, we have to go. The rehab folks are coming."

Rehab?

"You're in rehab too?" he blurted before his brain caught up.

She looked down, then back up, cheeks tinged with rose.

"For my back," she said. "I had it fused a few weeks ago."

Then softer, voice folding in on itself:

"I've been in programs before, too. I understand."

That was it. Not the tattoos. Not the laugh. Not even the smile through the glass.

It was that whisper - that breaking truth - that made him stay.

Now, he traced his finger down her neck.

"I've been waiting so long to touch you. I want as much as I can."

Indeed, Silas was a man starved of love, of belonging.

He remembered what he told her outside the gym: You feel like home.

He remembered how devastated he felt when she said she had to go back - somewhere called Santa Monica.

She turned as she left, fear in her eyes.

"I'll be back in two months."

The whole time they'd only shaken hands.

Now, he knew the texture of her skin, the sounds she made, the way she liked to be loved.

They talked often of precious things, but more than words, it was her palm against his chest, her mouth on his scars.

They always consumed each other - hungrily, wholly.

But this time, it was different.

He was slow.

She undulated beneath him like the sea.

Her fingers traced his chest.

"I worship you," she whispered.

It was as if time snapped - a slingshot of light, flung through memory, through years.

Then he looked at the clock.

All this - this flood of feeling, this joy - had taken place in just seconds?

The clock still read 7:00.

Delphine felt the graze of Silas's beard against her cheek - a sensation faint as lint on silk. He spoke suddenly, too loudly for the hush between them.

"I haven't felt that before," he said.

She didn't flinch. "I love you," she replied, like someone reciting a fact rather than a hope. Then, quieter: "You need me."

There was a pause, the kind that widens into silence. "I don't need anyone," he said, and the words struck her with a violence not unlike heat - an internal scalding.

But she knew better. He'd changed since the day they met. There was a meanness now, a brittle slant to his words. Once, she woke to find him mid-tirade on the phone, voice splintered with rage - his father, again. Afterward, she'd taken his hands, reminded him gently of the therapeutic tools he had once spoken of like lifelines. He swatted the air around her, then said with sudden, childish panic, "You won't love me if you knew me."

Later, she sank into the velvet chair near the bed. Dust rose from the cushion in sleepy spirals, suspended in the early light like gold thread. He knelt in front of her, shoulders hunched as though apologizing to God. What spilled from him was not a story, but an unraveling: the goat he'd killed for no reason, a comb stolen from a friend's coat pocket after the friend's suicide, a confession marked not by chronology but shame. His years in prison. The gang. The deaths he'd witnessed, the ones he hadn't spoken of.

Delphine watched him, expression unreadable. A thought occurred to her, quiet and unshakable: Death follows him too.

She crossed her legs like a child at circle time, folded her arms, and said simply, "I'm not scared off."

She never spoke much of her own past - she wore it like perfume: present, but only if you leaned in close. During his confessions, she made him look at her. She wanted truth, or at least the shape of it. "I love you," she said again.

His eyes flicked sideways. "I'm unsure."

"Liar," she laughed, and the sound was sunlight through stained glass.

With that, Silas scooped her up and tossed her onto the bed. "Now I'm going to initiate you," he said, grinning with a feral charm.

When it was over, she glanced at the clock: 7:00. But they had been awake for what felt like hours.

"Silas, the clock's broken."

She sat up, and then she saw it - curled beside the velvet settee, the hound from her childhood. Black-furred, moon-eyed. It raised its head, yawned, then tucked back into itself as if nothing at all had changed.

There was no logical explanation. But she didn't need one. This is where I'm supposed to be, she thought.

From the bathroom, she heard the shower hiss to life. "I noticed," Silas called out. "I'll ask the front desk for a new one."

Delphine slipped her nightshirt back over her skin, knelt by the hound, and brushed her fingers through its fur. It sighed, deep and contented, as if it too had been waiting a very long time.

The water ran behind the bathroom door, a muted rush, like wind combing through trees in a storm far off. Delphine stayed where she was, one hand resting on the dog's ribs, rising and falling like a tide. The velvet chair sat quietly across the room, its imprint still holding the shape of her.

The hotel, with its pale wallpaper and antique brass lamps, had the air of something preserved in amber - too still, too deliberate. Even the light was off somehow, not morning or afternoon, but a soft gray that dimmed every color. She watched the dust drift and settle. Time didn't move here; it rearranged itself.

One year he ruined her Christmas, she chased him through the house until he stopped at the sofa. As I sat I saw all the gifts, feigning surprise when the morning came.

Now, years later, it was here again, and Delphine had the sinking feeling it had finally found her.

Silas emerged from the bathroom in a cloud of steam. His hair dripped water in lazy rivulets down his collarbone. He was beautiful in a way that hurt to look at - like something that wouldn't stay. She wondered if he saw her that way, too.

"I feel human again," he said, towel slung over his shoulder, voice light but eyes shadowed.

She didn't answer right away. Her fingers kept moving, absently stroking the hound, as though grounding herself in its fur.

"Did you know," she said softly, "that when dogs appear in dreams, they're said to be guardians?"

Silas raised an eyebrow. "You dreaming right now?"

Delphine looked up at him. "I don't know," she said. "But I think I've been here before."

He crossed the room and sat beside her, still damp, skin warm. He touched her jaw, thumb brushing along the fine ridge of bone, as though memorizing it. "You scare me sometimes," he murmured.

She smiled - not the kind people give when they're happy, but the one they wear when something familiar aches.

"Good," she whispered. "I'd hate to be the only one."

Behind them, the clock still read 7:00. The second hand had stopped, or maybe it had never moved. Somewhere in the hallway, a floorboard creaked with the weight of something unseen.

