December, 2007.
Hugo Hollands, Age 7.
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I heard her before I saw her face. The kitchen seemed to hold her voice in its corners, sharp and ringing off tile, carried by the smell of hot dust from the heater and the sour-sweet of yesterday's tea left in the mug by the sink.
"Listen!" she said. "Stop crying, you're so annoying. Here—"
She bent and snatched my backpack from the floor, the zipper rasping like a small animal caught in wire. She shoved a truck inside, then a small astronaut with a scratched visor, then a tangle of crayons wrapped in a rubber band that had dried and cracked. "Do as I'm doing," she said. "Put all your toys into the bag."
My younger mouth tried and failed to make air behave. "Why?" I asked, tears slipping into my mouth, salt stinging my tongue.
"Because…" She drew a breath that shivered through her. "Christmas is coming up. We need to gather all the toys so Santa can see you're a good boy, putting your toys away, and then he'll get you new ones."
"I can put it in the basket," I said, pointing to the blue wicker in the corner where I usually kept them. The basket had a lid that creaked and a ribbon tied to the handle. I'd tied it myself; it had come loose.
"Why don't you ever listen?" she shouted. The cupboard door behind her rattled in its frame. My name left her mouth as if it were a thing to be thrown. I flinched before it hit.
"Because… we did this before," I said. "Before we came here. We left Dad behind. Now you're making me do it again."
Her hands went into her hair and dragged, knuckles whitening at the scalp. She breathed through her teeth. "You think you're smart, huh? Why don't you believe me? Santa is coming!"
"I don't want new toys!" I said. The cry scraped my throat raw. I wanted the basket. I wanted the ribbon I had tied. I wanted the room to stop moving.
She crossed the room and grabbed my wrist. Her fingers were hot; her nails bit shallow crescents into my skin. "If you don't collect your toys and clothes, I will leave you just like your father did," she said. "We didn't leave your dad behind, he left us. He did it." Her mouth shaped the last two words like a door slamming.
I watched this from the doorway and I didn't move. The floorboards didn't creak under me; air went through my chest without weight. Corvian wasn't there. No elegance, no shadow curled at the edge of the frame. Just the small boy with wet cheeks and the woman who had run out of patience for winter and rooms and sons who asked the wrong kind of question.
I didn't try to touch either of them. Time had the shine of ice here; you pressed a finger to it and it held your reflection and none of your warmth.
Seven-year-old me knelt by the bed. He tugged at drawers that stuck and then let go all at once, the wood giving a soft groan. He pulled sweaters out by the sleeves, socks in clumsy pairs, pressed shirts that still smelled of laundry soap and the faint ghost of cedar from the old wardrobe they had come from. He folded with the reverence of a ritual and the speed of fear, then gave up on folding and pushed everything down into the backpack where toys had already taken the bottom. His hair had grown past his jaw and kept falling into his eyes; he kept blowing it aside with short, angry bursts of breath. Each breath hiccupped at the end and frayed into a sob.
"Faster," she said, now by the window, lighting a cigarette she promised she had stopped buying. Smoke curled around her head and climbed the glass, turning the afternoon outside to a dull smear. Somewhere in the building, a neighbor's radio clicked on, a hymn bleeding into static, then cutting away. I could hear the thin scratch of the lighter wheel more than the first drag; I knew that wheel better than the sound of her laugh.
"I don't want to go," the boy said, not looking at her. He pushed his pajamas into the bag on top of the crayons. One crayon snapped. Orange. He stared at the broken piece and put both halves in anyway, as if a complete color might make the day less sharp.
"Then stop making it harder," she said. "Be good. Be good, and you'll get new ones."
He pressed his palm to his eye until stars came. When he let his hand fall, there was a red circle there, the skin around it shining. He didn't wipe his nose. He reached for the astronaut again, as if rescuing a friend, then remembered the rule and left it in the bag. The zipper pulled, snagged on a thread, and he bit his lip and worked it free with small, careful fingers. The sound of it traveling tooth by tooth cut the room into inch-long pieces.
