chapter twenty-eight

meghan

Back at my apartment, I hoisted the coffee table onto the couch to clear space on my living room rug. It was one of my favorite possessions—it was black with ornate flowers framing two intertwined snakes mirrored perfectly in the center. The rug was equal parts elegant and eerie, which was kind of my entire vibe.

Chase stared down at the rug, scratching his temple with his thumb. “This is unsettling.”

“Thanks,” I said, spreading out everything we needed to get started—Fannie’s journal, the sigil decoder, and a spare notebook for Chase. He lowered himself to the rug, taking his bag off his shoulders to unzip it. “Are you still sure you want to help me with this?”

Now that we weren’t allowed to make this one of our hybrid features, I wasn’t sure what direction I was taking with it. It was beginning to feel more like a personal project than a professional one. “I’m just as curious as you are,” Chase said, spreading out some of the sigil-etched stones on the rug.

I sat cross-legged in my black cigarette pants, carefully pulling the sigil decoder out of the envelope. “What if this is a big nothing-burger and we can’t make sense of it?”

“We’ll at least know we tried,” he said. “And hey, we might stumble across something cool.”

I watched Chase tear out a blank page from the notebook and place it over the sigil decoder, smoothing it flat with his palm. I was confused until I saw him pull a pencil from his bag and begin to make a rubbing of the decoder. The circular pattern of the decoder was faint, but just clear enough to make out the letters. “So we can translate at the same time,” Chase explained.

We decided to start with the six sigils that appeared both in Fannie’s journal and on Evelyn’s stones, since those seemed to be the symbols that connected them. I could get to the others that were sporadically spread out in Fannie’s journal later.

It took a while to figure out how the sigil decoder lined up. The letters weren’t in order, so it was difficult to determine where to even start. It wasn’t until I noticed the tiny notch carved above the letter “A” that I realized it should be turned to the 12:00 position on the top. Finally, the pattern made sense. I followed the jagged lines of the first sigil, tracing across the decoder with my finger until, finally, it spelled a word.

I gasped, drawing my hand to my chest to clutch my pendant. “Chase, I think this one spells ‘only’.” I waited for him to look up and traced the letters again. “Look. The ‘A’ goes at the top. You start with one end of the symbol and follow the lines across the circle.”

He shifted closer, putting his hand on my knee as he watched me do it once more. “Got it.” He turned his rubbing of the decoder counterclockwise, lining up the letters the way I’d shown him.

Chase grabbed the stone with the simplest sigil—the one with a simple V-shape etched into it—and held it up to the journal, flipping through Fannie’s scrawled notes. He glanced from the stone to his paper, working through the lines slowly. I figured it out a second before he did, but instead of saying it, I watched his expression, waiting to see if he’d get it, too.

His lips parted as the realization hit him. “‘My’?”

“I think you’re right.”

Chase leaned back on his hands. “So, we have ‘only’ and ‘my.’ That’s cryptic.”

“But we’re getting there,” I said. My heart was racing. Now that we knew how the sigil decoder worked—and we’d actually used it to form some words—my excitement level reached an all-time high. The rest of the words came even faster. When we combined our efforts, the six words were:

my

only

beats

heart

you

for

“Only my heart beats for you?” Chase asked at the same time I slapped his knee and declared, “My heart beats only for you!”

He blinked at me a couple of times. “Yeah, let’s go with yours.”

My heart practically exploded. “Chase! Do you realize what this means?!” I gripped his arm so tight I was probably digging my nails into his skin, but he didn’t seem to care. The pieces were clicking into place in my mind, faster than I could say them. “This… this wasn’t just some random spell or something. This was personal. Fannie loved her.” I pointed at the journal, at the sigils on the stones. “This message—it’s a love note. A secret one.”

Chase raised his eyebrows at me, still trying to keep up. “You think Fannie and Evelyn—”

“They were in love!” I interrupted, unable to contain myself. “This was their way of keeping it hidden. They communicated through sigils—codes no one else could figure out!” I rose to my feet and began to pace. “Oh my God, it’s not just folklore, it’s a love story. A real-life lesbian love story. They couldn’t be together because of the times, but they met in secret and drank apple brandy and ate the vegetables from Fannie’s garden-”

“And made out by the waterfall,” Chase interrupted.

