Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

If she looked hard enough, Wednesday always noticed the cracks of any facade. Nothing fooled her for long.

Jericho called itself wholesome, but smelled faintly of blood and rotting corpses shoddily entombed only three feet below the ground, as if someone had been in too much of a hurry to bury a body properly. While Nevermore was the unspoken scythe of death — a thing the townsfolk pretended wasn’t there for their own sanity, the blade hanging forever aloft over their necks — Jericho was something far, far worse. Rotten to its core, the bones brittle and the flesh half melted off. It wasn’t even a particularly interesting corpse. Lacked any charm, any color. It was just — lifeless.

And deep down, everyone in town knew this.

Still, surprisingly, there were always new parts of Jericho that Wednesday was discovering.

Tonight, she walked past a half dozen houses that lay on the eastern edge of town, their windows broken like missing teeth. The streetlights flickered, and sometimes Wednesday heard footsteps in the quiet behind her, ones that never revealed their owners. For a school night, only Thursday, she knew she had limited time. Enid and Thing would get distressed if Wednesday didn’t return before the morning bell, but she had more pressing priorities than a dismembered hand with a penchant for overly dramatic exclamations and a werewolf that had the fashion sense of a bleeding unicorn needing to be put out of its misery.

Because someone had delivered a note, written in blood. There was a time and an address scrawled across a white sheet of paper stained red, stuck to her door with a knife. And the most interesting aspect of all, the knife had also been speared through a heart. A human heart.

All of that left as a calling card to capture her attention.

Wednesday didn’t know whose heart it was, but it had been ripe and still bloody, almost warm, as if almost still beating. The mystery of it intrigued her enough that she was willing to satiate her curiosity. Thus, when she stopped at the last singular house on the road, miles away from where anyone else could hear screams, she found an old and unloved house. She confirmed the address and studied the facade of the building, all while folding the bloodied piece of paper into neat quarters and tucking it back into her pocket.

It wasn’t much to look at, this house.

The paint was peeling awfully, drained of color where the sun had hit it too harshly like bleached bones, but she pushed the gates open and looked around.

At the back, she found a statue that brought about a familiar sense of doom. Galling in its size, almost to a ridiculous point of overcompensation. The short snout came to a cruel jagged end, the mouth displaying every tooth chipped yet still somehow sharp. Across the skin, marks left over from a hundred forgotten fights. The stone was mottled with age and mildew, streaked with black where rain had wept down its ribs, giving the illusion of dried blood. The claws were impossibly long, curling inward. Muscles bulged beneath its coarse, chiseled fur, each strand etched with obsessive detail, as if the sculptor had loved the creature more than any human could be loved. And lastly, its eyes—wide demonic pits bulging from its sockets underneath the shadow of its heavy brow—they did not have the familiar bloodshot red appearance, but she could still recognize it.

Wednesday, of course, knew the look of a Hyde when she saw one now.

That answered one question. Who had sent her the human heart? It was Tyler. Wednesday was certain. She had suspected as much from the onset. He’d disappeared after the sheriff’s hunt for him had gone unsurprisingly nowhere. It was almost two months since his escape from Willow Hill’s Psychiatric Hospital, and he’d left a trail of corpses almost as cold as the clues he’d left behind to find him.

Other questions remained a mystery. Why, for one, did he choose to contact her now? And who had he murdered for the heart — another question. This was most certainly a trap of some kind, but the statue in the back was a dead giveaway if he’d planned any sort of surprise attack. Tyler knew her, and he would know that she would not be so easily baited and trapped, much less killed.

There was only one way to find out what this was all about.

Wednesday moved to the house, turned the knob on the back door, and was unsurprised to find it unlocked. Inside, shadows welcomed her. The place smelled faintly of mold and the metallic tang underneath that spoke of fresh spilled blood, sharp enough to make her teeth ache. She let her instincts lead her, a pull like an inescapable itch under her skin. Then she heard it—faint, rhythmic, a breath mixed with a growl—coming from somewhere below.

The basement door yawned open like a mouth.

Each step down felt heavier than the last. The smell intensified—copper, sweat, and wet fur. The single dangling bulb cast an anemic yellow glow over the room, and there he was — shackled to the far wall, wrists bound with thick iron. Barefoot, shirtless, hair damp with sweat. His eyes—too bright, too wild—locked on her immediately.

“Wednesday,” he greeted, and his voice was both familiar and gratingly knowing. “I knew you couldn’t resist the invitation.”

He looked thinner than she last saw him, his skin gone pale except where fever flushed it high on his cheeks, a mottled bloom that made him look half-sick, half-alive with some terrible affliction. Wednesday was surprised to see him bound, and could only assume he’d done that to himself — although why presented a question. She doubted those old chains would hold him for long if he decided to bring out his other physical form. Sweat slicked his hair to his forehead, dark strands curling and clinging like ivy to stone. The muscles in his forearms were corded and tight, but there was a tension in him that played across his skin like livewire. She could see the strain in his neck, the way his jaw flexed.

“Did you like my gift?” he asked her.

She halted at the edge of the steps. “These games grow old between us.”

He smiled wildly. “I thought you’d appreciate the macabre romantic overture. I gave you a heart.”

“Don’t make me throw up in my mouth,” she retorted, flatly. And not from the sight of a severed human heart but from the implications that the gesture held any ounce of courtship. “Who did you kill?”

“The owner of this house,” Tyler replied, idly. “Don’t shed too many tears over it. He was a man with a fetish for Hyde flesh. I disabused him of his unsavory ways.”

Wednesday did not respond to that. Other than offering the man’s family a discount on a plot of land or funeral services, there wasn’t much else that she could do for him. The circumstances that led her here had unfolded without the benefit of her premonitions, and there had been frustratingly little in the way of clues leading her to Tyler’s whereabouts. He seemed to know this, a flush of delight over his face as he studied her. This game of cat and mouse was already tiresome, especially since Wednesday would rather partake in a bath of flesh-eating bacteria than play along with Tyler’s fantasies of delusional grandeur.

“You have one minute to plead your case,” Wednesday offered, “or you become someone else’s problem.”

“What? You’ll call the sheriff? Like that wouldn’t result in more pointless death. They can’t contain me, Wednesday. You know this. You’d really ring them up only to bring them to their deaths?”

“What part of me screams that I have issues with death?”

“The part that always seems to save the day,” Tyler refuted, knowingly. “For a girl that convinces herself she cares about nothing and no one, you do have the talent for playing the dark knight. The town protector. The hero of Nevermore.”

“Pernicious lies,” Wednesday said, biting back an eye twitch. “An utterly obvious ploy to get under my skin when we both know the only reason we crossed paths was because I was bored and needed some deathly entertainment in this backwater town. Unlike you, I knew how to bury my kills deep in the dark so that they don’t come back to haunt me — literally or figuratively. You were sloppy, Tyler. Amateurish. It’s why you’re alone.”

His lips twitched. “Dead father, dead mother,” he agreed, glibly. “I killed my master. No wonder you and I get along so well. Death has a fascination with us both.”

“Half your minute is up. Do you have a point to get to, or not?”

A pause. “I have,” he said, voice low, “a proposition for you, Wednesday.” His gaze flicked upward, like he had to force himself to speak the next words. “You want me contained? We both know that this town will never hold me for long. Willow Hill only kept me for one summer.”

“That was an unfortunate byproduct of my provocations,” Wednesday refuted. “Without me, you’d have been locked up there for decades. Say what you will about their psychotherapeutic malpractice, but Willow Hill kept outcasts well contained.” Too well contained. “Even I have to give them that.”

He laughed. “So you’re saying I owe you my gratitude for the escape?”

“Don’t count your blessings yet. I still intend on delivering you back to your cage.”

“What if there was another way? To contain me? For good?”

Wednesday paused, said nothing.

A flush crawled up his throat, his eyes darkening. “I can feel the madness chewing at me from inside my skull, piece by piece. I’m losing myself.”

Her arms crossed, nails digging into her sleeves. “And?”

He’d killed Thornhill, his master. His fate was already sealed.

But the chains bit into his wrists, the skin there raw and abraded, but not from struggling tonight—it was the layered damage of many nights before. The iron links were thick, anchored deep into the brick behind him, but they still trembled when he pulled against them unconsciously, as if testing their faith in their own strength. He’d been doing this for some time, chaining himself up.