The hound lifted its head again, ears twitching.

Delphine leaned into Silas's shoulder, eyes half-closed. "If this is a dream," she said, "don't wake me."

He kissed the top of her head, but said nothing.

Outside, the sky had gone the color of lead. A storm was coming, or perhaps it had never ended.

Delphine felt it again - that slow, rising dread, warm and awful in her chest. She'd almost been found out. Almost let it slip, how Death had trailed her like a stray dog all her life, quiet as a shadow on velvet carpet.

As a girl, they called her over-imaginative. Sensitive. Prone to spells. But Death had watched her always: when the gremlins clawed at her insides, when she swallowed her little white freedoms with lukewarm tap water, when the ward doors closed behind her like the mouth of some polite beast. He followed her still when she packed up her life and fled west with the man who left bruises in the shape of prayers. Through it all, she felt - curiously, terribly - safe. Seen.

She still isn't sure if it happened - if it was real, or some echo of a fever dream. But one night, he came. .Death. He stood by her bedside, his long hands trembling above her as if he feared he might break her just by touch. She said nothing. Only began, very slowly, to undo the buttons of her shift. The invitation needed no word

Death exhaled. Not in hunger, but in something like relief.

"You're mine," he said.

He wore no cloak that night. No scythe, no ghostly pretense. Instead, a fine Stetson hat - smooth as oiled smoke, its brim casting an otherworldly shimmer. When he removed it, he revealed a face not dead but deliberate, tailored. The rest of him, too, was dressed for the South: black silk suit, alligator shoes gleaming like church glass. He had dressed for a woman like Delphine.

And she didn't flinch. Didn't close herself. She guided his hand to her breast, nodded - yes - and let him take what had already been his.

That night, he was patient. Tender. His touch reminded her of Silas, though he had never known Silas. Each movement shimmered past the bounds of flesh, something deeper. When it was over, he didn't leave. He simply faded, like fog burned off by morning.

She wonders still - was that surrender? Was that love? The thought snags something deep in her skull, a white-hot throb that won't let go. She shakes it off, steps into the shower like it's any other morning. As if she hadn't once given herself to the end of everything, and found in it something dangerously close to intimacy.

Death stood at the tall window, his back to the room, staring out into the void, a place that existed only because he willed it. The glass in his hand was delicate, untouched. His suit, dark and impeccable, flowed over him like liquid shadow. He had removed his hat, and now his hair caught the dim light, a faint silver thread that seemed to shimmer but never belong to the world beyond this space.

"You've grown sentimental," the Harbinger's voice cut through the stillness, a soft sound in the emptiness. She stepped up behind him, her arms winding around his form, as natural as a shadow.

"I've always been sentimental," Death murmured, his tone languid, as though the very act of speaking cost him little. "You mistake restraint for detachment."

The Harbinger moved away, her presence lingering like a distant echo. She walked to the table, her fingertips trailing along its surface, brushing away the dust that had settled for centuries. As her touch met the table, a cascade of rose petals lifted into the air, caught in some invisible current, before slowly falling back, settling once again into the forgotten corners of the room.

"She's not yours, you know," she said, her voice colder now, more deliberate.

Death's silence hung in the air for a moment, heavy and slow. He did not turn to her immediately, but when he did, it was with a softness that betrayed nothing of the edge beneath it. "She gave herself to me."

The Harbinger's eyes narrowed. "She didn't know what she was giving," she replied, her words like a soft sigh, layered with something that was almost pity. "She was looking for an end. Not for you."

"She looked me in the face," Death said, his voice barely a whisper now, a truth only shared in the solitude of this place. "How many do?"

The Harbinger tilted her head, considering him. "You think that means love?"

Death's shoulders moved in a slow, indifferent shrug. He did not speak again, but the air between them grew thick with something neither of them could name.

She reached out, lifting her hand with deliberate grace. Her finger - black as obsidian - pointed directly at her own chest. "You love me," she said, her voice cutting through the tension like a blade. "You're attached to me."

Death turned to face her then, his garnet eye flaring, a dangerous light dancing beneath the surface. The temperature in the room seemed to shift with the intensity of his gaze. For a moment, the Harbinger thought he might speak, but instead, he reached out - slowly, almost reverently - and touched her face. His fingers were cold, but they seemed to burn in the very air between them.

"I do love you," he said, his voice softer than she expected. "We've loved each other for millennia. Longer than stars have names."

He took a step closer to her, his fingers tracing the golden snake that adorned her throat, its scales gleaming like ancient light. "No other woman can shine like you. You were forged from the universe itself - the stars, the gems, the very minerals of existence came together to complete you. You are tied to me, as I am tied to you. There is no reason for it, no logic, no physics. It simply is."

His voice became more urgent, a fervor rising in his words as he gestured between them. "Yet you stand here, consumed with jealousy - jealous that your doppelg�nger could never see you. We are them. And they are us."

The Harbinger stood silent, absorbing his words. She could hear the conviction in his voice, but something in the room felt wrong, as though a door had been opened that should have remained shut. Her breath caught, she prepared to admit the truth was they were separated with their doppelgangers, she was me to him. And that poor boy never kept the clarity of mind to see me.

But instead, she took a deep breath, and with a calculated, seductive grace, she pulled her robe from her shoulder, revealing the smooth, pale curve of her skin beneath. Death's gaze, once cold and calculating, softened, a smile touching his lips - sharp and knowing.

She shivered as he slid the rest of her robe down her body, his touch deliberate, but slow. Every movement felt like a promise, like something inevitable, something both thrilling and dangerous.

"I've only ever had one," she whispered, her voice trembling with the weight of his presence.

And in the silence that followed, they both knew it was no simple truth. It was the very essence of what they had become, bound not by fate alone, but by a history so deep it could never be untangled.