I stepped nearer—not to stop anything, but to see him better. The wet shine on his cheeks. The damp collar where tears had soaked through cotton. The little freckle at his temple that I never see in the mirror now unless the light catches me at an angle. Memory has a way of polishing what life smudges.
She turned. Her eyes were glassy with smoke. "You think I want this?" she asked the room. Not me. Not him. Her voice lowered, then climbed again without warning. "If you don't do as I say, I swear—"
"Okay," he said, small and hoarse. "Okay."
He stood and the backpack slid down his arm with a thud that felt too big for the weight of it. He hauled it back up, both hands clutching the straps, the bottom bumping his knee. His shoulders rose toward his ears; he looked like he was wearing a coat made of worry. He waited for praise that didn't come, for a hand to land on his head, to say there, that's right, you did it, you're good. The room kept the silence.
I wanted to tell him it was not his job to make her winter softer. I wanted to give him the basket and say we can leave them here, the astronaut can watch the window and the truck can guard the doorway and the crayons can rest, and you can rest, and no one will make you tie your childhood into a bag like contraband. Instead I stood in the doorway of a past that didn't know me and watched him swallow the noise inside his chest so she wouldn't hear it and mistake it for refusal.
She stubbed the cigarette in the coffee saucer and ground it until the smoke died. "Shoes," she said. "Hurry up."
He nodded, hair in his eyes. He sat on the cold linoleum and tugged at laces that had knotted into little stones. He worked them apart with the stubborn patience of children and convicts. When the knot loosened, his shoulders dropped, just a fraction. He slid his feet in, heel catching at the back, toe searching for the right place. The left shoe squeaked against the floor; the sound seemed to shame him.
He looked up. Her mouth was a line. He looked down. One lace slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor like a string cut from a kite. He picked it up again. He tied. He double-knotted. The bows didn't match. He left them.
He lifted the backpack. He tried a smile that didn't belong to his face and lost it halfway across his mouth. "Ready," he said.
The word hung in the air, small and brave and wrong.
She reached for her coat. The sleeve turned inside out and snagged. She yanked it and the lining twisted like a throat. She cursed, then saw him watching and rolled her eyes instead, shoving her arm through with a sharp jerk that made the hanger tilt and scrape the closet bar. She smoothed her hair with her palm. Her hands shook.
"Good boy," she said finally, as if the two words hurt. "Let's go."
He nodded. He looked at the basket once. He looked at the window and the hymn that wasn't there anymore. He looked at his shoes.
When they left the room, they turned off the light and the kitchen went dim and tender with evening. I remained in the doorway with the smoke and the leftover tea and the small heat of their footsteps fading from the floor. The ribbon on the basket stirred without air and settled again, quiet as a hand that never came down to praise.
She dragged him by the wrist, hard enough that his small arm twisted behind him. The door slammed against the wall as they stepped out. Older me followed, a silent echo, his—my—feet making no sound on the worn tile. She moved fast, a shadow in her own storm, her voice too loud, her breath too quick.
Outside, the night was already there waiting for her. She shoved him—me—toward the car. His backpack slipped off his shoulder, hit the curb, and she threw it in the back seat without looking. Then she pulled the passenger door open and pushed him inside, small hands bracing against the dashboard as if the plastic could hold his fear.
She went around to the driver's side, slammed the door, and turned the key. The engine groaned, then caught, the headlights cutting through the thin snow that had started falling—pale dots on the windshield melting to streaks. The younger me sat there, too small for the seatbelt, his chin barely clearing the window. She never even checked.
I remember thinking she was never safe—not for herself, not for anyone. Not the kind of woman you could trust with breakable things, even if that breakable thing was her own child.
The car pulled out of the driveway, the sound of gravel cracking beneath the tires. I stood there watching. My hands were at my sides, fingers twitching against the cold, but I couldn't move. The red glow of the taillights blurred through the frost until the car became nothing but light slipping away into the dark street.
That was the day I last saw Michelle—my mother.
The world folded inward, and when I opened my eyes again, I was back in the room. The air was still. The only sound was the slow tick of the clock above the dresser, marking a rhythm that didn't belong to either of us.
Corvian was still on the bed. His body hadn't moved. The color in his skin hadn't returned. He lay there like a painting waiting for someone to finish it, the lines too perfect, the stillness too cruel.