He looked away, gaze distant for a beat. “A Hyde needs a master. And you—” His eyes cut back to her, fever-bright. “You could help me. You’ve always been able to get through to me, Wednesday. Stir interest in the beast inside me. I’m giving you the chance you’ve always wanted.”

“What deluded nonsense is this now?”

“Wouldn’t you like to keep me from spiralling into a homicidal void? One that would tear apart everyone in town limb from limb? Even you have loved ones — family, friends. I could rip through every one your little black heart cares about, starting with Enid.”

“I stopped you before. Given you’re already locked up and chained, my job is considerably easier this time.”

He jerked against the chains. The bricks on the wall securing his iron shackles struggled to contain even a brief flash of his strength, dust and debris kicked up into the air. His eyes were the worst of it, flashing a dangerous rage, threatening to bulge out. His teeth looked wrong, too. Not quite elongated, but sharper, as though the change was carving them into weapons grain by grain. The chains wouldn’t hold. Not for long.

Despite herself, Wednesday felt tense and instinctively reached for the vial of poison in her pocket, a crossfire hemotoxin blend that unconventional wisdom said would be enough to kill a beast Tyler’s size in thirty seconds flat. The hard part would be to get him to ingest it, but Wednesday knew if he attacked, she’d have plenty of opportunity to get close enough to his snarling mouth, especially if he was trying to bite off her head.

“What do you propose?” Wednesday demanded, finished with this game.

He straightened, his eyes darkening as the hyde receded by inches beneath the surface. “You’re the only one who can stand to control me now, Wednesday. Keep the madness from taking full control.”

She almost could have laughed, sharp and humorless, but her biting tone gave away her indifference. “You think I’d save you? After what you did?”

“I think you still care,” he countered, and the chain groaned as he leaned forward. “Even if you hate me. Hate and love aren’t so far apart, Wednesday. A thin red line. And when I turn— I think you want to be able to control that part of me as much as you deny it.”

The bulb above them buzzed, flickered, dimmed. She could hear his breathing deepen, ragged, the animal already straining against the man. And for one horrifying second, she remembered what it had felt like when she’d once reached for his touch instead of recoiling from it.

“You’re wasting your breath,” she declared. “You want mercy, you’re barking up the wrong girl.”

“I don’t want mercy,” he said, leaning forward just enough that the chains creaked. “This is about control.”

She let out a sharp exhale. “Control? Don’t try to lure me into one of your adolescent psychological fantasies. We both know you’d never give up control.”

“A Hyde,” he told her, grimacing, “needs a master. I thought I could contain the bloodlust myself, the madness — but I can feel myself slipping further and further into a black void, Wednesday. One I could never come back from.”

“Did you want me to push?” she threatened.

He let out a humorless chuckle. “I’m serious.” His voice dropped, almost a whisper. “Every night it’s harder to keep the line. It’s like… something else is driving, and I’m locked in the back seat, watching it tear through everything. I’m done pretending I can stop it on my own.”

“You didn’t stop it before,” she said, her words deliberate, slow. “You didn’t stop when they were screaming. I stopped you.”

His jaw tightened. “And that’s why you’re here. You’re the only one that has a chance. The Hyde— he respects you, even when he wants to tear you apart.”

She inclined her head. “You think I’m just going to play warden? Sit here like some keeper, just to keep your conscience and your hands clean? The sight of either of them bloody never affected you before.”

“No,” he said, that red burnt color scotching hotter in his stare. “Not warden. A Hyde doesn’t answer to a warden.”

No, it answered to a master. The word hung between them, silent, heavy as chains.

Wednesday said nothing.

“I want to remember myself,” he said, voice low but certain. “I want to have some semblance of an identity beyond a raging carnivore.” He swallowed, trailed off, the implication sharp as broken glass in his throat. “So, you win. You tell me when to move, who to kill, when to stop. You give the orders.”

She stepped closer, until the edge of the bulb’s light caught the shadows of her face. “And in return?”

“In return,” he said, “you don’t hand me to the cops, or Willow Hill, or anyone else who’ll put me in chains. You get to decide what I hunt. Who and where. I’m sure you have a list of people you’d like to cross off.”

“What makes you think I need your help in that?”

“Hunter or hound,” Tyler replied. “Which one would you rather me be? No matter what you may claim, you know there’s merit to this arrangement, Wednesday.”

Her pulse was louder in her ears now, though her voice stayed cool. “You think I’d be stupid enough to trust you?”

“You wouldn’t be trusting me,” he said, lips curling faintly. “You’d be controlling me. Owning me. Don’t tell me that’s not appealing to you. We’re both beyond petty denials.”

She studied him—every inch of the strained muscles, the fevered eyes, the chains dug into brick. He was desperate, despite all the bravado. That much was obvious. She could smell the tang of his fear hanging in the air like pheromones. He truly was at his last grasp of sanity; a Hyde without a master was only madness driven inwards, layers upon layers of insanity folding in upon itself like a slow-acting implosion. He had no chance at ever being normal, but that didn’t mean she had to leash the beast instead of slay it.

“Say it,” Wednesday declared.

Tyler’s head tilted. “Why?”

“Because I want to hear if you mean it.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “You want obedience, or proof?”

“Both.”

The chain rattled as he leaned forward until there was barely a foot between them. “Yes… Master.” This time the word came out like it had teeth, daring her to flinch. “I’ll be yours to command.”

She didn’t flinch, of course. “If you’re mine, then I decide what happens to you. I decide when you eat, when you move, when you breathe.” She paused, ominously. “When you die.”

He smirked. “You haven’t asked the best part yet — how the new bond needs to be forged?”

She paused. “Thornhill already unlocked you.”

He looked at her, gaze heavy and laden with layers of feral possession. “There are other ways to forge a bond,” Tyler said, smirk widening. “I assume you won’t blush like a virgin if I mention some of the carnal ways?”

Wednesday very nearly rolled her eyes. As if anyone growing up in her household, under the same shared roof as her mother and father, could ever proclaim to be bashful when it came to sex. The Addams had been pioneers in sexual rituals when most clans or covens were still in their infancies.

“I hope those chains are comfortable," Wednesday said, with finality. “Because you better be in them when I return tomorrow night. I need to think about this. I need to research if what you’re proposing is even possible. If you’re not here, if I find out you’ve killed another in the meantime, remember—I don’t need to bring someone else here to put you down like the animal you are.”

For a moment, silence. Then, oddly proud and soft: “You’d do it, too.”

“In a heartbeat.” She stepped even closer, until the chain between his shackles and the wall went taut. His breath brushed her face, hot and uneven. “The only reason you’re not dead right now is because you may prove more useful alive to me. Don’t mistake that for forgiveness or anything else filled with foolish sentiment.”

The muscles in his jaw tightened. “And don’t mistake this for weakness. The chains, the begging—these are just unfortunate setbacks for me. The pause before the next hunt. You’re not safe here. You’re not safe with me. Always remember, I killed my last master for abusing my trust.”

“Look how that turned out for you,” Wednesday replied, clipped. “Don’t worry, I won’t be as foolish as Thornhill nor as lenient.”

Something flickered in his expression—recognition, maybe, or hunger. “I’m glad we understand each other.”

“Settle in for the night. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Not going to tuck me in?” he taunted, grinning. Then, a warning: “I wouldn’t take too much time, Wednesday. The longer you wait, the less control I have over the animal inside me.”

“You are the animal, Tyler. Don’t mistake the difference.”

With that, she turned and left him in the basement, slamming the door shut after her.

Chapter Text

Nevermore’s library was less a building and more a relic stitched onto the campus like a scar. It stood apart from the other school structures, a hulking, many-gabled shape of blackened stone and leaded glass, the kind of architecture that looked like it had been built for a different century. Inside, there were the restricted access areas hidden behind a labyrinth of bookshelves, most of it locked behind wards and access keys that only certain staff were meant to have. Wednesday had always been good at slipping past locked doors. More importantly, Thing was also the best pick-pocket in the country, ten times more helpful than any vault cracker.

Nevertheless, by the following afternoon, her search for more answers on Hydes had failed to turn up anything new or significant.

