Page 32 of All Hallows Game

But would she pay before or after she killed my brother, too? Before she made Miz kill him as she threatened on the moors the night of the gala.

I swallowed, trying to hold onto the darkness as I approached the tomb, reaching for the lid, prepared to wreck my weak arms to push it off. But it was already cracked open, the empty tomb visible beneath. I let out a sharp breath.

“There was never a body here,” a soft voice said behind me, startling me.

I spun, wishing I still held the crowbar. But it wasn’t one of Nightmare’s cult who’d stalked me into the tomb.

It was Miz.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CAT

“You’re speaking to me again then,” I said, the darkness making me bolder than I would have been before, blood pounding in my ears. Miz’s dead body wasn’t here, decayed and hundreds of years old, but the man himself stood in front of me. The two of us, alone for the first time since he’d held my hand and led me to Nightmare like an oblivious sacrifice.

“The tomb is just for show,” he said, not acknowledging my comment, his golden eyes trailing around the small space. “I was dead long before I came here, so there was nothing to bury.”

“Why do you have a tomb here in the first place?” I asked, conscious of the distance between us, the fact he hadn’t come more than a single step into the building. “Who are you to Ford?”

He sighed, and I waited for him to avoid the question, waited for him to run away and pretend I didn’t exist again. Watching him from the corner of my eye, nothing more than a smear of pale hair and dark clothes that were so unlike him, I walked around the tomb. The stone was rough against the pads of my fingers as I ran them alone the lid.

“The family who lived here before it was a university were—my family. Not by birth but by choice. They took me in, cared for me as one of their own despite differences in our social standing and appearance. At home, I was a god, revered and respected, but here I was nothing.” His voice quietened, rasping. “That never mattered to the Fords. It should have, but it didn’t.”

I blinked, digesting that information. The family who lived here, who built the island and the buildings I walked every day, who built the room I slept in… he knew them, had lived with them, loved them.

“Who am I to Ford?” he repeated, his eyes on the floor and agony cut into the delicate lines of his face. “I’m one of its founders. That’s why I have a tomb here. Why they all do. These are the tombs of the founders.”

The darkness that roared so violently in my blood, my head, quietened at that, listening, watchful.

“Shit,” I breathed, spinning my crown ring around my finger. “That’s insane, Miz. You set up the school I’m attending. You’re—how old are you?”

His laugh was dry and hoarse. “Old.”

The violent urge to destroy the tomb receded until I could think clearly, until I winced at what I’d done. What the hell was I thinking, breaking into the groundskeeper’s shed and raiding a tomb? I shuddered, becoming aware of how cold I was, all my clothes drenched by the rain.

“All the…” I began, watching him from across the tomb. “The dates are all the same year.”

It was something I’d noticed thanks to spending so many days with Byron’s grave. Every mausoleum had a date chiselled in the stone—1385.

“Yes,” he agreed, his voice deeper, rougher. I jerked forward a step before I caught myself. Miz didn’t want me close, or he’d close the distance himself.

“That was the first time, wasn’t it?” I swallowed, remembering the throbbing heartbeat of Nightmare’s magic killing people, remembering the fracturing sensation of the curse inside me, like I’d been cut apart and put back together wrong. “The first time she came here.”

“Yes.”

His voice broke on that single syllable. I couldn’t take it anymore. I rushed across the small tomb so fast that he had no hope of running away and threw my arms around him.

“I can’t stand your pain. It fucking kills me,” I admitted, my voice tight, clogged with emotion. The scent of him wrapped around me, every one of my senses coming alive.

“You shouldn’t hug me,” he rasped, his chest jumping with a jagged breath.

I swallowed my initial hurt, hearing something I’d missed when he was in my room yesterday—self-loathing. Hatred. “Do you want me to let go?”

“No,” he whispered.

My eyes stung. “Good, because I’m not.”

His body seemed to cave in, his head dropping onto my shoulder as his breathing shuddered. I reached for his arms and pulled them around me, and he cinched them tighter until we aligned everywhere.

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