“And declared their love with a secret code.”

“And poisoned Evelyn’s husband,” Chase reminded me, lowering his chin to give me this come-back-to-earth look. Oops, I’d sort of forgotten about the whole murder thing. I hadn’t meant to romanticize a murderer, but maybe there was more to that crime than met the eye. “Do you think Fannie went to the public hanging?”

“Records show there were ten thousand people from around the state in attendance,” I said. “Who knows if Fannie was one of them.”

“Did she write about it?”

I shook my head. “She stopped writing in the journal almost a year before the execution.” I sat down again, pulling the printout of Fannie’s journal onto my lap. There were still some entries I hadn’t read yet, and some I gave up on because they didn’t fully make sense. Chase’s AI tool seemed to have about a 75% accuracy rate. I turned to her last journal entry, dated December 1845. It was pretty mundane, just talking about the frost patterns on her windowpane.

Chase pulled out his phone beside me. I couldn’t see his screen, but I watched him adjust his glasses as he scrolled and read something. In the meantime, I flipped backward a few journal entries and read and reread one of the jumbled sentences.

The fore in the heart matches the heat in my lains—for both, I have Envy to thank. How I wish she didn’t hove to go nome so soon.

Envy was obviously meant to be Evvy. I reread the first sentence again and again, trying to make sense of the words Chase’s translator didn’t get right. “Fore in the heart” could mean “fire in the hearth,” couldn’t it? But… lains ?

And then it hit me: loins.

“‘The fire in the hearth matches the heat in my loins,’” I read aloud, grinning like I’d stumbled upon some 1800s erotica.

That caught Chase’s attention. He raised one eyebrow at me, asking, “What about your loins?”

“Fannie’s loins. Evvy had her all hot and bothered in her bloomers.”

Chase snickered. “Could you imagine all the layers of clothing they had to peel off just to get to the goods? I think I’d give up.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

He just smiled, knowing I was right. “Okay, now let me show you what I found.” He flipped his phone screen around to show me a death record on one of the ancestry sites I frequented myself. “Evelyn’s husband was murdered the same month Fannie’s journal stops, and the trial was the following spring.”

“Interesting. They would’ve been separated. Maybe she just couldn’t bear to pick up her pen.”

“I was going to theorize that the poor man could’ve been poisoned with something from Fannie’s garden, and she was crushed with guilt,” Chase suggested. “She ever mention poppies? I mean, they produce opium.”

I flipped back to an entry about the flowers Fannie planted the spring before. “No. She just mentioned cosmos, daisies, foxglove, and lavender.”

“Ding, ding, ding,” Chase said. “Foxglove causes instantaneous cardiac arrest when ingested.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“Agatha Christie,” he said with confidence, like it was common knowledge. “Anyway, that could be where Evelyn got the poison. Those two might’ve been in on it together.”

I bit my bottom lip, trying to hold back a smile. “Is it bad that I’m still kind of rooting for them?”

“You know how this ends, right?” He rested his hand on my knee like he was trying to gently rein me back in. After all, this was a tragedy, not a love story. “How do you think the historically open-minded people of Woodvale are going to react to this? I mean, is this all going in your column?”

With a deep inhale, I looked at everything scattered on the rug in front of us and considered the best way to get Fannie and Evelyn’s story into the world. There was too much to cover for my Sunday column. I turned toward Chase, an idea forming. “What if we bring the blog back and post it there?”

Chase’s lip parted, and his eyes bounced from one of mine to the other, as though he wasn’t sure I meant it.

“We’ll make Silas regret telling us this can’t be a hybrid feature when he sees how much attention it gets.”

“That would be extremely satisfying,” Chase said, staring down at his folded hands on his lap. “I could take my gear out to the woods and see if I can make contact with their spirits.”