Wednesday was agitated. Thing, too, was in the corner, fretting away in that way he had whenever he was worried about her, but she didn’t have the time or the energy to assuage his vexations.

Wednesday had plenty of her own.

She sat cross-legged on her dorm bed, the rain tapping against the tall windows from a receding storm. Whatever promising books she had lay open in front of her, the candlelight turning its black ink into something almost alive.

In lieu of anything entirely on point, Wednesday had drawn references to various books on the occult — Out of the Devil’s Cauldron; Infernal Geometry and the Left Hand Path; Sexual Rituals and Rights of Passages. She’d read them all, skimmed through the important passages, and tried to piece together what was necessary. Every one came with its own ritual instructions; all seemed to come with its own unspoken warning, and she mentally ticked through each of them like she was balancing a set of scales.

Loss of privacy. That was the first major drawback all the books talked about. A bond meant he’d feel her moods when she was nearby, taste the edges of her thoughts if she wasn’t careful. Tyler wasn’t the type to keep to the edges—he’d push, prod, tease until he found the center of her. Shared pain. Shared hunger. If he lost control, that pull would yank at her too, drag her into the frenzy.

The second drawback was dependency. Not hers—she’d die before letting herself lean on anyone—but his. A Hyde who saw her as his anchor might cling like iron. And iron cut both ways. She’d have to be strong enough to temper it, but Wednesday had confidence she could manage the task.

She thought of Enid—her riotous laugh, her neon-dyed hair, her endless optimism in a place that should have gnawed at weaker souls. Enid didn’t deserve the kind of danger Tyler promised, that he inherently brought into the world. And her family? Whatever their tangled history, they were hers to protect.

Sex was a complication, but Wednesday was practical and even, despite herself, a little intrigued. One of her favorite authors, Mary Shelley, had lost her virginity upon the gravesite of her own mother. Given Morticia Addams was still alive, it seemed Wednesday had no hope of following in her footsteps, so a sexual ritual seemed more than a tolerable consolation for her first time.

The decision should have been clean. Clinical. She’d done harder things for less. But then came the snag—the one she refused to tug at too often.

Tyler, himself.

He’d been the first person in years to make her feel that sharp, visceral jolt—like a live wire sparking under her skin. Attraction wasn’t something Wednesday allowed herself. She was self-contained, independent to the marrow. She didn’t need anyone, and certainly didn’t want the mess of wanting someone. As much as she wanted to deny it, with Tyler, it was there. Provoking, taunting, highlighting one of the few instances where Wednesday had ever let sentiment get the better of her.

There was an attraction, she felt no point in denying that to herself. Anyone with eyes could see he clearly felt the spark, too. In the way he watched her like she was the only thing in the room worth noticing. In the way his voice sank low when they fought, threatening and amused all at once.

She pressed her thumb against the page, hard enough to whiten her skin.

Yes, there would be consequences. Yes, this might go badly for her. But if it kept the people she loved safe—and if she could harness Tyler before his chaos burned through everything—then it could be worth it.

Even if part of her hated admitting she wanted him close.

“You’re doing that thing again,” Enid said, behind her, perched on her bed and painting her nails.

Wednesday didn’t bother to look up. “Reading? Yes, scandalous.”

Enid snorted. “No. The other thing. The thing where you pretend you’re not up to something. I know when you’re plotting, Wednesday.”

Turning the page slowly, deliberately, Wednesday said, “If you’re going to accuse me of something, specifics are always better than vague generalities.”

“Wednesday,” Enid said, almost whining. Then her voice dropped into a tone that was entirely too serious for someone wearing a sweater with neon cats on it. “What’s going on? Thing tells me you’ve been hunting for books on the occult and bonding rituals.”

Wednesday flashed a glare across the room, where Thing was currently pretending to hide behind one of Enid’s colorful shoeboxes. “Traitor,” Wednesday hissed.

“Don’t blame Thing, he’s just worried! You’ve been even more cryptic and secluded this year than last, which is saying something. I thought we were best friends! Friends share with each other.” Enid sighed. “You’ve been— weird. And not your usual unflinching morbid weirdness, either. It’s different. I haven’t seen you this withdrawn since—” she made a face, “—that thing happened with Tyler.”

There were so many things that happened with Tyler, Wednesday couldn’t precisely pinpoint which instance Enid was referencing — which was perhaps more of the point than Enid intended.

“Look, I get it. He’s mysterious and dangerous and looks like he was carved from marble by someone who was way too into Greek tragedies. But he’s bad news, and you need to move on.”

“I’ll tell that to his next victim’s families,” Wednesday returned, flatly.

“You’ll take him down,” Enid returned. “You’ve made your position clear. Repeatedly. In stereo. But you’re letting it consume you.”

Wednesday shut the book. “I have it under control.”

“Under control? With him?”

Wednesday blew out the candle. She needed more answers, more clarity, and Enid was turning into a distraction she couldn’t afford. The library books weren’t cutting it, but thankfully Wednesday knew there was another set of prized tomes on the occult not far from her now, a private collection. Her own family’s collection, almost entirely curated by her mother.

“I’m going to visit my mother,” she told Enid. “Don’t wait up.” She looked across the room, glared at Thing threateningly. “And you better not follow me.”

Despite herself, Wednesday chewed on the conversation all through the short journey to the gardner’s cottage where her mother was still preoccupied and engaged as the Chair of the Gala Fundraiser. The path to the house was steep and crooked, slick with fallen leaves. Nevermore’s gothic towers shrank behind her until they were just jagged teeth on the horizon, and the woods swallowed the campus lights.

The storm was doing her favors tonight when she quietly broke into her parent’s bedroom—wind rattling the old shutters, rain streaking the windows in chaotic sheets, masking the sound of the back door of the lock clicking open. Wednesday slipped inside her mother’s house like a shadow. The air was warm, smelling faintly of dried sage and iron, and every floorboard seemed to hold a grudge against her weight.

The cabinet with her mother’s favorite collection of books was closed, but not locked. She eased it open and shelves bowed under the weight of thick, leather-bound grimoires and books. None as precious as Goody’s book. None as informative, nor holding the same sentimental value, but the book was burned now and there was no purpose in crying over spilled blood.

She found the one she was looking for—the black volume with a clasp of tarnished brass and a small sigil etched into the leather. Vinculum et Dominatus. The Book of Sexual Binding and Dominion. The title alone intrigued her. She scrolled past the preface and found the meat of something immediately:

The Binding is an ancient compact, traced to pagan blood cults of the Northern Tribes. It is neither spell nor curse, but a tether forged in the mind and marrow of two living beings—Master and Servant. Once forged, the Servant’s will is yoked to the Master’s command, though the bond is not without peril to both.

Below that was a woodcut-style illustration: a human and a beast kneeling face-to-face, a thread of shadow passing from their foreheads like a cord.

She read on:

On the night of the full moon, the Master must share a circle with the Subject, drawn in ash from burnt rowan wood. Salt is cast at the four points, and blood—one drop from Master, one from Servant—is mingled in a vessel of blackened iron.

The Master must make the Binding Vow at the altar of pleasure, as the Servant kneels, unchained but willing, two made into one. Once the joinder is consummated, both will feel the “bite” of the tether—pain sharp enough to taste the other’s thoughts for an instant. The bond will deepen with each command given and obeyed, until the Master’s will becomes strong in the Subject’s mind.

She flipped through, pages rustling like brittle leaves, until her eyes caught on a section deeper than anything she’d read in the academy archives. The script was dense, but the illustrations were clear enough: two figures, a monster and a witch, kneeling in a circle of salt and blood, their hands bound together by a red cord, caught in congress. In some illustrations, their bodies pressed together in a merger of skin and fur, monster and human. In others, both were only in human form. The accompanying text was blunt—physical intimacy could tighten a tether, making the bond between them complete, replacing any old lingering threads.

She sat back, absorbing the information. It appeared Tyler hadn’t been pulling her chain when he’d intimated a carnal sexual ritual in their binding. As she went on to read, she found the ritual was relatively simple, but not entirely safe as the subject could change and transform into a monster mid-coitus if provoked enough. The notes in the margin—scribbled in her mother’s tight, fussy hand—warned that in rare cases, a monster’s hunger could turn on the Master before completion of the ritual; historically, this had resulted in many deaths before the bond was ever completed.