I sat on the floor again, where I had been before all of this began. My head rested in my hand. The same gesture the boy had used before she dragged him out the door. My palm pressed into my temple, and I thought, could it be that he really isn't coming back?
The thought landed soft but heavy.
The room looked wrong without him breathing in it. The air didn't seem to belong to me anymore. It just stayed, suspended, stale. My throat ached with something I didn't know how to name.
I closed my eyes. The silence crept under my skin, the kind that makes you aware of how empty you've always been. I thought about how helpless I felt sitting there. And how that wasn't new.
Maybe it was always like this. Being moved, dragged, packed up, told where to go, what to leave behind. Losing things before I even had the time to realize they were mine. I've been passed from one set of hands to another all my life—first my mother's, then the world's. And when it wasn't their hands, it was time pulling me forward by the collar.
I never had a choice in anything.
Not until him.
Funny how it took a devil to give me something that looked like control.
The irony almost made me laugh, but the sound died in my chest. I kept my eyes closed, my breath catching on its way out.
Corvian had told me once that choice was an illusion. That every decision we think we make is just the result of hunger—what we desire most wins. I think he believed that. Maybe I do now too.
But still, when he looked at me, I felt like I was the one choosing. For the first time.
Now, without him, I felt like the boy again—watching the car drive away, powerless to stop it, holding my breath as the sound faded. The road changes, the faces change, but the leaving never does.
I pressed my palms together, leaned my forehead against them, and whispered into the hollow they made, "You said you'd come back."
No answer. Just the same clock ticking. The same still air.
And somewhere beneath it all, the same small boy, waiting by the door, believing that this time—this one time—someone might turn around.
The air changed. It wasn't a sound, not really. More like pressure shifting through the room—the smallest motion, but enough to pull me from the hollow I'd fallen into.
I opened my eyes.
Corvian's chest rose. Slowly, like the world had to remember how to let him breathe. His fingers twitched once against the sheets, then stilled. A sound escaped him—ragged, quiet, the kind that makes you realize how quiet everything had been before.
I didn't move at first. I just watched, my pulse thudding behind my ribs, afraid the sight would vanish if I blinked.
Then his eyes opened.
There was nothing human about the way he came back. His gaze cut through the dim room, sharp, cold, seeing everything before settling on me. For a heartbeat, he looked like he didn't know where he was. Then his expression softened, the faintest pull of something that looked like relief—or exhaustion—at the edges of his mouth.
I exhaled without realizing I'd been holding my breath.
He sat up, spine straightening, the movement too controlled, like he was adjusting to the weight of being alive again. The room's dim was still too bright for him; he blinked once, slow, as if the light had edges. His hair was disheveled, his skin pale, but his presence filled the space so completely it was as though the walls leaned toward him.
I stayed where I was on the floor.
He noticed me then, head tilted slightly. A shadow of movement passed through his expression—something between recognition and quiet regret. He shifted from the bed, bare feet pressing to the floor, and crossed the small distance between us without a sound. Then, lowering himself, he sat in front of me.
The floorboards gave a small sigh beneath his weight. His knees brushed mine. He reached out, and when his hand found my face, it was with that same grave precision he always had—like he was touching something delicate he might still destroy. His palm was warm again, impossibly so, his thumb tracing a slow line beneath my eye.
"You thought I wasn't coming back?" he said, voice low, almost steady—though I could hear the exhaustion buried inside it, the pull of somewhere far deeper than this room.
I couldn't speak. My throat ached from holding everything in. I nodded again, smaller this time, and his gaze lingered—like he was memorizing what fear looked like on me.
He tilted his head slightly, the corner of his mouth curving in a way that wasn't cruel, but it wasn't kind either. "Although I haven't marked you," he said, "we still have a lot to—"
"Mark me."
The words came out before I thought them through. They hung in the air, and for a moment, even the room seemed to listen.
His hand stilled. "What?"
"Mark me," I said again, louder this time, my voice shaking but steadying itself by the end. "Corvian, do it."
He stared at me, eyes narrowing slightly, not in anger but in disbelief. The silence between us grew taut.
