All Chapters of A LOVE LIKE OURS: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

The wind didn’t come back the next morning.That was what made it worse.It was too still. Too heavy. Like something was waiting just beyond the reach of breath, crouched behind the veil of fog that hadn't lifted since dawn. The trees didn’t rustle. No birds sang. Even the creek nearby had quieted, as though the water knew better than to stir.Yvette sat at the windowsill in the study Elise once used, her hand closed tightly around the ring. It was warm again. Not hot—just alive. Just enough to remind her that something old and dangerous pulsed within it. Something that remembered.She could feel Cara’s breathing before she heard her footsteps. The child didn’t walk like a child anymore. She moved with precision now, like someone who had been trained to stay silent. And when she stepped into the room, her eyes glinted with that terrible gold that came and went like lightning behind clouds.“You didn’t sleep,” Cara said, not as a question.“No,” Yvette replied, watching her. “You didn’

Three days had passed since the sealing. But the silence hadn’t lifted—it had deepened.Not the suffocating kind from before, when Elias’s shadow stretched over every inch of their lives. Not the dead hush of fear. This was different.This was a silence that waited.A silence that listened back.---Yvette sat in Elise’s garden, legs curled beneath her, staring at the overgrown lavender her mother once used for tinctures. The plants had grown wild since the fire, their roots threading through the shattered path like veins. But now... they stood still. No wind. No bees. Even the birds had gone quiet.Every time she blinked, she expected the whisper again. That singed voice in the back of her skull. The one that used to echo his name.But there was nothing.No dreams. No dread.And somehow, that terrified her more.---Cara hadn’t slept.Not really.She lay in the upstairs bedroom, eyes closed but twitching beneath her lids, as though dreaming in too many layers at once. When Yvette bro

The forest had not changed, and yet it was no longer the same.Yvette stood at the edge of the old path, the morning mist curling around her legs like fingers trying to pull her back. The trees loomed taller now, or maybe it was the weight in her chest making everything seem heavier—roots, branches, breath. The mirror shard she’d found in the garden was wrapped in a velvet cloth, tucked inside her coat pocket, but even without touching it, she felt its presence vibrating against her skin.Cara was out there.Somewhere.In whatever realm or memory or bleeding fracture the mirror had opened.And Yvette would tear the world in half to find her.Behind her, Tristan watched. His silence was more telling than any speech. His hands were in his coat pockets, but she knew they trembled. His blood was still drying under his nails. They had nearly lost everything. Again.Dahlia joined them, face drawn, her bag of talismans swinging from her shoulder. She had insisted they wait until morning. Unt

The cabin felt smaller with another child inside. Junia’s presence was like smoke—curling into the corners, quiet but impossible to ignore. She barely spoke, and when she did, her words were clipped, haunted. Her eyes, too old for her body, studied everything—Tristan’s movements, Yvette’s voice, Cara’s dreams.“I don’t sleep,” she said the second night. “I listen.”“To what?” Yvette had asked.Junia just pointed at the sky. “The echoes.”That first night, she hadn’t eaten, hadn’t blinked when Yvette tried to clean the wounds on her feet. It was Cara who finally broke the silence between them—by drawing. A spiral, half-finished, in the dirt. Junia had frozen. Then she’d finished it.Yvette had seen it before.In her mother’s journal.---“There are more like her,” Tristan murmured the next morning as they stood outside, watching fog creep through the trees. “Kids who got out. Kids they tried to make into vessels for whatever Elias wanted to become.”Yvette rubbed her arms. “Why does it

The morning broke not with sunlight, but with mist. Thick, clinging fog stretched across the ravine like a silken net, cloaking the forest in silence. It muffled the birdsong, blurred the horizon, and swallowed the narrow trail they had followed through the ruins.Yvette rose before the others, her boots damp with dew as she moved toward the edge of the bluff. Beneath it, the sea churned a restless gray. The salt in the air stung her eyes, and for a moment, she let it. It was a small pain—manageable. Human. Real.They had left the ruined chapel just after dawn, traveling by instinct more than direction. Tristan said the sea was important. That Elias had feared it. That something ancient slept beneath it. But no one knew exactly what.Cara didn’t question it.Not anymore.Ever since the night she saw the girl in the thorns—the other one who had been marked and forgotten—she had changed. Not in a way Yvette could name, but in a way she could feel. Cara carried herself differently. Spoke