There were the darker implications, too. That the bond would strip Wednesday of choice, slowly, over years. That the leash she intended for Tyler might loop back around her neck. Wednesday just had to make sure she wouldn’t let that happen. Her stomach knotted, but she didn’t acknowledge the slow creep of fear inside her. This wasn’t the angle she’d have choosen—but it was information. And information was power. Wednesday would wield it, and do it better than others. She trusted herself enough in that.

Wednesday had never been afraid of risks.

She stared at the woodcut again, the crude illustration of a man and a woman joined in sexual congress. It would mean letting Tyler close, unchained, no barriers—all to force him to obey and kneel. It would mean letting his blood mingle with hers. It would mean letting him fuck her.

And if it worked, his voice, his hunger, his violence— she’d be tethered to it, but it would be hers to command. If he ever disobeyed her command, she could snuff out his life like a wick in the dark.

The thought was equal parts intoxicating and dangerous.

“You know,” her mother drawled, leaning on the door frame with a cup of tea in hand, “if you wanted my collection of books, you could always just ask.”

Wednesday froze. She didn’t do anything so profane as flinch, but the urge was there. Things with her mother were… complicated, lately. Ever since she’d returned to Nevermore, everything had been more complicated and her relationship with her mother was perhaps the most knotted rope of all.

She respected her mother’s craft without question. The woman was a force of nature—her hexes legendary, her reputation stretching across the country like a whispered warning, inspiring fear and awe in equal measure. Wednesday much preferred inspiring only fear. She’d grown up watching her mother’s hands at work: grinding herbs into powder with slow, deliberate force, weaving incantations into smoke until the air felt thick enough to drink. That skill was something Wednesday never mocked or dismissed. In fact, she quietly measured her own progress against it, even if she would never admit that out loud.

But respect for the craft didn’t mean obedience to the woman.

She stood up, left the books where they were — she’d already read enough to know what to do.

“Well, this is a pleasant surprise,” Morticia said, looking from the open book to Wednesday. Her voice was calm, smooth, carrying an edge of knowing more than she should. “What brings my Machiavellian hellion spawn breaking and entering into my humble abode today?”

“Classes let out early,” Wednesday lied easily, wandering out to make a quick escape before her mother asked too many questions.

Her mother followed her, silently. Her mother’s way of caring often felt like a stranglehold—layered protections, constant advice, questions disguised as commands. To Wednesday, it wasn’t nurturing; it was surveillance. She had inherited her mother’s cunning, but she’d also inherited her refusal to be handled. The older she got, the more she bristled against anything that smelled like being looked after.

They reached the Greenhouse, the easiest access point to leave the house and make the short journey back to Nevermore grounds. Morticia followed along, until her voice sprang out in a command, “Wednesday, stop. I saw the books you were looking through. If you have questions, perhaps try asking me.”

It was a trap. Her mother saw Wednesday’s independence as recklessness. Wednesday saw her mother’s concern as mistrust. That fundamental mismatch meant every conversation could teeter between banter and battle in the span of a heartbeat. Sometimes, they sparred in words the way duelists might test each other’s reflexes—her mother with sly, amused prodding, Wednesday with cool deflections.

When Wednesday turned around, she found her mother staring with a lifted eyebrow, expectant and curious at once. Along the tables, her mother ran her fingers over the broad leaves of a foxglove and another of a carnivorous plant. She glanced into another bed of flowers, unsurprised to find it littered with Pugsley’s collection of favorite antique hand grenades.

“I’ve been reading up more about the occult,” Wednesday admitted.

“Your favorite bedtime stories since you were four years old,” Morticia acknowledged, a hint of affection and pride. “But there are risks in the type of things you were looking at just now, Wednesday.”

“I know the risks.”

Her mother’s expression cooled, though the acute judgement never fully left her stare. “No, you think you know.”

Wednesday’s fingers tightened at her sides. Her mother already knew too much, and Wednesday needed to defuse it. “This isn’t complicated. It’s academic. I simply want to learn more about the power to wield unfettered control over another individual’s will, overriding all forms of potential choice, crushing the subject’s inner voice until they are nothing more than a subservient lackey bent only to obey my command.”

“Of course,” Morticia replied, easily. “Go on.”

Reluctantly, Wednesday continued, carefully playing the interest off as theoretical. “It is my understanding that there are many ways to go about solidifying a dominant bond.”

“Oh my,” Morticia said. “We really are finally going to have the Talk, aren’t we?”

“The Talk?” Wednesday repeated.

“Sexual satanic rituals,” her mother said, bluntly. “I knew you were coming of age.”

Wednesday repressed a look of dismay at the openness in her mother’s voice.

“Oh, come now, Wednesday. We mustn’t be prudes. Your father and I were barely older than you when we—”

Wednesday reached over and pulled free one of Pugsley’s grenades, pulling the pin immediately and keeping the safety lever compressed. “I will end both of us in an explosive annihilation of self-inflicted doom if you insist on finishing that sentence.”

Morticia made a disapproving frown. “Fine,” she said, clipped, ultimately moving onward. “I will be brief. Two creatures creating a bond requires— proximity, a sharing of themselves. Bonding rituals aren’t just about control. They’re about surrender—more than you’ll be comfortable with, Wednesday.”

“This is purely theoretical, Mother.”

“Of course,” Morticia agreed, a little too indulgently. “But if you’re not careful, you’ll end up with something inside you that changes your whole life.”

“Demonic possession?” Wednesday posited, curious about potential side-effects.

Her mother’s smile widened—sharp and almost wicked. “Or a squealing baby.”

Wednesday was already greatly regretting her life’s existence. “Mother, please, save me your feeble attempts at cautionary tales. I’ve been aware of contraceptive methods ever since I was old enough to bleed.”

Morticia smiled. “Quite right. In any case, even without a demon or a baby, there is always the possibility that you will get a snarling beast in your head, eating your thoughts as if for breakfast. Mating rituals like the one you were reading up on are—” She gave the moment one last dramatic pause, as if punctuating the point. “—unpredictable. Once that link is made, you can’t just cut the cord if it gets messy. Some days a Master will feel their Subject’s hunger as if it’s their own, and some days the Subject will feel every one of their Master’s darker inclinations and desires.”

Wednesday wasn’t entirely unaware of this. There were so many ways this could go wrong, a chief reason for her hesitation.

“Darling,” her mother said, cautiously, studying her intently. “Most people think that such bonding rituals can give you control, but it’s a relationship. You’ll know their hungers. Their fears. The things they dream about when they sleep. You’ll see a glimpse of the madness in their minds, and the dark abyss will stare right back at you — if you’re lucky like your father and I.”

“You and father are traumatically co-dependant,” Wednesday said.

That would never happen with Wednesday, not with anyone. Not even with Tyler.

Few things were more terrifying than ending up like her mother.

Morticia stared back, still too knowing. “A bond like that has its seductive draw.” Her mother’s eyes glittered with bone-dry wit and wisdom. “I’m not here to tell you how to live your life, but—”

“Then don’t.”

Wednesday and her mother exchanged a cool look, a constant clash of wary affection, like two predators who recognized each other as kin but still bared teeth when the other had gone too far. There was rarely such a thing as idle chatter between them.

“Be careful, Wednesday. It’s a mother’s prerogative to be concerned.”

“Is it also her privilege to be hypocritical?”

That struck. Her mother’s expression smoothed out, but her mind was always working. When Wednesday was younger, that intensity of her mother’s intuition had been intoxicating—Wednesday had been eager to learn from the best, impatient to impress and surpass anyone else on the field, especially her mother.

But as she grew older, that same scrutiny upon herself felt less like a lesson and more like control.

“I’ll only say this,” Morticia warned. “Once you invite something to crawl into your soul, into your body, sometimes it doesn’t politely leave when you change your mind. A lover turned stalker turned homicidal maniac is a dangerous thing, and you don’t want him threatening to burn down your bed with you still tied to it if the thought of ever leaving him crosses your mind.”

That sounded specific. “An ex of yours?” Wednesday ventured.

“No, your father again.”

Wednesday nodded.