She looked up.

The mirror was old, spotted with age, like a surface that remembered too much. And there, just beyond her own reflection, she thought she saw it - Death. Just a flicker, a shape behind her shoulder, hollow-eyed and still, the same way she used to see it as a child in Mississippi when the nights were hot and the air was full of cicadas and dread.

She blinked.

It was gone.

She exhaled. Too many hours in the air yesterday. Too much not said. Too much felt all at once. Delphine pressed her palms to the edge of the sink and stared at herself like she was trying to see through her own face. The silver in her hair caught the light like threads of winter.

"Not tonight," she whispered to no one, then turned out the light.

She climbed back into bed without a sound, slipping into the hollow Silas had left behind. His warmth still lingered there. She closed her eyes and let herself slide into a sleep so deep it was almost chemical - thick and dreamless, her limbs too heavy to move, her breath barely noticed.

But then -

"Del," Silas murmured, low and rough, his hand finding her hip in the dark. "Delphine..."

She stirred, her body aching, her mind slow to rouse. He turned to her, kissed the back of her neck, her shoulder. His touch was needy, reverent, like he was trying to make sure she was still real.

"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I just - need to be? you again."

She could've said no. Could've rolled away and disappeared back into that heavy place. But instead, she turned to him, her eyes half-closed, her voice barely a breath.

"You don't ever have to ask, Silas."

And so, again, she gave him everything.

Even what she didn't have left.

Loving him the only way she knew how - with all the fire and ruin she was made of.

He took her wrists - not roughly, but with a kind of finality, as though folding a letter he'd never send - and raised them above her head. There was a silence in the motion, a quiet plea disguised as dominance. It was not her surrender he was after. It was his own.

Silas was coming apart like wet paper, slowly, deliberately, in the only dialect he had ever been fluent in: touch, tension, the sweaty grammar of need. His skin glistened, the kind of sheen you see on summer asphalt or a man too long without rest. And then, quite suddenly, he let go.

He framed her face between his hands, thumbs brushing along the high bone of her cheeks, memorizing her like she was a photograph he feared might fade. She didn't speak. Only tilted her chin a little, offering him that rare, unguarded stillness. The kind you don't earn. The kind that's simply given.

"You need me," she used to say, a simple truth dressed in flirtation. But tonight, it was he who needed her, in that soft, frightened way men do when the night presses in too close.

Her fingers found his jaw, that patchy beard he never quite managed to grow properly, and she traced his lips like they were a wound. You're more than the worst thing you've done, her touch seemed to say. You're not just what they called you. Not just the addict. Not just the dealer. Not just the convict.

And it undid him - her believing. He looked at her, the girl who'd never known a cellblock's stink, yet carried her own ghosts with the kind of grace he could never fake. She never asked him to hold them. She just kept showing up, which - if he were honest - sometimes made him want to scream. She should've run. Should've chosen someone good. Someone clean.

But she hadn't.

She was his, and not in the way men boast, but in the way lost things sometimes find a place to settle.

He touched her then like a man afraid he might drift off the edge of the world. "Open your mouth," he said, almost tenderly. She gave a surprised laugh, small and unguarded, then did as he asked. What followed was base, raw, a gesture that might've humiliated another woman - but she only kissed him deeper, dragging him into it, baptizing him in that dark, private sacrament.

"You're my baby girl," he murmured, voice rough with promise. "I won't let anything happen to you."

And when it ended, and she lay across his chest like a blanket he wasn't sure he deserved, he kissed her temple with a reverence he didn't know he was capable of.

That's when he saw it.

Not clearly - no, it came like things often do at the edge of sleep. A tall figure, darker than shadow, with a cigar glowing at its mouth and a dog at its side. Leashed. Tense. Familiar. A page torn straight from the quiet madness of his dreams.

He blinked. The room was empty again.

He pulled her closer, his nose in her hair.

"I didn't know you enjoyed being your own cuckold," the Harbinger said. Her voice was mild, but her words sliced clean. She brought the slim cigarette - more green than tobacco - to her lips, lips red as a bitten cherry, as though kissed too long by something unkind. The tip flared. Her eyes, a green that recalled bottle glass and heartbreak, lit from within. Each of her fingers was lacquered black, glistening like a moonless sea.

Death turned his head toward her, swift as a reflex. He drew on his cigar with the deliberation of someone who wished to say something meaningful and could not find the way. One eye, red as garnet, sagged slightly in its socket - tired, maybe, or simply ancient. The ember at the end of the cigar flared, throwing jeweled light across the planes of his face.

"I miss it," he said at last. "I hate that we always bring them here when they're at peace. And you - " he pointed with the cigar, a steady, gnarled gesture " - you're no less to blame than I am. You brought him here. You always do. To the last place he felt safe."

He lowered his hand to the great hound's head and patted it with something like reverence.

Smoke trailed from their mouths, weaving into the still air, wrapping around each other like the lovers they were fated to follow.

The Harbinger smiled - just barely - and a trace of laughter, brittle and unfinished, escaped her. "How can you bear to watch it happen over and over without fury?"

Death removed his hood. Beneath it was not a skull, but a man's face - worn thin by the centuries. His beard was a drifting fog of stars, each strand curled around a secret galaxy. One eye, gouged by fate, was nothing, but the other glinted, and it was the same deep ruby that she had once loved and still envied. His face echoed hers - sharp cheekbones, a nose that pointed but did not accuse.

He crossed his massive arms, his shoulders rising like dark hills, and said again, "I miss it." His voice was deep and precise, the kind of voice that carried through halls even when spoken low. "Sit with me."

She rolled her eyes, but not unkindly. "How many times are we going to ruin this?"

