Chapter 7 – Ghosts of Roses

The rain had stopped by dawn, but Raven couldn’t tell where the storm ended and her own thoughts began.

She hadn’t slept. Not really. Her body ached from Elijah’s touch, the feel of his mouth still seared into her skin, but her mind was somewhere else entirely—sixteen years back, in a house that had smelled of roses and rain.

Zara.

The name alone was a knife.

She slipped from the bed without waking him. Elijah’s breathing was steady, measured, the kind of rhythm that felt deliberate even in sleep. She hated how easily he looked like he belonged there, tangled in her sheets, invading spaces she had sworn were hers alone.

In the kitchen, she poured black coffee and carried her laptop to the table. She opened a file labeled simply Z. It was a graveyard of photographs, notes, timelines—her private archive of a case the department had closed but she had never let go.

She clicked open an image, it was of Zara at sixteen, standing barefoot in their backyard. The smile on her face was a challenge, daring the world to try and break her. Raven felt the air leave her lungs.

“You would’ve loved this mess,” she whispered to the screen. “You would’ve cut through it faster than me.”

Her throat tightened. She hadn’t cried for Zara in years. She’d carved grief into obsession, rage into sharpened focus, because tears had felt too small for a loss that massive.

The sound of movement drew her out of memory. Elijah stood in the doorway, shirt half-buttoned, his eyes unreadable.

“You don’t sleep,” he said.

She closed the laptop. “Neither do you.”

He stepped in, gaze brushing the mug, the file, the shadows under her eyes. “She’s why you’re still breathing fire after all these years.”

“She’s why I breathe at all,” Raven snapped, harsher than she intended.

Silence stretched between them. She hated that he could peel her open with so little effort. He didn’t need words, just presence, and suddenly she was sixteen again, kneeling on a rain-slick floor beside her twin’s body, promising herself she’d never stop hunting.

“I remember her,” Elijah said quietly.

Her head whipped toward him, fury burning through exhaustion. “Don’t you dare.”

His jaw flexed, but his voice remained steady. “She laughed like you, but louder. She trusted too easily. I warned her”

“Stop.” The word cracked like glass.

But he didn’t. “She mattered. To me.”

Raven’s chest constricted. It was too much, too intimate, too late. She pushed back from the table, pacing toward the window, hands trembling despite herself.

“Why didn’t you ever say anything?” she demanded.

“I thought silence would hurt less,” he admitted. “For both of us.”

The confession gutted her, because in some corner of herself she understood it. The problem was that it didn’t change a thing.

She turned, fire in her voice. “You don’t get to rewrite her into your story, Elijah. She was mine. My blood. My life.”

His eyes darkened. “And mine too, in ways you don’t want to hear.”

The words lingered like poison. She wanted to scream, to demand details, to rip every secret out of him until Zara’s shadow finally had form—but instead she gripped the window frame so tightly her nails dug into wood.

The silence between them thickened, swollen with things neither of them were ready to name.

Finally, Elijah stepped closer, but not too close. His voice dropped to something rawer. “The killer isn’t leaving roses for you, Raven. He’s leaving them for me. That’s why you can’t stop.”

Her heart thudded. It should’ve been confirmation of her worst fears, but instead it felt like a lifeline wrapped in barbed wire.

“Then help me,” she whispered.

“I am.”

The words brushed the air like a promise, but Raven didn’t trust promises anymore. She stared at him until he finally turned away, retreating down the hall.

Hours later, Raven found herself back at the cemetery. She hadn’t planned it—her car had just followed the streets she knew by muscle memory. The Blaire family plot was tucked at the edge of the grounds, overgrown with ivy and half-forgotten stone.

Zara’s grave was simple. A single headstone. A name. No epitaph. Their parents hadn’t known what to write, or maybe words had felt useless then too.

Raven knelt, brushing wet leaves from the carved letters. “I should’ve been faster,” she murmured. “I should’ve seen it coming.”

The wind stirred, carrying the faint scent of roses from some other corner of the cemetery. Her chest caved.

She thought of Elijah’s voice in the dark, admitting he knew Zara, that she had mattered. The memory twisted inside her.

“You’d hate him,” she told the stone. “Or maybe you’d love him. You always loved the ones I didn’t trust.”

Her laugh cracked, half-broken, half-bitter.

A shadow stretched over her. She didn’t turn. She didn’t need to.

“You shouldn’t be here alone,” Micah’s voice said.

Raven wiped her face quickly, standing. “You’re tailing me now?”

“Someone has to.” He studied her, his usual gruffness softened by concern. “This case is already eating you alive. Don’t let it finish the job.”

She forced a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “It won’t.”

Micah didn’t look convinced. But he let it drop, giving her space, and together they walked back toward the gates.

For a moment, Raven glanced over her shoulder, back at Zara’s grave. The petals scattered across the ground looked too red in the fading light.

And for the first time in years, she whispered the thing she never allowed herself to say aloud:

“I miss you.”

Back home that night, Raven sat with the laptop open again, staring at Zara’s photo. Elijah’s words echoed in her skull: She mattered. To me.

Her hands trembled as she traced the outline of her sister’s smile on the screen.

The killer had dragged her past into the present. Elijah had cracked it open wider. And no matter how much she wanted to fight it, she knew the truth:

Every step she took now wasn’t just about catching a murderer.

It was about Zara. About Elijah. About the thin line between love and obsession, and how far she was willing to cross it.

The storm outside had passed, but inside Raven Blaire, it was only just beginning.