“It’s a right as a young Addams woman that you choose how this goes,” her mother said sweetly, turning back to her herbs. “Just promise me, if you ever turn theoretical into practical, you’ll use protection.”

Wednesday narrowed her eyes. “Wolfbane oil? A silver talisman dipped in unholy water?”

“With a knife under your pillow,” Morticia added, “and an unbroken circle of salt around your bed. But I wasn’t talking about that.”

Still, Wednesday made a mental list to add that to her provisions.

“These rituals aren’t just sexual congress,” her mother warned. “A beast with two backs is more than just a euphemism.”

“You don’t have to worry about me, Mother.”

A dry laugh escaped across Morticia’s painted lips. “Lately, I feel as if that’s all I’ve been doing. Just remember, complications aren’t always predictable. Things can get messy, and you, my dear — you aren’t particularly adept at the type of mess I’m referring to.”

“I can handle gore and mayhem.”

“Physical intimacy is a new type of devilment you cannot yet grasp until you’ve experienced it,” her mother warned. “One last thing,” her mother smiled without looking up, lost in some distant nostalgic memory. “Make sure your partner always serves your pleasure before theirs. Don’t let them finish without making you come first. Your father knew that from the start, that’s how he slipped past all my defenses—”

Wednesday lobbed the grenade into the air, fully willing to shuffle off this mortal coil and end both their miserable existences if it meant no further commentary from her mother — unfortunately, Lurch was standing nearby. He caught the grenade in his mouth, lips wrapping around the explosive device, and swallowed it down. A second later, the grenade went off in his stomach, and a puff of smoke emerged from his mouth, nose, and ears. He gave a loud belch.

“This conversation is over,” Wednesday declared.

The rain had finally relented.

On her way out, she’d lifted the keys from Lurch’s pocket and the family hearse headlights cut long blades through the mist as Wednesday steered it down the cracked town roads. The fields on either side were empty this time of night, just black expanses that smelled faintly of damp earth. The moon wasn’t full yet, but it was close—fat and pale, hiding behind gauzy clouds that let through just enough light to turn the road silver.

The drive back to the old and withered house Tyler was using wasn’t long, and she kept her gaze ahead, but the prickle at the back of her neck told her she wasn’t alone. A shadow flickered at the corner of her vision—too quick, too deliberate — in the backseat, followed by a soft shift of the cushions.

Wednesday exhaled. Of course. She pulled the hearse over to the side of the road, cutting the engine. The silence was immediate, heavy, and absolute.

“Come out, Agnes,” she said flatly.

There was a shimmer in the air, before Agnes appeared. Her copper hair was braided into two rope-like plaits, swinging forward as she grinned—wide, too wide—eyes glinting like a ferret’s.

“You always catch me these days,” Agnes complained, both annoyed and awed.

“That’s because your amateurish technique at hiding doesn’t work on people who actually pay attention to their surroundings. Uncle Fester was right. You’re obnoxiously loud.”

“I can’t help it if my giddiness can't be contained. You have zero appreciation for how difficult it is to contain my nerves and excitement under these circumstances.”

That was ominous. “Why are you here?”

“I know what you’re up to,” Agnes said in a sing-song tone, leaning forward. Then, with an exaggerated flourish, she produced something from her jacket pocket: a bright roll of condoms. She wiggled it in Wednesday’s direction. “For the bonding ritual. You know, in case you need protection.”

Wednesday stared at her, expression flat as a gravestone. “Get out.”

Agnes grinned. “You’re going to Tyler. I could be your lookout, anticipate your needs if anything goes wrong with the ritual. I even brought back up supplies—”

Wednesday climbed out of the car and circled back to Agnes. “Leave. Now.”

“But—” Agnes said, reluctantly, climbing out and standing on the rough asphalt, “you might need someone to watch your back.”

The idea of someone watching her during a mating ritual was not, Wednesday found, one of her kinks.

“Agnes,” Wednesday stepped closer, voice dropping to a quiet, lethal register. “If I find out you followed me in the next fourty-eight hours, I will ritualistically peel the skin off your bones inch by inch so that your little invisibility trick will be a bygone ability. The only use you’ll have is as a helpful cadaver in an anatomy class where a first year medical student will fumble about learning how to dissect a wide range of your underlying fascia, nerves, blood vessels, and internal organs on your formaldehyde-ridden corpse. Don’t test me.”

Agnes’s smirk faltered, face paling. She took a step back, muttering something under her breath about even getting magnum size condoms, the implications about Tyler’s Hyde body stingingly clear.

“Don’t follow me again,” Wednesday said, turning back to the hearse.

When she glanced in the rearview mirror as she started the engine, the road behind her was empty again—Agnes was already gone, like wind fading into the night.

The rest of the ride was uneventful. The house loomed at the end of the gravel drive, its windows black and still, the air smelling faintly of damp earth and iron. Wednesday slipped inside, the creak of the back door swallowed by the silence.

He was exactly where she’d left him before—on the floor near the cold hearth, wrists chained to the wall, eyes sunken and bruised purple in the dim light. The iron cuffs bit into his wrists, skin raw. But this time, he looked worse. More frayed around the edges. His breathing came slow, deliberate, as though he were holding back something dangerous with each exhalation. His head was bowed, but she could feel his attention prick the moment she stepped into the room like a predator scenting blood.

“You came back,” Tyler said, his voice low, hoarse and rough. “I knew you would.”

Wednesday didn’t answer right away. She walked forward until she could see the sharp planes of his face in the gloom, the way his eyes glimmered—hungry, restless, wrong. She looked around. There was food and water nearby; he’d eaten recently. The rough complexion and sweaty pallor of his skin had other implications.

“I told you I’d come back.”

Tyler nodded, almost to himself. “You did. Some would call that reckless. Tell me, Wednesday, what did you tell yourself was the reason to come back? Sympathy? Pity? Concern for your loved ones—”

“I’m not led about by noble aspirations,” Wednesday corrected him, disdainfully.

He seemed to agree with that. “Then something darker—more than curiosity. The thrill of constant mortal jeopardy can’t be the only thing that draws you to me.”

“Don’t delude yourself into reading more than there is.”

He snorted. “Still resisting the obvious answer.”

“I’ve decided,” she declared, flatly, changing the subject. “While the thought of continued exposure to your rank and prodigious ego fills me with a disgust I usually reserve for children entertainers, I know the risks you run if I leave you without a master. So, I’ll do it. I’ll wrangle your leash.”

For a moment, his restraint slipped. His head lifted slowly, and something feral flickered in his gaze. Relief, yes—but also possession. The faintest smile ghosted across his face. “You ready to accept what this means?” he asked, the words carrying a dangerous weight.

“I know enough,” she said sharply. “Including that the bond works best under a full moon. That’s not until tomorrow night. Which means we should wait.”

The chains rattled as his hands tightened into fists. “Wait,” he echoed, with something like frustration—or dread.

“Unless,” Wednesday added, looking at the pathetic state of him, “you think you can’t hold it together that long?”

He looked away, jaw tight. “Every hour is harder to control the madness. But I can manage, if you keep your distance.”

“Noted,” she said, though she didn’t step back.

They stared at each other across the shrinking gap of air, the pull between them a thing she could almost touch—like static electricity before a storm, tense and charged, threatening to spark into something uncontrollable. The silence was thick, heavy with all the words they wouldn’t say aloud: the bitterness of betrayal, the weight of past judgements and attacks, and the fragile expectation of what was to come — that maybe, just maybe, this reckless pact could hold things together into something at least manageable.

Her eyes flickered, with reluctant appreciation, a flicker of life in the cold fortress she’d built around herself—an ember she fought to smother but couldn’t quite fully extinguish. She saw it reflected in the slight narrowing of his gaze, the way his jaw clenched as he battled the dark urges clawing beneath his skin. There was a raw vulnerability there, masked by feral intensity, a man wrestling with the monster inside and desperate for a lifeline.

Between them hung the thin, fraying thread they’d agreed to tether tomorrow—a fragile tether for all the weight of hatred and fury it contained. Each breath, each heartbeat, seemed to pulse in rhythm with that tenuous bond, the invisible line holding them intertwined.

In that moment, it was clear: whatever came next could be carnage or chaos, but it would change their dynamic forever.