He grinned - just a flash of gold between his teeth. "Come see."

Bound as she was, not by chains but by memory, she moved to him, walking with slow, serpentine grace. At the sofa, she did not sit demurely - she straddled him, as one might take a seat in a memory they could not forget.

His smile faded to something weightier. He reached for her waist, and at the same time, unfastened the hound's leash with a casual flick. Then, leaning close, his breath warm and old against her ear, he asked softly, "Do you know what it's like, seeing you hanging there?"

He lifted his cigar, like an old man gesturing toward a past no one else could see. "We wait for them to grow. To see each other. To let us see each other. To be reunited, again and again." He sucked his teeth, a small, dry sound, and flicked the ash.

She leaned against the wall now, her green gaze unreadable. But her body soon followed the rest of her will - she walked back to him, slow and sure, until she straddled him once more.

Death pressed his face into her hair and breathed her in, like memory, like regret. He kissed the top of her head, the way Silas once did to Delphine.

"We could go home," he said. "Just for a minute. Steal their will. Lock them in this place they never quite leave anyway. I'll stop time."

His hand, once busy with leashes and cigars, now cradled her face with the tenderness of long grief. It was a gesture older than both of them, one he had made a thousand times and would again before the cycle could be broken.

They were not meant to separate, not truly. Their souls had been lashed together at the edge of time, and whether one died sooner or later, the ache for the other never dulled. Their longing was a sickness shared across the boundaries of flesh and form.

The Harbinger touched her forehead to his. She nodded.

And with that, they sank - together - through the floor, and into the quiet dark of Death's house.

.

Silas woke first, as he always did. Seven a.m., every day.

Sleep never came easy.

The room was dim, hushed. The thin curtains breathed in and out with the breeze like lungs learning how. Beside him, Delphine lay curled under the covers, her bare arm slung across the pillow like something forgotten.

He studied it - the sleeve of tattoos, delicate and deliberate, each one filled in with the precision of a steady hand. Illustrations. Stories.

Not like his: prison-black, born from single needles and traded favors. His were warnings. Hers were memories.

A feeling came over him - wild, stupid, animal.

He rolled onto her with a playful grunt, burying his nose against her neck, nudging and nuzzling like a mutt that didn't know better.

She stirred, giggling, her voice still fogged with sleep.

"You're like an animal," she murmured, scratching his head as if she meant it.

He made a face - cartoonish, confused - arched a brow and snuffled against her stomach, her ribs, lower.

She laughed again. Small. Warm.

"We can't go five minutes," she said.

He wrapped her in a clumsy bear hug, all elbows and sincerity.

"That's because I waited too long for this," he said.

And for a moment, he meant it more than anything.

His mind slipped. Back two months. Back to the gym at the center - the only place they let him go unsupervised once a week.

He hit the bag like it owed him something, fists wrapped tight, sweat dripping to the rubber floor.

That's when he saw her.

Thin, but not fragile.

There was something in the way she stood, balancing on one foot like it wasn't even a thought.

She turned, caught him watching through the glass, and smiled.

A quiet smile, but it stayed with him.

After the session, unwrapping his hands, she floated across the floor like someone late for something.

She stopped to speak to Maurice, the gym owner, and the half-wit who held the pads.

Maurice gestured.

"This is Delphine. John's sister."

She looked him in the eye as she gave him her hand.

"Okay, John, we have to go. The rehab folks are coming."

Rehab?

"You're in rehab too?" he blurted before his brain caught up.

She looked down, then back up, cheeks tinged with rose.

"For my back," she said. "I had it fused a few weeks ago."

Then softer, voice folding in on itself:

"I've been in programs before, too. I understand."

That was it. Not the tattoos. Not the laugh. Not even the smile through the glass.

It was that whisper - that breaking truth - that made him stay.

Now, he traced his finger down her neck.

"I've been waiting so long to touch you. I want as much as I can."

Indeed, Silas was a man starved of love, of belonging.

He remembered what he told her outside the gym: You feel like home.

He remembered how devastated he felt when she said she had to go back - somewhere called Santa Monica.

She turned as she left, fear in her eyes.

"I'll be back in two months."

The whole time they'd only shaken hands.

Now, he knew the texture of her skin, the sounds she made, the way she liked to be loved.

They talked often of precious things, but more than words, it was her palm against his chest, her mouth on his scars.

They always consumed each other - hungrily, wholly.

But this time, it was different.

He was slow.

She undulated beneath him like the sea.

Her fingers traced his chest.

"I worship you," she whispered.

It was as if time snapped - a slingshot of light, flung through memory, through years.

Then he looked at the clock.

All this - this flood of feeling, this joy - had taken place in just seconds?

The clock still read 7:00.

Delphine felt the graze of Silas's beard against her cheek - a sensation faint as lint on silk. He spoke suddenly, too loudly for the hush between them.

"I haven't felt that before," he said.

She didn't flinch. "I love you," she replied, like someone reciting a fact rather than a hope. Then, quieter: "You need me."

There was a pause, the kind that widens into silence. "I don't need anyone," he said, and the words struck her with a violence not unlike heat - an internal scalding.

But she knew better. He'd changed since the day they met. There was a meanness now, a brittle slant to his words. Once, she woke to find him mid-tirade on the phone, voice splintered with rage - his father, again. Afterward, she'd taken his hands, reminded him gently of the therapeutic tools he had once spoken of like lifelines. He swatted the air around her, then said with sudden, childish panic, "You won't love me if you knew me."

Later, she sank into the velvet chair near the bed. Dust rose from the cushion in sleepy spirals, suspended in the early light like gold thread. He knelt in front of her, shoulders hunched as though apologizing to God. What spilled from him was not a story, but an unraveling: the goat he'd killed for no reason, a comb stolen from a friend's coat pocket after the friend's suicide, a confession marked not by chronology but shame. His years in prison. The gang. The deaths he'd witnessed, the ones he hadn't spoken of.

