Page 29 of 13 Nights

"Yes."

"Was it there when you arrived?"

"No."

She reaches for her phone.

"Leave it," I tell her. "You document from inside tonight."

She sets the phone down. She doesn't argue, which means she reads the urgency as genuine rather than just controlling.

The horse watches from the tree line, a dark shape against the darker woods. The Veil has been watching this cottage more carefully every night since Ashley opened the door to me, and what happened between us in this kitchen may have sharpened its interest considerably.

Dawn arrives by degrees. The sky above the tree line begins its slow transformation from black to deep blue to the gray that precedes the end.

The Void's claim builds in my sternum, a gathering tension like a rope going taut, and the sensation arrives later than any morning this week.

"It's past sunrise," Ashley says. She holds up her phone. The screen reads 7:18:00, the published sunrise for October 25. She taps the stopwatch. "You're still here."

I am. The pull hasn't reached me yet. Ashley counts aloud, forty seconds, sixty, ninety, her voice steady, clinical, recording the data even as she watches me not disappear.

At ninety-three seconds, the pull finally arrives.

I seize the doorframe. My fingers close around the wood with force I've never applied before. The grip that results belongs to a body that has opinions about being ripped from a room it wants to remain in.

I hold for one second. Then two. Then three. Then four.

The wood groans under my fingers. The grain splits beneath my hands. My knuckles go white against the frame.

Ashley's hand closes around my arm, solid and alive and anchoring me to a moment that the curse is determined to end.

The pull wins. It tears me from the doorframe and her grasp. The gouges remain. Deep enough that she'll run her fingers across them and know exactly how hard I fought.

The last thought arrives with a clarity that cuts, three beats before the Void swallows everything.

What if her love breaks the curse? Will the Gate open and take her?

The Void takes me because it has never once needed my consent. But this time I left marks in the wood. Ashley's grip burns into my arm. The curse may still win, but this time it has to work for the victory.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Ashley

The gouges in the doorframe are deep enough to catch my fingernail. I run my index finger along the longest one while the coffee brews, measuring the force it would take to split oak grain like this. The wood is old, but it isn't soft. Whatever Severin's hands are becoming, they're becoming strong enough to damage solid wood in a few seconds of desperate resistance.

I photograph the marks from three angles before I do anything else. Then I sit at the kitchen table with coffee and something to eat while I work on my laptop, my phone, and the data from last night, and I build the case the only way I know how: one verified fact at a time.

The sunrise delay spreadsheet is getting harder to dismiss as measurement error. Each night the delay has roughly doubled, and if it continues at this rate, Night Seven's delay could exceed three minutes.

I type that and then stare at the number. Three minutes past sunrise with a dead man standing in my kitchen.

My phone buzzes. An email from Dr. Renate Hoffman at the Hessian State Archives in Marburg. The subject line makes my heart rate climb: Re: Friedrich von Brandt, Supplemental Materials.

She's attached a scan. Partial, she notes, because the document is fragile and the archive hasn't digitized the full collection. But what she's sent is enough to stop me mid-sip.

I lay the scan beside my existing evidence and the chain tightens.

I have the discrepancy between Severin's recorded capture and Fritz's filed declaration. I have the muster-roll facsimile from my mother's drawer, annotated in her handwriting with a question that now has an answer. I have the correspondence with Marburg archivists that she started and I resumed. And now I have this: Margarethe's own handwriting, cramped and formal, consistent with late eighteenth-century German correspondence. Hoffman's translation is appended in a separate attachment: