Page 138 of Creeping Lily
I read the papers again. Slower. Desperate for the possibility that I’d misunderstood. That I’d twisted the words into something they weren’t. But no. There it was. Every line, every signature, every seal of finality.
I wasn’t Lincoln Walker. I wasn’t even anyone.
For a long time, I sat there, the papers clutched in my hands, my knuckles bone-white. As if gripping them hard enough would force an explanation from the dry ink. But there was none. Just betrayal, pressed flat between pages.
My father had known. He’d known every second of my life. And he’d kept it buried, like my very existence was something to be ashamed of.
My mother… she hadn’t known. Not until I told her.
I remember dialing her that night, my hands shaking, my throat raw from smoke and whiskey and grief. I asked her if she knew who I really was. Silence stretched across the line, and in that silence, I heard her heart shatter. I heard the truth.
The wind howls through the trees now, dragging me back to the present, back to the lodge looming in the distance. My fingers twitch, itching to break something, to tear this place down brick by brick until nothing is left. But I stay still. Because movement feels dangerous, like the memories will consume me all over again if I stir.
This place didn’t just take my past. It poisoned my future.
Eight months after I ran, I thought I’d outrun the truth. But pain has a way of hunting a man down. I was living in someone else’s house, hiding in the shadows, convincing myself I could fade away. Then the fire came—smoke, flames, screaming wood. The house went up like it had been waiting for the chance.
And me? I ran back inside. To save strangers. People I barely knew.
I made it out. Barely. The burns still claw my skin, bright reminders of that night. Not reminders of heroism—reminders of failure. Proof that I couldn’t even succeed at dying.
So I let the fire finish the job.
I didn’t stay for the aftermath. Didn’t wait for the ash to cool. I disappeared into the night and never looked back.
Lincoln Walker died in those flames.
Titan was born from the smoke.
A man with no past.
No family.
No name worth saving.
A man who lived in the shadows.
But standing here now, staring at the hunting lodge, it’s like the past crawls out of the walls and sinks its claws into me. Every splintered memory, every scream I tried to bury, it all comes crawling back, gnawing at my skin, tearing open wounds that never healed. The weight of it presses down on me, heavier than the scars carved into my back, sharper than the ache that lives in my chest like a second heart.
This place is a mausoleum of everything they ever took from me. My childhood. My name. My goddamn humanity.
And now they have Lily, and they think they can keep her.
They’re wrong.
Lily isn’t theirs; they can’t have her. She isn’t their prize, their toy, their offering to whatever sickness runs in their bloodline. She’s not theirs to break. She’s mine.
The Walkers don’t understand what they’ve done. They raised a ghost. They built a monster out of the ashes of a stolen baby and the bones of a dead one. They think their name is untouchable, that it can shield them from the evil underneath their skin. But that name destroyed me. And now it’s my turn to destroy them.
I take a step forward, the crunch of frozen earth beneath myboots loud enough to echo in my skull. Each step feels like I’m stomping on a grave—theirgrave, already dug, waiting only for me to throw their bodies in.
The hunting lodge looms closer, a black skeleton against the sky, windows like hollow eyes that watched me suffer and said nothing. But the fear that used to keep me shackled here, the pain that once made me their prisoner—it dissolves. Burns away in the furnace I’ve built inside my chest.
Titan has no family. Titan has no past.
Titan is the reaper they made without meaning to.
And tonight? Tonight, that reaper starts with Lily.