Delphine watched him, expression unreadable. A thought occurred to her, quiet and unshakable: Death follows him too.

She crossed her legs like a child at circle time, folded her arms, and said simply, "I'm not scared off."

She never spoke much of her own past - she wore it like perfume: present, but only if you leaned in close. During his confessions, she made him look at her. She wanted truth, or at least the shape of it. "I love you," she said again.

His eyes flicked sideways. "I'm unsure."

"Liar," she laughed, and the sound was sunlight through stained glass.

With that, Silas scooped her up and tossed her onto the bed. "Now I'm going to initiate you," he said, grinning with a feral charm.

When it was over, she glanced at the clock: 7:00. But they had been awake for what felt like hours.

"Silas, the clock's broken."

She sat up, and then she saw it - curled beside the velvet settee, the hound from her childhood. Black-furred, moon-eyed. It raised its head, yawned, then tucked back into itself as if nothing at all had changed.

There was no logical explanation. But she didn't need one. This is where I'm supposed to be, she thought.

From the bathroom, she heard the shower hiss to life. "I noticed," Silas called out. "I'll ask the front desk for a new one."

Delphine slipped her nightshirt back over her skin, knelt by the hound, and brushed her fingers through its fur. It sighed, deep and contented, as if it too had been waiting a very long time.

The water ran behind the bathroom door, a muted rush, like wind combing through trees in a storm far off. Delphine stayed where she was, one hand resting on the dog's ribs, rising and falling like a tide. The velvet chair sat quietly across the room, its imprint still holding the shape of her.

The hotel, with its pale wallpaper and antique brass lamps, had the air of something preserved in amber - too still, too deliberate. Even the light was off somehow, not morning or afternoon, but a soft gray that dimmed every color. She watched the dust drift and settle. Time didn't move here; it rearranged itself.

The hound blinked at her. Its eyes were the same - coal-black and bottomless, like they'd been when she was eight years old and first saw it lying on the porch, its sides shuddering with breath, its body too calm for a stray. Her mother had said, "That dog's been here before. It's looking for someone."

Now, years later, it was here again, and Delphine had the sinking feeling it had finally found her.

Silas emerged from the bathroom in a cloud of steam. His hair dripped water in lazy rivulets down his collarbone. He was beautiful in a way that hurt to look at - like something that wouldn't stay. She wondered if he saw her that way, too.

"I feel human again," he said, towel slung over his shoulder, voice light but eyes shadowed.

She didn't answer right away. Her fingers kept moving, absently stroking the hound, as though grounding herself in its fur.

"Did you know," she said softly, "that when dogs appear in dreams, they're said to be guardians?"

Silas raised an eyebrow. "You dreaming right now?"

Delphine looked up at him. "I don't know," she said. "But I think I've been here before."

He crossed the room and sat beside her, still damp, skin warm. He touched her jaw, thumb brushing along the fine ridge of bone, as though memorizing it. "You scare me sometimes," he murmured.

She smiled - not the kind people give when they're happy, but the one they wear when something familiar aches.

"Good," she whispered. "I'd hate to be the only one."

Behind them, the clock still read 7:00. The second hand had stopped, or maybe it had never moved. Somewhere in the hallway, a floorboard creaked with the weight of something unseen.

The hound lifted its head again, ears twitching.

Delphine leaned into Silas's shoulder, eyes half-closed. "If this is a dream," she said, "don't wake me."

He kissed the top of her head, but said nothing.

Outside, the sky had gone the color of lead. A storm was coming, or perhaps it had never ended.

Delphine felt it again - that slow, rising dread, warm and awful in her chest. She'd almost been found out. Almost let it slip, how Death had trailed her like a stray dog all her life, quiet as a shadow on velvet carpet.

As a girl, they called her over-imaginative. Sensitive. Prone to spells. But Death had watched her always: when the gremlins clawed at her insides, when she swallowed her little white freedoms with lukewarm tap water, when the ward doors closed behind her like the mouth of some polite beast. He followed her still when she packed up her life and fled west with the man who left bruises in the shape of prayers. Through it all, she felt - curiously, terribly - safe. Seen.

She still isn't sure if it happened - if it was real, or some echo of a fever dream. But one night, he came. Death. He stood by her bedside, his long hands trembling above her as if he feared he might break her just by touch. She said nothing. Only began, very slowly, to undo the buttons of her shift. The invitation needed no words.

Death exhaled. Not in hunger, but in something like relief.

"You're mine," he said.

He wore no cloak that night. No scythe, no ghostly pretense. Instead, a fine Stetson hat - smooth as oiled smoke, its brim casting an otherworldly shimmer. When he removed it, he revealed a face not dead but deliberate, tailored. The rest of him, too, was dressed for the South: black silk suit, alligator shoes gleaming like church glass. He had dressed for a woman like Delphine.

And she didn't flinch. Didn't close herself. She guided his hand to her breast, nodded - yes - and let him take what had already been his.

That night, he was patient. Tender. His touch reminded her of Silas, though he had never known Silas. Each movement shimmered past the bounds of flesh, something deeper. When it was over, he didn't leave. He simply faded, like fog burned off by morning.

She wonders still - was that surrender? Was that love? The thought snags something deep in her skull, a white-hot throb that won't let go. She shakes it off, steps into the shower like it's any other morning. As if she hadn't once given herself to the end of everything, and found in it something dangerously close to intimacy.

