The Trestle Bridge didn’t look like a piece of infrastructure anymore. It looked like a ribcage.
I killed the engine of the truck at the mouth of the span. The headlights cut two cones of illumination into the fog, revealing the wet, rusted iron girders that soared into the darkness. The bridge vibrated beneath the tires, a low-frequency hum caused by the wind rushing through the gorge and the Blackwood River churning three hundred feet below.
This was where the town said Elias died. This was where they found the shoe that didn’t fit him. This was where Julian had stood for weeks, screaming his brother’s name into the roar of the water until his voice bled out.
And now, Elias was sending me back.
I stepped out of the truck. The wind hit me instantly, a physical shove against my chest. It smelled of ozone and deep, cold water. It smelled like the bottom of a well.
I wrapped my coat tighter around me, feeling the weight of the revolver in my pocket. It was a cold comfort. Bullets didn’t work on ghosts, and right now, Elias felt more like a haunting than a man.
“I’m here,” I whispered, the words snatched away by the gale.
I began to walk.
The metal grating of the bridge deck clattered under my boots. Through the holes in the mesh, I could see the abyss. It was a shifting, black void. If you fell, you wouldn’t hit the water; you would be swallowed by the dark long before impact.
I scanned the girders, the railings, the rusted bolts.
Find the marker.
The first station had been the slide—innocence. The playground where we met.
This was Station Two. The site of the separation. The place where the world decided he was dead so it could stop feeling guilty about him.
I walked to the center of the bridge. The midpoint. The place where the drop was deepest.
The fog swirled around the iron beams, creating phantom shapes that danced in my peripheral vision. I kept my hand on the gun, my thumb tracing the hammer.
Then I saw it.
On the oceanside railing, tied to a rusted stanchion.
It wasn’t a balloon. It wasn’t a streamer.
It was a vine.
A long, thick rope of English ivy, torn from the earth—probably from my own garden—and knotted around the metal. It dangled over the edge, swaying violently in the updraft.
I rushed to the railing and looked over.
Suspended about three feet down, twisting in the wind, was a silver object. It caught the ambient light of the moon breaking through the clouds, flashing like a beacon.
A shield.
Julian’s badge.
My breath hitched. It wasn’t just a prop. It was a trophy. Elias had stripped Julian of his armor. He was showing me that the law held no power here. In Elias’s world, the only authority was the narrative he wrote.
I reached over the railing. The wind tried to push me back, stinging my eyes with moisture.
The badge spun, the gold lettering of DETECTIVE flashing in and out of view. It was tied to the ivy with a complex knot—a figure-eight loop. The same knot he had used on Sarah Miller’s wrists.
I stretched my arm down, my fingers brushing the cold, wet leaves of the ivy.
“Come on,” I grunted, leaning further out. The drop yawned beneath me. I could imagine falling. I could imagine the silence of the fall, just like Richard’s fall from the balcony.
Gravity is a good weapon.
My fingers closed around the badge. The metal was ice-cold.
I hauled it up, hand over hand, dragging the ivy over the rusted rail. When I finally pulled the badge onto the safety of the grate, I fell back against the opposite railing, gasping.
I held the badge in my hands. It was heavy. Real. I ran my thumb over the raised numbers. 409.
Julian.
He was alive. He had to be alive. Elias wouldn’t leave the badge if Julian was dead; he would have kept it as a spoil of war. Leaving it here was a message. He doesn’t need this anymore. He has a new role.
I turned the badge over.
Taped to the back, protected by a layer of clear packing tape, was a Polaroid.
I ripped it free, holding it up to the moonlight.
It wasn’t a picture of Julian.
It was a picture of a building. A massive, towering silhouette of corrugated iron and smokestacks, backlit by a setting sun that turned the sky the color of a bruise.
The Old Lumber Mill.
The Oakhaven Sawmill.
But Elias had drawn on the photo. In black marker, he had drawn a crown on top of the tallest smokestack. And at the bottom, he had written two words.
THE CASTLE.
The realization settled over me like a shroud.
Of course.
It wasn’t just a mill. It was where we went when the woods were too wet. It was where we went when we needed to be bigger than we were. We would climb the catwalks, scaling the rusted machinery, and look down at the town that hated us.
“We’re the Kings of Rust,” Elias used to say, his voice echoing in the vast, empty cavern of the processing floor. “They can’t touch us up here.”
It was the only place he felt powerful.
And now, it was where he was staging his finale.
The Wedding.
He wasn’t just taking me to a hideout. He was taking me to his throne room.
I shoved the photo and the badge into my pocket. The badge clinked against the revolver—law and disorder, sitting side by side.
I looked back at the water one last time.
“You didn’t die here,” I said to the river. “You just held your breath.”
I walked back to the truck. My legs felt solid now. The shaking had stopped. The flashback in the truck, the realization of my own violence, had cauterized the fear. I wasn’t a victim walking into a trap. I was an accomplice walking into a partnership dissolvement.
I climbed into the cab and slammed the door, shutting out the roar of the wind.
The Sawmill was on the other side of town, past the residential district, past the high school where Becca Trent had bullied me, past the cemetery where my mother was buried. It sat on the edge of the river, a monument to the industry that had raped the land and then left it to rot.
It was the heart of Oakhaven’s decay.
I turned the key. The engine roared to life.
I didn’t speed this time. I drove with a cold, mechanical precision. I needed to be calm. I needed to be the Ice Queen.
As I drove back across the bridge, the tires humming on the metal, I thought about Julian.
Elias had taken him. Elias, the boy Julian had tried to save with a pair of shoes.
Julian was the “Bad Prince” in Elias’s story. The usurper. The one who stole the Princess and kept her in the city, away from the magic of the woods.
If Elias was following the logic of a fairy tale, the Bad Prince didn’t get a trial. He got an execution.
I pressed the accelerator.
The fog parted around the truck, swirling in the headlights.
I remembered the layout of the mill. The main floor, the sorting belts, the catwalks. And beneath it all, the incinerator. The massive, brick oven where they used to burn the waste wood.
Fire.
Elias loved fire. He burned the dolls in the festival. He burned the memory of the dog.
If this was a wedding, there would be candles. If this was a funeral, there would be a pyre.
I turned off the main road, bypassing the chained gate of the mill entrance by driving through the ditch. The truck bounced violently, mud spraying the windows, but I kept going. I parked in the shadow of the drying kilns, hidden from the main structure.
I killed the lights.
The mill loomed above me. It was silent. Dark. A jagged mountain of metal against the night sky.
But high up, in the tower where the foreman’s office used to be—the tower we used to call the Keep—I saw it.
A flicker.
Weak. Orange. Unsteady.
A candle.
He was home.
I stepped out of the truck. The rain had stopped, replaced by a heavy, suffocating mist that clung to the ground.
I didn’t need a map anymore. I didn’t need clues.
I walked toward the massive, gaping maw of the loading bay doors.
I was going to the Castle. And I was going to burn the Kingdom down.