“Even with a leash, I’ll still be a monster,” he warned.

“Monsters don’t change. They just get better at adaptation.”

“It’s the monster that you fell in love with, anyway,” he taunted. “You wouldn’t want me to change too much.”

She treated him with a look of utter contemptible disdain. “That’s your second attempt to entreat me with a sentiment that never existed. I’ve never used the word love in my life. My soul is where things like that go to wither and die. It’ll never be my language, Tyler. When I’m your master, you’ll learn better than to deploy such ridiculous puerile notions either.”

“Ah, but you’re not my master yet. I’ll be teaching you a new language come tomorrow night. So, run along. What you’re going to do now, Wednesday, is leave this place and go back to your dorm, crawl into your bed, safe and warm and tucked away from any danger. And you’re going to spend the entire night thinking about the fact that tomorrow night, I’m going to fuck you so senseless your legs will give out.”

Wednesday stared at him.

His lips twitched, nostrils flaring, as he continued in a slightly deranged drawl, “I’m going to tear you apart in ways you’ve never once imagined. Ruin that you’ve never known, never dreamt of. You think you know the pleasures of pain, Wednesday Addams? I look forward to teaching you a new thing or two.”

She didn’t flinch or move or blink, but it was a near thing, a tight grasp slipping on her control. “Lofty promises,” she proclaimed, as icily as she could manage. “All entirely insipid and uninspirational. Like most teenage boys, I imagine your performance will be deeply disappointing and embarrassingly premature.”

“Sure,” he rasped, lips curled at the edge, still entirely too satisfied with himself. “Tell yourself that as you try to sleep tonight. But you won’t — you couldn’t possibly, because you’ll spend the entire time thinking about me — the things I’m going to do to you. The things you’re going to let me do. The things you’ll beg me for—”

She stepped closer, matching his taunt. “By the end, we’ll see who’s begging who.” A glance, a warning, a promise. “You think just because you were my first kiss that I’ll be blushing and innocent?”

“Innocent, you? Never. But unlike other areas, you have no experience in this, Wednesday.”

“Experience doesn’t equate expertise,” she countered. “Careful not to confuse the two, Tyler. Your ego is already too Hyde-sized.”

“We’ll see,” he promised, smirking, eyes a little too wild.

She turned toward the door. “Hold yourself together until tomorrow—or I’ll walk away, and you’ll be left to rot in your clear descending madness.”

He didn’t answer, but the sound of the chains going taut followed her out. Wednesday’s footsteps echoed softly as she moved up the stairs toward the door, each step measured and deliberate, the weight of what she’d just agreed to pressing down like a stone in her chest. Just before she slipped through the doorway, a flicker of instinct made her pause. She cast a quick glance back, the shadows swallowing her slight figure as she leaned into the dim room once more.

There he was—Tyler—no longer the controlled and arrogant man she’d spoken to moments before. His breath came ragged now, a low, guttural growl curling from deep within his throat. The chains rattled sharply as he shifted, iron cuffs biting into wrists raw and slick with dark, slow-trickling blood.

His eyes caught the faintest gleam—wild, glowing red. Wednesday could almost see the Hyde tearing at the edges of his mind, rending the fragile thread of sanity he clung to so desperately. A snarl, rough and ragged, shattered the suffocating silence.

Tyler slammed a fist against the stone wall, the sharp crack echoing like a gunshot through the quiet. “Not yet. Hold. Hold.” The words were barely his own, a desperate mantra hammered from the last shards of control he had left. But beneath the surface, the beast stirred—restless, ravenous, impatient. If she didn’t follow through, the Hyde would break free—not just from his chains, but from every last thread of reason and restraint.

And if he did, no one she knew would be safe.

Wednesday turned and walked away.

Chapter Text

The moon was already heavy in the sky, pale and swollen, casting its light through the frost-webbed window of her bedroom. On the other side of her dormitory, bathed in every color imaginable, Enid’s bed was empty. A full moon meant she had plans, and Wednesday was thankful Enid would be so preoccupied with her evening that she wouldn’t notice that Wednesday had her own plans. Thing had been harder to shake loose, but one well-timed barb in a tone so severe it could curdle milk had sent him off to Enid’s side. Wednesday felt a rare trickle of remorse at her treatment of Thing, but it was for the best. She could not allow any meddling or interruptions tonight.

Wednesday's fingers moved automatically, curling around the unfamiliar weight of her hearse keys, a spare set she’d made of Lurch’s set so she could have quiet and easy access to the car whenever she needed a ride into town. She plucked them from their hiding spot and moved towards the door, halfway there when she saw it.

The note.

The one Tyler had left her under a speared human heart, bloody and warm. It lay where she’d left it—on the corner of her desk, folded into quarters, edges dried tacky with blood. Tyler’s handwriting crawled across it in uneven lines, a shaky hand that belonged to someone fighting his own body, a time and address to the place where she’d ultimately agreed to become his new master.

Her fingers brushed the paper — and the world slammed sideways.

She gasped as her head snapped back, a white-hot spike of pressure driving through her skull. The room blurred, shadows crawling up the walls, and a cry tore from her throat as black tears began to slip down her cheeks, hot against her frozen skin.

The vision tore into her.

Tyler—free, in his Hyde form. No chains, no restraint. His eyes burned that bloodshot red, his mouth slick with blood. Screams tore the air apart as bodies crumpled in the streets of Jericho, limbs twisted at impossible angles, a line of bodies left torn asunder. He moved too fast, a blur of claws and teeth beneath the full moon. The town’s narrow main street was slick with chaos, store windows broken with littered glass, his rampage illuminated in the moonlight.

He wasn’t hunting out of hunger—he was slaughtering because the Hyde had regained full control and wanted the world to burn.

Her breath tore out of her lungs in a sharp, ragged gasp as the vision spat her back into the present like it had no further use for her.

She became aware, slowly, that she was sprawled on the hardwood, limbs heavy and trembling, her pulse pounding in her ears. Her bedroom swam in her periphery, warped at the edges, and the silence in its wake felt deafening like a scream. The note was still under her hand, but her skin burned with a cold so deep it felt as though frost had threaded itself beneath her veins.

Her hand rose unsteadily to her face. Her fingertips met dampness first, then the strange, familiar tackiness of something thicker than normal tears. When she pulled her hand away, her breath caught knowingly—black streaks glistened across her skin, staining the pale ridges of her fingers like oil.

It had been months since she’d had any visions—weeks since before the coma two months ago when the darkness had swallowed her whole and left her hollow in its wake. She had clawed at every edge of the supernatural she could reach, tried everything under the sun and moon to spark her visions again—charms, spells, whispered bargains—but all she had for her effort was silence.

Depleted, her mother had called her, with a tone of quiet relief, as if some great sickness had finally been purged from Wednesday.

But Wednesday had missed it. Missed the visions like a severed limb, phantom pain and all. Missed the pull of power, the future clawing at the inside of her skull, even when it left her broken on the floor. And now it had come back—not to warn her of some distant threat she might prepare for, but to thrust into her head the vivid certainty of slaughter. The rampage Tyler would commit—his freedom, his hunger, the gleam in his eyes— tonight. The full moon from her vision, luminous and pitiless, was the same as the one hanging in the sky now — Wednesday was certain.

Her heart was already hammering before she realized she was moving. She dropped the keys into her pocket, but her course had changed—no longer Tyler’s makeshift house and chained basement.

If the vision was true—and they usually were—then she didn’t have the luxury of the ritual, the binding, the safety of planning. Tyler was out there, and if she didn’t find him before the Hyde had his fill, there would only be a pile of dead bodies too big for her to look the other way.

The hearse tires skidded hard as she took the corner into the main street, the back end of the car fishtailing across the black pavement. The beams of her headlights cut through the darkness, slicing across a sudden, frantic scatter of movement ahead across Jericho’s main streets.

Three people—two men and a woman—were pressed flat against the wall of the closed hardware store. They were pale in the glare of her headlights, faces frozen in that slack glassy look that lived halfway between shock and the certainty of death.

The fourth figure was no man.