Death stood at the tall window, his back to the room, staring out into the void, a place that existed only because he willed it. The glass in his hand was delicate, untouched. His suit, dark and impeccable, flowed over him like liquid shadow. He had removed his hat, and now his hair caught the dim light, a faint silver thread that seemed to shimmer but never belong to the world beyond this space.

"You've grown sentimental," the Harbinger's voice cut through the stillness, a soft sound in the emptiness. She stepped up behind him, her arms winding around his form, as natural as a shadow.

"I've always been sentimental," Death murmured, his tone languid, as though the very act of speaking cost him little. "You mistake restraint for detachment."

The Harbinger moved away, her presence lingering like a distant echo. She walked to the table, her fingertips trailing along its surface, brushing away the dust that had settled for centuries. As her touch met the table, a cascade of rose petals lifted into the air, caught in some invisible current, before slowly falling back, settling once again into the forgotten corners of the room.

"She's not yours, you know," she said, her voice colder now, more deliberate.

Death's silence hung in the air for a moment, heavy and slow. He did not turn to her immediately, but when he did, it was with a softness that betrayed nothing of the edge beneath it. "She gave herself to me."

The Harbinger's eyes narrowed. "She didn't know what she was giving," she replied, her words like a soft sigh, layered with something that was almost pity. "She was looking for an end. Not for you."

"She looked me in the face," Death said, his voice barely a whisper now, a truth only shared in the solitude of this place. "How many do?"

The Harbinger tilted her head, considering him. "You think that means love?"

Death's shoulders moved in a slow, indifferent shrug. He did not speak again, but the air between them grew thick with something neither of them could name.

She reached out, lifting her hand with deliberate grace. Her finger - black as obsidian - pointed directly at her own chest. "You love me," she said, her voice cutting through the tension like a blade. "You're attached to me."

Death turned to face her then, his ruby eye flaring, a dangerous light dancing beneath the surface. The temperature in the room seemed to shift with the intensity of his gaze. For a moment, the Harbinger thought he might speak, but instead, he reached out - slowly, almost reverently - and touched her face. His fingers were cold, but they seemed to burn in the very air between them.

"I do love you," he said, his voice softer than she expected. "We've loved each other for millennia. Longer than stars have names."

He took a step closer to her, his fingers tracing the golden snake that adorned her throat, its scales gleaming like ancient light. "No other woman can shine like you. You were forged from the universe itself - the stars, the gems, the very minerals of existence came together to complete you. You are tied to me, as I am tied to you. There is no reason for it, no logic, no physics. It simply is."

His voice became more urgent, a fervor rising in his words as he gestured between them. "Yet I stand here, consumed with jealousy - jealous that my doppelg�nger could never see you! We are them. And they are us."

The Harbinger stood silent, absorbing his words. She could hear the conviction in his voice, but something in the room felt wrong, as though a door had been opened that should have remained shut. Her breath caught, and for a moment, she almost wondered if she could believe him.

"Remember, I was the one who wanted to risk it all just to feel you again. Alone."

But instead, she took a deep breath, and with a calculated, seductive grace, she pulled her robe from her shoulder, revealing the smooth, pale curve of her skin beneath. Death's gaze, once cold and calculating, softened, a smile touching his lips - sharp and knowing.

She shivered as he slid the rest of her robe down her body, his touch deliberate, but slow. Every movement felt like a promise, like something inevitable, something both thrilling and dangerous.

"I've only ever had one," she whispered, her voice trembling with the weight of his presence.

And in the silence that followed, they both knew it was no simple truth. It was the very essence of what they had become, bound not by fate alone, but by a history so deep it could never be untangled.

The light in the hotel room had shifted - grown weaker, more honeyed, as if it too were tired. Delphine sat on the edge of the bed, her knees drawn up slightly, the heel of one foot rubbing slow, nervous circles into the fabric of the quilt. The sound of the shower ran in the background - steady, distant - as though Silas were dissolving in steam.

She traced the seam of her thumb, eyes fixed not on the door, not on the ticking silence of the broken clock, but on something inside herself. That old ache. That knotted, untouchable sorrow.

When Silas returned, he looked damp and bare, like something carved out of flesh and weariness. A towel slung low around his waist, a crooked smile twitching at the corners of his mouth, like a man trying not to be too hopeful.

"You were quiet," he said.

"I was thinking."

"Dangerous."

"Sometimes."

He sat beside her, close but not touching. They didn't need to. The space between them breathed. She could feel the warmth radiating off his skin, the humidity of his presence. He smelled like mint soap and something darker - tobacco maybe, or the bitter residue of sleep.

"I saw the dog again," she said softly.

He turned his head. "What dog?"

"The hound. From before. From... always."

Silas blinked once, slow. "And?"

"And I think I'm supposed to stay here."

There was no judgment in his eyes, only a kind of private understanding. Silas was not a man who questioned madness. He'd seen too much, carried too many specters of his own.

"Then stay."

She turned to him, chin tilted, expression open and unreadable. "You'd want that?"

Delphine nodded. She understood. She or they were dead. The room was a purgatory. A place untouched by reason or calendar. The broken clock, frozen at seven, confirmed it - somewhere between night and day, life and whatever came after.

She leaned her head against his shoulder. His arm moved slowly, looping around her waist. They were two haunted things trying not to haunt each other.

"I keep thinking about that night," she murmured. "The night you told me you didn't need anyone."

Silas didn't answer.

"You were lying," she said.

Still no answer, but she felt him breathe in - sharp, shallow - and exhale through his nose.

"What do you mean that night? That was this morning."

Delphine looked up at him, her voice steady. "I need you."

He met her gaze, and for a moment the whole room seemed to pulse with something ancient and holy. "I love you.," he said.

She smiled faintly and whispered, "The clock is still broken."

"I know," he said. "Maybe it's meant to be."

