Page 44 of Bear Naked Truth
He told me the stars were ours. That they’d always light our path. And yet, tonight, I bury a promise instead of a man. Hollis, forgive me. The blood was never supposed to fall.
Autumn sucked in a breath sharp enough to sting her lungs.
Hollis.
She flipped back through the earlier entries, hands trembling, every turn of the page kicking up a gust of cold air that didn’t come from the drafty attic windows. The atmosphere thickened with every line, the weight of memory pressing in around her like the house itself was trying to warn her away—and still, she read.
There. A name scrawled in the margin, repeated three times in increasingly unsteady handwriting.
Hollis Blackthorne.
And beside it, in another hand—more severe, precise like a ledger or a curse—was the line that cinched it all:
Property deed transferred under duress. Curse invoked. Circle unbroken.
Autumn sat frozen for a moment, the journal warm in her gloved hands despite the chill sinking into her bones. Her breath fogged the lantern light.
This wasn’t just some angry soul clinging to the place he died. The Hollow Man wasn’t a random, violent echo.
He wasthespirit.
Thesorrow that dripped through Briar Hollow’s walls like mold. The reason no magic stuck long in the hallways, why the windows wept in the fall, why love stories here always turned tragic by the third act.
He’d been a man once. A manin love.
And he’d been betrayed.
She pressed her hand against the journal’s leather cover, feeling the faint thrum of leftover magic pulse beneath her palm like a heartbeat. Pieces of the story tumbled into place like bones snapping into alignment.
The original builder—Theodore Hawthorne—hadn’t just raised this house for grandeur or status. He’d built it withHollis.Laid the foundation stone by stone beside the man he loved, whispered promises in the mortar, planned a life beneath its roof.
And then… he’d caved.
To power. To pressure. To fear.
There were hints in the writing—mentions of “family expectations,” “a union not yet sanctioned,” “an offer I cannot afford to refuse.” Words that reeked of cowardice dressed in duty.
Autumn felt it in her gut: the ritual that ended Hollis’s life hadn’t been born of cruelty, but desperation. Theodore had tried toseverthe tie between them. To cut the cord of fate before it pulled him under.
But magic like that doesn’t disappear. It lingers. It rots.
And Hollis—heart split, soul unanchored—had stayed.
Not as a memory.
As a wound.
The ritual hadn’t summoned immortality. That had just been the lie told to make it palatable. The real spell had been darker. Ancient.Forbidden.
It had been cast not to preserve love, but to destroy it.
Autumn’s throat tightened. Her fingers curled into fists over the edges of the journal.
This wasn’t just a haunting.
This was grief, immortalized. A fated bond betrayed so completely it had warped into something vengeful. Something protective. Something afraid to let anyone else try again.
And now, she and Dorian—another pair on the cusp of something real, something binding—were paying the price.