In the past, I’d often met Chase’s interest in the paranormal with skepticism, knowing he played it up a little for views—that and because he wanted to believe it was true. But in that moment, so did I. If there was any chance at all Fannie or Evelyn’s spirits lingered in the woods, I wanted to find them. “Can I come?”

Chase didn’t answer me with words. Instead, he stared into my eyes as he took my face in his hand, his fingers grazing the side of my neck. I instinctively leaned my body toward his, and when his lips pressed into mine, I slid one arm around his midsection to pull him in even closer. I wanted to feel his warmth, his weight. He gave my inner thigh a firm squeeze like he needed more, too. I melted into him, threading my fingers through the back of his hair, tugging just enough to draw a low hum from him. His lips moved hungrily against mine, and when he gently bit my bottom lip, I gasped, pressing closer until there was no space left between us.

Still, I needed more.

I breathlessly tugged away and rose to my feet, reaching down to pull him up off the rug. He didn’t question it, he simply sprang up and let me drag him into the bedroom, where the afternoon sun spilled through my open blinds. “Get out of here,” I yelled at Wanda, who glanced up at us from beneath her back leg as she licked her crotch. She didn’t budge until Chase backed me against the bed and practically fell on top of me. As the cat scampered away, Chase looked down at me with a wicked grin, his fingers slipping beneath the hem of my shirt. “Did reading about the Fannie’s fiery loins get you all hot and bothered?”

“No,” I said, sticking both hands up the back of his shirt as I pulled him against my body. “It was all you.”

Chase showered me with a few hard, aggressive kisses, his hands roaming as if he couldn't decide which part of me to touch first. Then, with a low hum of satisfaction, he pushed himself up to tug my shirt over my head. His gaze landed on my black lace bra, and he froze for a beat, staring at my chest like he’d just unwrapped the perfect Christmas gift. “Christ Almighty,” he muttered, as though he hadn’t seen my breasts before.

Before I could even tease him, he lowered himself again, his lips brushing slow, deliberate kisses along my collarbone. The warmth of his breath sent shivers across my skin. He painted my neck and shoulder with his tongue, while one of his hands cupped my breast through the lace, his thumb pressing firm against my nipple. His lips trailed back up to my neck, where he nibbled the spot just below my ear that always drove me wild. An involuntary, dorky giggle escaped from my lips.

I felt his smile on my neck. “There she is,” he whispered, his voice low and teasing. “God, I love those little noises you make.” His hand slid beneath the lace, his fingers grazing bare skin now, and I arched my back. “Think I could make you do that again?” he murmured, his thumb and forefinger rolling my nipple with just the right amount of pressure. “Yeah, I know exactly how to get you there.”

Chase nipped at my ear, his breath hot against my skin. I let out a loud, satisfied sigh, a noise he seemed to appreciate even more than the laugh. His hips pressed closer against my body, and I could feel the hard length of him against my thigh. “Chase,” I rasped, tucking my fingertips beneath the waistband of his jeans. “I need you.”

Just like Chase knew how to get me going, I understood how to work him, too. I knew what he liked to hear, which words unlocked the animal in him. Chase tore the rest of my clothes off like they were in his way, delighting in the way my breasts sprang from the black lace for one, lingering second before sliding off my pants and underwear together. With the same sense of urgency, I helped him remove his own clothes, my fingers scrambling to peel off his jeans. He pulled back from the bed to kick them all the way off, yanking his briefs down after. And then he was on top of me again, skin against skin, his solid dick pushing against my core. He kissed my breasts, pausing between them to whisper, “Do you still have that thing in your arm?”

He meant my birth control implant. “Yes,” I gasped out, tracing my fingernails down the center of his back.

Chase groaned, the sound low and dangerous, as he rolled his hips just enough to tease me, his dick sliding against my slick skin. “Good,” he murmured, brushing his lips against mine without quite kissing me, “because I don’t plan on holding back.”

Finally, he let me kiss him, rolling his tongue around mine, with one of his big hands holding both of my wrists down above my head on the pillow.

“And don’t you hold back on those pretty sounds you make, either,” he said, rubbing the tip of his nose against mine, “because I’m going to keep going until I hear them.”

He kissed his way down to my breasts, giving one nipple a slow flick with his tongue. And then he lifted himself up, sliding into me slowly with his eyes locked on mine. My breath hitched as he filled me inch by inch, not stopping until his hips were flush against mine. His eyes drifted shut like he was savoring the moment. When he opened them again, he lowered his upper body to kiss my lips.

“I missed you,” he whispered, before pulling part of the way out. He kept his thrusts slow and deliberate for a while, taking his time to kiss me and caress my skin, giving me reminders of what had been missing from my life for the past three years with every touch. I had no idea where this was going or what it meant, but the uncertainty only added to the thrill.

Squeezing my legs around him tight, I tugged on his hair, enjoying the way it made him grin. He picked up the pace, reaching behind him to give my thigh a hard squeeze. His hand slid up to my knee, fingers curling around it before he pushed my leg farther away, opening me up beneath him. The new angle sent a bolt of pleasure through me, and I couldn’t hold back the soft, needy moan that escaped my lips. “That’s it, sweetheart,” he murmured, thrusting faster now. God, I couldn’t take it when he called me sweetheart . The only thing better was when he called me— “God, Meg,” he whispered, like he could read my mind, pushing his sweaty forehead against mine. He slowed the pace, closing his eyes. “I don’t want to come yet.”

“Please don’t stop. You’re making me feel so good.”

Chase’s eyes shot open and he licked his lips. I followed his gaze to my bedside table. “I want you to get one of the toys I know you keep in that drawer,” he said with a slow thrust, “and I want you to use it on your clit while I’m inside you.”

With a shaky breath, I reached over to the nightstand, fumbling to get the drawer open. My fingers found the small vibrator immediately—muscle memory, I guess. Chase watched me turn it to a medium speed setting and lower it between us, pressing it just above where he entered me. My head fell back against the pillow as Chase’s hips rolled into me again, the sensation of him inside me combined with the toy threatening to send me over the edge within minutes. Chase’s groans were in sync with my whimpers, and my mind drifted to my retired neighbors who were always home around this time. Oh well, they were probably just glad to hear a second voice in the room this time.

The thought almost made me laugh, but it was quickly drowned out by the way Chase thrust into me again, harder this time, making the vibrator buzz even closer against me.

“Chase.” My eyes widened as the heat began to coil low in my belly—and it was building fast.

He looked down at me with that cocky grin that always made me weak. “That’s it, sweetheart. Come for me.”

And just like that, I felt myself unraveling beneath him. I gasped, digging my fingernails into his back. I dropped the vibrator from my other hand—I didn’t need it anymore—and tugged on his hair, as the pleasure low in my belly began to pulsate through my entire core. My thighs trembled on either side of Chase as he slammed into me. “Fuck, Meg—” His voice was a strained growl, and that was all it took. I shattered beneath him, a scream ripping from my throat as the orgasm crashed through me.

Chase wasn’t far behind, his hips shaking as he buried himself deep with a guttural groan, coming right along with me.

As our breathing slowed, he stayed inside of me, squeezing a fistful of my hair in his hand. My skin was still buzzing from the pleasure.

After a moment, he collapsed onto the mattress beside me, dragging a hand through his messy hair. I rolled onto my side, catching my breath just as a low buzzing noise made both of us freeze. Chase shifted, and with a lopsided grin, he pulled the vibrator out from beneath his back and turned it off. We looked into each other’s eyes and laughed.

He lazily draped one arm over my waist, and we stared at each other just like that for a little while. I pressed a kiss against his shoulder, taking in the sandalwood scent of his deodorant.

Wanda leapt onto the bed with a chirpy meow, digging her claws into the comforter as she stretched. “C’mere,” Chase said, clicking his tongue. She listened, purring as she cuddled up against his bare chest.

And suddenly, it was like no time had passed between us at all—like we were just picking up where we left off. Back before everything went wrong.