That's when the hound trotted to her. Silas jumped in terror. Delphine took his hand and put it on the beast and the dog sat beside him at attention.

"What is this?" He asks as the dog prods him on his back.

He wants us to follow him.

The dog stood poised at the threshold, as if awaiting permission from something older than command. Its dark eyes held a hush to them - like the sky before it remembers stars. It turned, slow and deliberate, its tail drawing soft arabesques in the stale air, and padded toward the door, claws ticking gently against the floorboards.

Silas looked to Delphine. She only nodded, that quiet, inward gesture she'd always made when the air grew too heavy with memory.

She rose without a word. He followed, hesitant, shoulders tight with the unnameable fear that had always lived in him like a second spine. Still, he followed.

The hallway looked the same - every dent, every smear on the wallpaper exactly as it had been. But it felt as though the walls had begun listening.

The dog stood poised at the threshold, as if awaiting permission from something older than command. Its dark eyes held a hush to them - like the sky before it remembers stars. It turned, slow and deliberate, its tail drawing soft arabesques in the stale air, and padded toward the door, claws ticking gently against the floorboards.

"You know when I did meth I was told if I saw something I wouldn't see in everyday life it isn't real" He told her.

"We see it, she replied"

Silas looked to Delphine. She only nodded, that quiet, inward gesture she'd always made when the air grew too heavy with memory.

She rose without a word. He followed, hesitant, shoulders tight with the unnameable fear that had always lived in him like a second spine. Still, he followed.

The hallway looked the same - every dent, every smear on the wallpaper exactly as it had been. But it felt as though the walls had begun listening.

The lobby exactly the same, the sun shining through the sliding doors in a heavenly lustre.

The receptionist nodded to them a dead look behind the eyes, as though she were some sort of animatronic.

The hound barked and directed them down a hallway. Stopping before a room, pawing the door.

Delphine began to cry. A kind of soft, unspooling weeping - like she'd been unraveling quietly for years.

Silas held her. "I think? I think we're dead," he said. "I can't remember my sister's name. I can't remember my mother. Just this... sadness."

The dog stood at the threshold as though waiting not for command but consent - something older, slower, shaped by myth. Its eyes were dark pools of quiet, holding in them the same hush that comes over the sky just before it remembers its stars. With the dignity of an old thing, it turned - tail tracing slow arabesques through the stale corridor air - and padded toward the door, claws ticking gently against the wooden floor like a clock that had lost interest in keeping time.

Silas glanced at Delphine.

She answered him in the way she always had, when memory thickened the air like smoke: a simple nod, small, inward, full of private ruin.

She stood. He followed - slowly, uncertainly, every step betraying the tight coil of dread that had been living inside him for years. A second spine, invisible but unrelenting. And still, he followed.

The hallway was precisely as it had been: the dent in the plaster from the time he'd punched it, the faint stain from a spilled drink neither of them could remember. It was all the same. Yet something in the air had shifted. As if the walls, once merely passive, had begun to listen.

The lobby waited, indifferent. A slash of afternoon sun carved the space into gold through the sliding doors, too lovely to belong here.

The receptionist looked up and nodded - a small mechanical motion, lifeless behind the eyes. She might've been a doll, programmed to recognize ghosts.

The hound barked once, sharp, and led them through another hallway. Then stopped before a door, pawing at it with an urgency that made Delphine's breath catch in her throat.

Her crying began without sound. A slow, unraveling weep, the sort that doesn't come from sorrow but from something deeper, older - a quiet surrender after years of holding something too tightly.

Silas folded her into his arms.

"I think?" he began, unsure of the shape of his own voice. "I think we're dead. I can't remember my sister's name. Or my mother's. Just? this sadness."

The hound barked again. Insistently. Scratching once more at the door like it, too, needed to see.

Silas looked at it, then at her. "What is this?" he whispered.

Delphine shook her head. Her voice came out thick and small. "I don't know. Let's go back to our room."

She tugged at him first gently, then with rising desperation. "I don't want to know."

But Silas pulled away and opened the door.

The scream he wanted to release collapsed into a soundless gasp. He fell to his knees, hands to his mouth.

Delphine lunged to catch him - and then she saw.

His body slumped on the floor. Blood smeared in the basin of the sink like a Rorschach. A needle still in his arm. And beside the body, a woman. Dark, somber, impossibly still. Her presence was not that of a murderer, but of a mourner. She touched his corpse like one touches a favorite photograph.

Delphine shoved him, her grief catching fire into fury.

"You couldn't wait two more months? I told you to call me - even at three in the morning! Look at you. Dead. You didn't listen to me! You never - never loved me."

She backed away to the opposite wall, clutching her blouse, as if it might shield her from the enormity of what she felt: failure. A kind of death all her own.

Silas's voice came raw. "I did? I do. I texted you. We were making plans."

A bark. Sharper this time.

Delphine turned her head. The hound was waiting at another door. She drifted toward it, as though called by something she recognized.

Inside: her body - suspended, limp, cut down by Death himself. He held her like a father holds a sleeping child, rocking slightly, a figure of final tenderness.

Silas slammed the door shut.

"No," he said, though he wasn't sure to whom. "No. He killed her. Or I did. She died of grief."

He turned to her. The real Delphine. Or what was left of her. Her face streaked with tears. The hound, having done its duty, trotted off into the dim hallway.

Silas reached for her hand. She didn't resist.

He led her back toward their room. Neither of them spoke.

He tried, as they walked, to remember what led him here. He remembered the quiet of the apartment after she left. The monotony of sober days stretched like threadbare linen. Counting down to her return. And then - Heather. Blonde. Strung out. Like him. He remembered the way she laughed without mirth. The needle that followed. The silence that grew between him and Delphine. Her messages unopened. Her voicemail about the pregnancy.