"You don't know what you're asking," he said finally.
"I do."
"Do you really want to carry my mark?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Say it again."
"I want to carry your mark."
He studied me, as if waiting for hesitation. There was none left to find. His eyes softened—not mercy, but acceptance.
He leaned closer, his breath touching my skin, and whispered, "Then you're braver than most angels I've met."
I didn't move. The space between us was too small to hold what came next.
When his hand reached for me again, it wasn't gentle anymore. It was certain. I could feel the heat building under his palm before it touched my neck, a warmth that felt alive, ancient, and cruelly familiar.
And in that small, trembling moment before he marked me, I thought— So this is what it means to be chosen.
Corvian's hand still cradled my jaw when he spoke. His voice was low, steady, the kind that could command a sea to stillness.
"Don't freak out, okay?" he said. "It'll feel a bit weird."
Something in his tone told me weird wasn't the right word. But I nodded anyway, because if I didn't, I might start shaking.
He stood, every inch of him unfolding like something remembered by the room. The dim light shifted around him; his shadow reached long across the floor. "Stand," he said, then paused, "or kneel. It doesn't matter."
My body moved before I decided to. I slid from the wall, knees pressing to the floorboards, the grain rough beneath my skin. It felt like the kind of place one should kneel—somewhere holy, or about to be.
He took a step closer. His feet stopped just short of mine, the air between us weighted with heat. When his fingers found my face again, the warmth of him made me tremble. His palm covered my cheek, his thumb brushing my lower lip, a gesture that felt almost human.
He leaned down. Close enough for his breath to touch my skin. Close enough for the room itself to listen.
Then he kissed me.
The contact was slow, deliberate, like he was tasting the boundaries of the human shape he had borrowed. The warmth of him pressed through me, heavy and infinite, and something inside me bent toward it without question. I felt my body give, the way a flame leans into wind.
The kiss deepened. His breath changed—drawn through his chest in rhythm, then poured into mine. It wasn't just breath. It was entry. Something ancient moved between us, threaded through the air, slow and invisible. My lungs took it before I could resist.
The heat flooded first, a low thrum in my ribs that spread outward. It pulsed in time with my heart, then overtook it. My breath hitched, sharp and unsteady, my chest rising not by will but in answer.
He was breathing for me now.
Each exhale from him became my inhale; each pause left me hanging on the edge of stillness until he decided to fill me again. My throat ached with the effort of keeping up. At times, I gasped, small and involuntary, my body trying to remember its own rhythm and failing.
The air itself felt wrong. Too thick, too alive. It moved through me like a command, spreading deeper, curling through the spine. My skin prickled. My hands pressed to the floor as if to anchor myself, but the ground didn't feel solid anymore—it pulsed, vibrating faintly, as though the earth beneath us recognized the blasphemy happening above it.
His lips parted from mine only to let a final breath pass through. It burned this time—an ember placed behind my teeth.
And then everything changed.
He lifted my hand to his mouth. I felt the knife before I saw it—only a kiss of steel. A bead of blood welled on my thumb. He pressed it to his tongue without ceremony. The light in the room collapsed. The bulb overhead burst with a sharp crack; shards of glass rained to the floor, scattering like frozen rain. Darkness swallowed the room whole.
I didn't open my eyes. I didn't need to. The dark itself felt different—thick with static, pulsing with something that wasn't quite alive. I could still feel his breath against my mouth, though he wasn't breathing anymore. The heat of it lingered, slow, molten.
When I finally exhaled, the air that left me wasn't mine. It shimmered as it escaped, dark instead of pale, curling upward like smoke rising from wet wood. It flickered once in the dark—a faint pulse of light, then gone.
My lungs fought to remember how to be lungs. The air was heavy, electric, as if it had been stolen from a place that didn't want to share it. My heart beat too loudly. It hurt.
Corvian stayed close, his forehead resting against mine. His voice came through the dark, quiet and unhurried. "There," he whispered. "Now we breathe the same. That's the first knot," he said. "Breath. Two remain: blood and name."
"What do they do?"
"Make this harder to break. And harder to survive."
The weight of his words pressed into me like gravity.