The Hyde stood between them and the open street, a hulking shadow made solid. He was massive—as feral as she remembered, but somehow skinnier and more gaunt. His form stretched tall and ominous, built for killing. Along his spine stood a ridge of severe discs protruding underneath his gray skin, matted with something darker — blood. Muscles rippled beneath the thick skin, each step making the sinew of them roll and tense in ways that no human body could manage. He wasn’t just moving—he was measuring. Head low, shoulders swaying with the deliberate patience of something that knew its prey couldn’t run fast enough, couldn’t fight back.

Wednesday slammed the brakes and the car skid to a stop, the tires squealing one last protest as she wrenched the door open. The cold knifed into her lungs, but her voice was louder, sharper. “MOVE!” she barked, boots hitting the asphalt hard. “Do you myopic idiots want to die? Go— now!”

The three of them just stood frozen, trembling statues pinned to the brick by their own terror.

But the Hyde turned at her voice.

Red eyes met hers — and stared with a look of recognition that Wednesday couldn’t fully describe or appreciate. The lamplight caught on his teeth—too long, stained too red. Then the Hyde snarled, deep enough for Wednesday to feel the vibrations in her chest, a sound that seemed to scatter the heat from the air around her. She could admit to herself that the thrill of the moment elicited more than just a primal response of fight or flight. Addams did not feel fear, and they certainly did not have the normal response to it.

“Move!” She strode toward the civilians, keeping Tyler’s attention riveted to her like the draw of gravity, putting herself at the back of the lot, keeping the Hyde’s spine to the civilians. The gray shape loomed in the dark, and she snapped at the would-be victims. “Run, you useless sacks of unprocessed meat!”

Her words finally cracked through whatever spell fear had woven around them. The older man stumbled first, dragging the woman with him, the younger man finally tearing himself free to follow. They bolted down the side street, vanishing into the darkness without so much as a backward glance. Wednesday didn’t watch them go. Her eyes were locked on the Hyde now. His red gaze fixed on her, and the hush between them felt like it had narrowed to a chilled silence. The air smelled of iron and something electric—like the moment before lightning struck.

The shift in him was sudden, the kind of violence that snapped, surging toward her in a blur of black, claws scraping asphalt, fury exploding in his onslaught.

Wednesday didn’t move.

Every muscle screamed at her to run, but her boots held fast to the frozen ground, ready to meet him head-on even if it shattered every bone she had left to break. He hit her like a wrecking ball. The air left her lungs in the brutal impact, the world exploding in shock of white pain as her shoulders slammed into the pavement. A sharp crack echoed up her spine, her bones protesting the impact, but it was nothing compared to the weight suddenly bearing down on her. Hot breath washed over her face, fanning across her cheek in ragged bursts. His teeth hovered at her throat—too close, too sharp, the kind of proximity where one wrong twitch could split her throat open.

Every nerve screamed at her to thrash, to push, to fight, but she didn’t move—not because she was frozen with fear, not because the sheer mass of him held her like a crucifixion nail driven deep into the earth — but because Wednesday recognized what she had to do now. How she had to reestablish the connection between them from one of hunter-and-prey to another of servant-and-master.

Her heart battered against its cage, wild and useless, but she kept firm. “Tyler!” she spat the name, forcing it past the adrenaline burning her throat. “Release me,” she ordered. Her fingers gripped fistfuls of his elongated throat, dragging his gaze to hers. Red eyes blazed, animal and unthinking, but she refused to look away. “You know me. You answer to me now.”

The growl tore through him again, deeper, angrier, his jaws snapping just beside her face. She sensed blood—someone else’s—the feel of it was tacky against the skin under her fingers.

Her own fear screamed in her skull, but she locked it down, making her voice harden to steel. “You answer to me — Tyler, his hyde — I don’t care which face you wear, you answer to me.”

Above her, the pair of red bulging eyes didn’t blink.

“Stand down,” she told him—firm, sharp. Not pleading.

The snarl looming in her face deepened, vibrating through his chest into hers, but she didn’t flinch. If she gave him fear, he’d take it. He’d bathe her in her blood, and it said something entirely gruesome and indecent in Wednesday that the thought pooled slick arousal between her thighs. But she was beginning to see some human awareness emerging in those red beady eyes—not just a molten pit, but something growing in restraint. The growl raked over her and then dropped into silence.

Still, she didn’t break eye contact, only pressing her palm flat against the shuddering rise of his chest. “Stand down, Tyler.”

For a heartbeat, there was nothing—no recognition, no mercy, only the animal. Then his breathing hitched, just slightly, as if a hook had caught somewhere deep inside him. The monstrous weight pressing down on her loosened just a fraction, muscles quivering, the tension snapping like a thread stretched too thin.

Then, beneath the Hyde’s snarl, she heard it: a ragged intake of breath, human and frail, breaking through the beast’s fury.

Before Wednesday could catch her breath or respond, the Hyde’s monstrous form blotting out everything else from her vision — there was a change, a shift in the very air surrounding them. The shadows seemed to warp around the beast, doing dreadful beautiful things to the form above her. The skin along his jaw rippled as his face began to shift, bone and sinew breaking and reshaping painfully. His red bulging eyes darkened, swirling with confusion and panic. Fur receding into skin, claws transforming into the shape of a broad hand, sinewy veins of a flexing forearm, all with an iron grip still over her, keeping her crushed to the ground. Her body stayed pinned underneath his heavier and far more substantial weight, until finally—he collapsed into himself, onto her, folding down into the trembling ragged form she recognized as human.

Afterwards, they were a sweaty tangled pile of limbs.

Tyler’s pale face came into full view. His features were dimly illuminated by the moonlight and the single hanging streetlight nearby, and he was almost naked, covered in the tattered remains of a trouser that only half clung off his hips, covered in splotches of blood — though none of it appeared to be his own. He only used her moment of sheer stifled shock as an opportunity to press the hardness of him hauntingly into the cradle of her thighs.

He was aroused, and — to her evident surprise — so was she.

“What are you going to do now, Wednesday?” he said, voice low and ragged.

Wednesday knew he meant a number of things, his tone suggestive— something weighted, a moment more than a mere existential threat caught between them, the weight of his hardness heavy against the wet center of her. There was something feral in his gaze, in his ominous insinuating tone, something that only served to fuel Wednesday’s attraction to him — she had always found feral things beautiful, found the darkness more enticing than any shards of pretty dancing lights.

“Get up,” she ordered him, pleased her voice held evenly. “We need to get out of here before Sheriff Santiago arrives with enough gunpowder and manpower to knock out ten of you.”

He climbed off her reluctantly, each movement slow and measured. She didn’t speak, especially when he extended his hand towards her to help her up — only returned a flat scrutinizing glare — then took up his offer begrudgingly, placing her hand in his, letting him pull her upright.

Together, they climbed into her family hearse and slipped into the darkness beyond the shattered streetlights and broken glass, the wail of sirens ringing in the air diminishing distantly behind them.

As they moved towards the roads out of town, Wednesday’s voice cut through the silence, low and sharp. “We have to perform the ritual — tonight.”

It was the only way she could keep control over him, hold the Hyde back before it consumed him entirely.

“I’m not arguing with that,” Tyler replied, almost belligerent. His jaw tightened, gaze flickering with frustration and something else. “The house I was hiding in? It’s compromised. The sheriff’s probably already sent her men that way. Neighbors called in because of the noise—I started the rampage there, couldn’t hold back any longer. We can’t go back there.”

Wednesday paused, weighing the risk, then nodded grimly. “Then we find somewhere else. Somewhere no one would expect.”

She looked around the barren outskirts, eyes settling on the road sign that led southeast to Cobham woods just beyond the river. A cluster of abandoned cabins where methheads and squatters nestled outside of the town’s edge. Wednesday was, of course, entirely familiar with it because it was the sight of where Joseph Crackstone had burned so many alive, almost including Goody Addams. Wednesday had visions there, and Tyler had also attacked her there as the Hyde. There were many horrifying memories there, lurking in the dark.

There was also more than one cabin up there. Good for a hideout.

“Cobham Woods,” she determined. “It’s isolated.”

“You wanna fuck at the sight of a massacure?” Tyler said, a huff of a disbelieving laugh. “Of course.”

He didn’t argue, though.

Wednesday pressed on the gas, quickening their pace, racing towards the woods.