He remembered the way he ignored it.

He remembered choosing not to answer.

Closing Chapter: The Harbinger

The Harbinger lay beneath the hush of dark, her skin pale as moonlit frost, and let her fingers drift across Death's chest - slow, reverent, like a leaf skimming the surface of still water. He was sleeping - truly sleeping - for the first time in centuries. In rest, his face reclaimed something celestial, a kind of solemn radiance that once made even the angels uneasy.

Careful not to wake him, she rose from the warmth of their bed. The floor was cold, but her bare feet made no sound. At the window, she looked out at a sky unfurling like silk - the heavens a quiet wound of stars and violet. Each galaxy shimmered, distant and suspended. Silas, she thought. Silas is safe. For now.

The sheets stirred behind her. She felt him reach for her, the soft encirclement of arms, the weightless warmth of his breath brushing the back of her neck.

"I woke you," she whispered, half-regret, half-affection. She turned, pressing herself into him, her skin catching starlight like a mirror.

He buried his face in her hair. "Don't feel bad," he murmured. "We came here to be alone."

He patted his thigh in an old, wordless call - a summoning for Mortem, the hound. But there was no echo of paws, no breath at the threshold.

"That's strange," Death said, the laughter in his throat hollow, a bell under water. "Usually the beast listens."

Something stiffened in the Harbinger's shoulders. Her body turned to quiet stone.

Then the panic. It came like smoke up the spine - silent, rising fast.

Her cry burst from her like a broken hymn, high and raw, ricocheting off the nebulous walls. But nothing answered. Only stillness.

She turned to him, eyes flashing. "You forgot the dog," she said. Her voice trembled, glass about to break. "Again. He'll ruin it. He always ruins it. We've kept them safe for centuries - "

But the words died as horror bloomed too large to contain. In one swift breath, she vanished, a blur of feathers - owl-gray, crow-black - lost to eternity.

And then -

She was there again, in the nightmare, in the ruin of what she had built.

Silas's hands were around her throat. His body clung to hers, trembling. Still inside her. His eyes feral with grief, unfocused. Foam at the mouth. The smell of chemicals - a sour, clinging thing - rose off him like decay.

"We just have to end it," he sobbed. "Start over. I won't - I promise - this time - "

"No." The word came thin and breaking, a whisper scraped over glass.

She tried to push him away. But he was too far gone. Even here, in the liminal quiet between death and not-death, he did not know her.

But Delphine did.

As the last flicker of light drained from her gaze, Delphine looked through the delirium and found her - the Harbinger. Not a deity. Not Death's beloved. Just a woman.

Delphine's hand reached, trembling.

The Harbinger knelt. Took her hand. Held it - not with power, but tenderness. Not as savior, but as witness.

In the corner, the hound sat. Still. Watching.

Delphine's eyes, wide with knowing, began to flood red. The last air left her throat. Silas wailed - a sound no longer human but rooted in something older. Regret without shape.

The Harbinger did not see him crawl toward the bag.

She did not see the glint of the needle.

Only heard the soft thud behind her.

And turned.

Too late.

That was when the storm arrived.

Death came in a sudden gust, the air cracking open. He surveyed the room - saw Delphine folded in the last of herself, Silas collapsed beside her, a tableau of despair.

He dropped to his knees.

The garnet of his eye shimmered, turned wet with sorrow, and fell as diamonds upon Delphine's brow. He lifted her in his arms. Her body hung as if remembering flight.

Across the room, the Harbinger cradled Silas's head. She was stroking his hair. Letting drops of ice fall from her fingers onto his face.

"They're still connected," she said, eyes pleading.

Death nodded, solemn.

She shook Silas gently. He blinked, dazed, paralyzed by the fog of the drugs.

Delphine stirred. Turned toward the presence she'd always known.

"It's you," she rasped, her throat dry with death.

Death leaned close. His face held no terror. Only certainty.

The Harbinger looked to him.

"We have to reset," he said. "I'm not waiting on you anymore."

She looked down at Delphine. Death slid her back under the blanket like a child being tucked in.

"I'll make one correction," he said quietly.

And took her again in his arms.

Then he vanished.

The Harbinger stayed. She could not leave Silas. Not yet. If she parted now, she might never find him again. So she remained beside him, waiting. Watching. Curiosity over took her, so she caressed him. "You are mine" She said to him.

He took The Harbinger by the waist and whispered "Delphine" The Harbinger allowed his fantasy, what she herself always wondered about. Pulled him closer, deeper into her being.

Then she closed his eyes, and waited in silence again.

And Delphine woke.

This time, the bed was soft and dark, made not of thunderclouds but of night skies. The kind you see from mountaintops. The kind the moon blesses. The kind that do not frighten.

She whispered, "You told me I was yours."

Death approached. His presence like the silence before snow.

"Yes," he said. "And I meant it."

She opened her arms to him, and once again - slow as the breath between stars - he joined her. Their rhythm followed the pulse of the universe: expanding, contracting. Becoming.

Afterward, Death closed her eyes and laid her beside Silas.

"You, see what I have longed for now?" She nodded

"I created something new," he said. He extended his hand to her. "So did you"

Silas awoke.

Next to Delphine.

His lover.

And though he could not say how, he felt - lighter. Unburdened.

Somewhere, far from them, beneath a crescent moon, a child was born.

Her eyes were the color of sleep and sorrow. She saw what others couldn't. Hummed lullabies no one had taught her. And when she met the boy with ash in his lungs and music in his bones, they would recognize each other - not from memory, but from something deeper.

They were the children of Death and Delphine.

Of the Harbinger and Silas

And this time, perhaps, they would not have to die to belong.