Page 141 of Creeping Lily
Titan looms before him, unmovable, broad shoulders drawn tight as though he’s holding the world in place. His stance is feral, weight balanced, predatory. Shadows bleed across the room and carve his face into something inhuman—half death mask, half savior. He wears two skins: Titan, the executioner, and Lincoln, the broken boy who crawled out of hell. And I can’t tell which one is winning.
I fold my arms over myself like that’ll stop the shaking, like that’ll stop my ribs from rattling inside me. My chest aches just looking at him. He’s alive. He’s breathing. And I’m no longer locked in the dark with nothing but my own screams for company. The rats are gone. The walls don’t whisper. The nightmare finally has an ending.
Titan’s arm is bound in the dressing I wrapped earlier, but the bandage is already seeping red, his blood blooming through cotton like bleeding roses. Justin crouches near him, muttering curses under his breath, warning about torn stitches, about reopening wounds that might never close. Titan doesn’t hear a word. His eyes never leave Bentley. He’s fixed on him with a hunger I’ve never seen before, a predator watching prey twitch in its last moments.
And Bentley—once the man who could make me doubt my sanity with nothing more than a whisper—can’t even lift his head without the chains dragging him back down. His lip trembles. His chest hitches. He looks smaller now, diminished, like Titan’s wrath peeled the flesh right off his arrogance and left him hollow.
For the first time, I wonder if death would be kinder than what Titan has in store for him.
“You shouldn’t be moving,” Justin warns Titan again, his voice clipped with tension, his hands hovering like he might restrain Titan if he dared.
But Titan doesn’t answer. He doesn’t waste words. He doesn’t need to. The silence around him is its own weapon, heavy and suffocating, pressing down on everyone in the room. And now, as his gaze pins Bentley to the wall, that silence stretches tight—ready to cut through flesh.
Bentley forces his swollen head up, blood slick at the corner of his mouth. Even ruined, he clings to his arrogance. His split lip twists into something that might’ve been a smile once, but now it’s just a sneer carved into a mask of ruin.
“You betrayed us,” he croaks, voice raw, venom bleeding through every syllable. “You chose her over your own blood.”
Titan moves. Just one step, slow and deliberate, but it’s enough to make the shadows ripple and fall across Bentley’s mangled body like a shroud. His voice comes low, growled fromsomewhere guttural, inhuman. “You’re not my blood. You’re nothing but a parasite.”
Bentley laughs—a wet, choking sound, more phlegm than humor. It echoes off the stone, foul and rancid. “A parasite?” he spits, his words slurred but sharp. “That’s rich. Coming from a man who built his whole pathetic life on lies. You think you’re any better than me?” His head lolls against the wall, and he bares his teeth, red and broken. “I should’ve killed you years ago.”
Titan’s fists clench at his sides, veins crawling up his arms, knuckles whitening until they look like bones tearing through skin. His chest rises slow, deliberate, every breath measured like he’s holding back a tidal wave of violence. “You would’ve tried,” he says, his voice like gravel. “And you would’ve failed.”
Bentley coughs, spits a dark clot of blood onto the floor between them. The sound is obscene in the silence. His swollen eyes narrow, hatred flaring. “I really thought that fire was the end of you,” he mutters, each word dipped in malice. “But Dad couldn’t even get that right.”
The words hit like a tsunami. The air in the room shifts, heavy, suffocating, poisoned. My stomach knots, and the world tilts sideways. My breath tears free, jagged, and the sound feels too loud, too alive in the silence that follows. The fire. Tom. The truth doesn’t land—it claws, it rakes, itdevoursme with a sick kind of clarity, and in one breath everything lines up, a nightmare puzzle locking into place.
The walls spin. The floor drops. And I am falling back into the nightmare I thought I’d escaped.
My stomach twists into knots, bile burning the back of my throat. Titan doesn’t speak, doesn’t even blink, but the silence that rolls off him is deafening. Louder than denial. Louder than rage. It tells me everything I need to know. It’s true. Tom Walker had tried to kill his own son. And maybe it shouldn’t shock me—not after everything I’ve seen of this family’s evil—but still, it tears something jagged and raw inside me.
Titan steps forward, each stride like a death knell. His voice is low, deadly calm. “Say that again.”
Bentley’s swollen lips split into a grotesque grin, teeth red with blood. His laugh is wet, choking. “You heard me. You were never one of us. Dad was just cleaning up his mistake.”
The words ignite Titan like a lit match. Fury tears out of him in a roar, and then he’s moving—an avalanche of muscle and rage. He collides with Bentley in a bone-cracking crash, the impact rattling the chains in the wall. The room fractures into chaos. Titan’s fists become hammers, raining blow after merciless blow. Bentley thrashes against his restraints, his shackled hands clawing, grasping, dragging for purchase. But Titan is relentless, a storm given flesh, his fury a weapon no one can stop.
The sound of it is unbearable—flesh meeting flesh, wet thuds that shake the floor. Their grunts and snarls twist the air into something feral, inhuman. Blood sprays, smears across the wood, spattering Titan’s chest, Bentley’s face, the walls. I can’t tell whose it is anymore—Titan’s reopened wound or Bentley’s shattered features. Titan doesn’t seem to care. Pain doesn’t touch him. He is a man possessed.
“Stop!” My scream tears from my throat, ragged, useless. It drowns in the madness.
Justin lunges forward, trying to wedge himself between them. He gets a vicious kick to the ribs for his effort, the sound of impact snapping in the air. He doubles over but doesn’t quit, dragging himself up again, shouting Titan’s name.
And then—movement. A shift in the shadows.
My heart stutters.
Tom Walker steps into the room like a phantom dragged outof hell, a gun gleaming cold in his hand. His face is carved from stone, his eyes bottomless pits of hatred.
Something inside me snaps. Instinct surges hot and wild. My hand seizes the jagged leg of a broken chair, splinters biting into my skin. Before I can think, I’m swinging.
The wood cracks against his wrist with a sickening smack. The gun clatters from his grip, skittering across the floorboards. Tom stumbles back, cursing, fury burning in his eyes. But I don’t stop. I swing again, this time driving the broken wood into his knee. His snarl turns into a grunt of pain as he buckles, one leg folding beneath him.
“Lily!” Justin’s voice rips through the air. He’s beside me now, his gun drawn, aimed steady at Tom.
“Stay down,” Justin growls, his tone sharp. Tom clutches his leg, his gaze burning as it locks onto me, promising that if he rises, he’ll make me regret breathing.
Meanwhile, Titan’s world is a furnace. He pins Bentley to the floor, his massive hands clamped around his brother’s throat, pressing him into the floor’s filth. Blood runs in dark rivers down Titan’s face, dripping onto Bentley’s chest as his breath saws through his lungs. His chest heaves, muscles shaking, rage bleeding into every inch of him.