I opened my eyes. The room was still cloaked in shadow, the only light the thin silver bleeding from the broken glass on the floor. Something in the air shimmered near the corner—movement where there should have been none.
Then I heard it: a faint crackling, as if heat were trapped inside a mirror's skin.
I turned my head toward the sound.
The mirror on the wall was shattered. Its frame had split at one corner, and the glass was spidered through with fractures, each crack spreading outward like veins. My reflection was scattered across them—hundreds of versions of myself, each one breathing differently, some slower, some not at all.
Corvian's hand slid from my jaw to the back of my neck, steadying me. "Don't look away," he said quietly. "You'll see what it means."
I looked. The fragments shimmered, and for a heartbeat I could have sworn one of the reflections moved—closer, breaking from the glass like a shadow stepping out of its shape.
The air trembled again.
Corvian's eyes glowed faintly now, pale and otherworldly. His lips curved in something that could have been sorrow, could have been awe. "It's done," he said.
The room stayed dark, but everything felt illuminated—inside out, as though my body had become a lamp lit by something not meant for this world. My breath was no longer only mine.
It came with his rhythm. His warmth. His ruin.
The world tilted. A thin ringing threaded the room—softer than a tone, more like pressure. It brightened when he looked at me.
Not the kind of tilt that makes you dizzy, but the kind that rearranges the laws of everything you once believed to be stable. The air vibrated around me, humming low through my bones, as though my body had become the hollow of an instrument finally played by the right hands.
Every breath felt wrong now—too deep, too full. The air that entered me didn't just fill; it multiplied, crawling beneath the ribs, spreading through the veins until it seemed to hum in the blood itself. My skin was trembling, but not from fear. It was awareness. Like every cell had been woken from a sleep it wasn't meant to wake from.
My heart beat out of sync with itself, two rhythms overlapping: one human, one not. Each pulse came a moment late, like it was following an echo. Corvian's echo.
When I closed my eyes, I saw light—but not the kind that comforted. It flashed behind the lids, slow and red, seeping into the edges of vision like blood spreading through linen. I could feel him in it, his breath still caught inside mine, moving through me in waves.
A strange sound pulsed low in my ears—steady, endless, alive. The world itself had taken on his frequency.
I tried to inhale quietly, but it wasn't only me doing it. Somewhere behind the veil of this moment, I could feel his chest rise too. The synchronization was absolute. Our lungs had become mirrors, trading air like confession, giving and taking without permission.
The room had grown smaller, the air too dense to belong to a mortal world. My eyes burned, but I didn't blink. I couldn't. Everything shimmered, colors deepened, sound fell away. Time loosened its grip.
There was no before or after—only this breath, this unbearable fullness.
I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. What escaped instead was vapor, curling from my lips, gray and threaded with faint sparks of light that drifted upward before vanishing. The scent it carried was not smoke. It was sweeter. Older. Something like burnt honey and skin.
My body trembled again, but not in fear. It felt as though something inside me was still being written, letter by letter. A language of fire being etched into the space between bone and heart.
Corvian watched. I could feel his gaze without looking. The air around him rippled, his heat mingling with mine until I couldn't tell where he ended and I began. His silhouette was steady, but everything else in the room seemed to bend toward him.
I pressed a hand to my chest, half expecting to feel something foreign moving beneath the skin. Instead, it was my heartbeat—only faster, louder, doubled.
The glass on the floor caught the last traces of light, each shard reflecting a different version of my face. They looked at me from every angle, each one breathing slightly out of time. A choir of selves, bound to a rhythm not their own.
And when I finally turned my head toward him, the movement was slow, like shifting through water. My voice, when it came, was lower than I remembered.
"What did you do to me?"
Corvian didn't answer at first. His eyes glowed faintly, pale and steady, as though something behind them was still adjusting to the weight of creation reversed.
Then, quietly, he said, "What I was made to do."
The words sank deep, threading themselves through the quiet.
The air between us pulsed once more, a single breath shared and exhaled in unison. I could feel him still inside me—not as a thought, but as presence. Like a second heart, lodged just beneath the first.
Being chosen felt less like being saved and more like being occupied.