She dropped the heavy rattle of chains onto the floor of the cabin, and it kicked up a cloud of dust. “Put these on,” she said, voice low but unyielding.

Tyler’s eyes flicked over his shoulder, dark and defiant. “No way. I’m done with chains.”

“You tore through the town,” she snapped, stepping closer, the weight of her stare pinning him. “Did you kill anyone before I got there?”

He swallowed hard, hiding the grimace twisting his features by turning away. “I don’t remember.”

“That’s not a good enough answer.”

“It’s the only one I have,” he snapped. A heavy exhale escaped him, the silence stretching thick between them. “I… I can’t remember it all anymore. It’s slipping—before, I had control, I could hold it back. Now? When I’m the Hyde, it’s all a red haze.”

“Exactly why you need to be chained,” Wednesday said, her voice cold steel.

He shook his head slowly, eyes locking with hers, fierce and raw. “What’s the point? You’re supposed to control me, Wednesday. You need to hold me without a leash. You stopped me back there, didn’t you?”

She didn’t flinch. “All the more reason I’ll keep you tied until that bond is complete—”

He cut her off, voice low but firm. “I listened. Even the Hyde listened to you. You don’t need iron to keep me compliant.” His gaze hardened, refusing to let her argue. “There’s a creek out back. I’m going to wash the blood off. You—” his eyes flicked to the bag of supplies she’d pulled from the car “—get the ritual ready.”

“And I should trust you to just come back rather than scamper away like a wild animal?”

Something darkened the frame of his face at her taunting words. He stepped closer, only a single step. “ Why would I run away? I have what I want right in front of me. Even the beast is desperate to taste you.” He swallowed hard, fingers clenched into fists at his sides. “Get yourself ready,” he breathed, harshly, and looked to revel in the quick swallow of her throat that she tried so hard to hide. “I won’t be able to restrain myself much once we begin.”

“Stop trying to intimidate me,” Wednesday offered flatly, a small rebuke. “It’s not going to work.”

Tyler didn’t reply to that. He just nodded. “I’ll be back soon.”

She didn’t reply, only watched him retreat, sensing that this moment alone was a fragile tether holding his sanity together—not his intolerable pride. She could see the cracks in his facade, the tenuous hold he had over himself. The cracks were widening.

Left in the quiet, she set to work. She lit a match in an oil lamp to burnish the place. The cabin’s only bed sagged under the weight of years, the mattress stained and bloated with mold that curled along the edges like dark, grasping fingers—decay incarnate. The air around it hung thick and sour, a musty heaviness that seemed to seep from the very wood itself. This place had rotted, but it still stood. Wednesday wouldn’t lie in any bed here, but the floor was manageable. She unfolded a crisp black sheet, its fabric stark and unblemished, and spread it across the creaking floorboards. The wood groaned beneath her hands, whispering secrets of long-forgotten lives as she smoothed the sheet flat, making a flimsy island in the midst of all the rot.

With practiced precision, her fingers traced a circle of salt around the sheet’s edges. The salt represented a boundary between worlds, a fragile barrier against whatever darkness might try to press in or escape out. From a weathered leather satchel, she retrieved a small pouch of ash—blackened remnants of burnt rowan wood, sacred and sharp, known in old lore to bind spirits and shackle beasts alike. Guided by the arcane instructions she’d scavenged from all those ancient dust-choked tomes, Wednesday carefully drew pagan symbols of binding within the circle. The ash lines curled and twisted into a pattern both beautiful and terrible, weaving power into the very floor beneath her.

The last pieces — a chalice to drink from, which had already been filled with the other necessary ingredients of the spell, and two blades. Silver knives: one for protection and one for service in the altar of their ceremony. She placed the first, larger and more deadly, still sheathed, underneath the black sheets — easily accessible if Wednesday found herself in need of the blade. It was poisoned at the tip with a toxin that could — if not stop the Hyde’s heart entirely — at the very least slow it down. The second blade, ornate and ceremonial, was placed atop the sheet; they’d need it to deliver on the blood elements of the bonding ritual.

Everything was set.

The only thing she didn’t need was the roll of condoms that Agnes had left behind in her car. Wednesday had an IUD implanted ages ago, and she wasn’t concerned about Tyler’s sexual history because she’d long ago broken into Willow Hill’s medical and psychiatric records and read up about everything on him. Not just that he had been cleared of venereal diseases, but the notes she’d read in Dr. Fairburn’s neat handwriting that spoke of his rabid obsession with Wednesday.

The patient continues to exhibit pronounced fixation on Subject W.A. [full name redacted for privacy]. This fixation has progressed beyond standard retaliatory or associative interest commonly observed in similar forensic profiles of outcasts. Instead, it demonstrates hallmarks of obsessive compulsion, characterized by persistent and escalating fixation upon the subject.

In multiple sessions, I have noted a distinctive physiological response in the patient when discussing W.A.—heightened and increased autonomic activity, and agitation consistent with both sexual excitement and predatory anticipation. While such patterns are not uncommon in patients with violent pathology, the intensity and singular focus here is atypical.

The patient’s discourse is dominated by references to W.A., with intrusive content interwoven into violent fantasies. Of note, he articulates these not as hypothetical desires, but as inevitabilities—events he believes will occur in future contact. There is an unusual absence of competing interests or goals; all thought pathways appear to loop back to W.A., regardless of therapeutic intervention or conversational redirection.

The sudden echo of heavy footsteps fractured the silence behind her, each step a drumbeat of looming confrontation. She didn’t turn. The ritual space was ready—waiting for what was to come. So was she.

A lengthy silence fell as she felt his stare at her back, scrutinizing in its silence.

“Did you think about me last night, Wednesday?” he asked eventually, voice low – a little tease. “Like I predicted you would?”

She refused to answer him. Refused to supply him with the truth — refused to blush; refused to afford him any more reasons to gloat or preen in arrogance that was hardly entirely deserved. It didn’t matter that he was right, that she’d spent the entire night restless, unable to sleep, too agitated by his words, his taunts, his promise of what he’d do to her.

"Tell me you touched yourself last night," he prodded, low. "Admit you thought of me in bed."

“There’s that grandiose estimate of your own self-worth standard of any stereotypical psychopathetic narcissistic personality. You’re such a classic DSM-5 definition, it’s a wonder why Dr. Fairburn had any difficulty treating you.”

She heard him step up behind her, but Wednesday refused to turn around, keeping her spine to him. Then he pressed that firm column of his body up against her back, and Wednesday stopped breathing entirely because it was no longer an assumption, the intimate knowledge that he was stark nude assaulting her senses; she could feel the full length and breadth of his naked body, the hard lines of his chest, the flex of the muscles with every exhale.

He was hard again, at her backside — and that inspired another wicked flush of warmth in her.

“You didn’t answer the question,” he noted.

Was he playing with her like she was just a wide-eyed virgin running away from him? Some smokey-eyed ingenue fumbling over cobblestone in heels that comically slowed her escape? And he was just taking his time in pursuit of her, following in easy loping strides after her. As if any such thing would ever happen to Wednesday Addams.

She very much wanted to inflict violence at the conceit inherent in his voice. “I slept last night like I always do — like the dead.”

She felt the prickling at the back of her neck of his intent gaze, a hunger that seemed to give her just enough space only to heighten her anticipation before he pounced. His heavy breath tickled her ear, now no longer smelling like blood and bits of meat, but now surprisingly a hint of mint — she wondered if he’d gone scavenging through the plants out back, found something just to freshen up for her. It didn’t make much of a difference to Wednesday, a born deviant who didn’t shirk foul sights or pungent orders.

Except — nothing had ever inspired any of the things that she currently felt, fighting off an uncontrollable shiver as she felt his hands lightly at her sides, fingers tracing up her arms with a featherlight touch, gooseflesh raking across her skin in his wake. He was toying with her, but as much as she tried to deny it his touch inspired a riot of sensations, a quickening pulse.

Despite herself, she knew her nerves were taking control.

“Really?” he said, unconvinced by her deadpan demeanor. Wednesday didn’t turn around, but she could practically feel the outline of his smirk, behind her. “I thought of you last night,” he admitted, almost blithely if it weren't for the low rasp underneath the words. “Can you blame me if I want to know if you took the same pleasure that I did?”

She refused to show any hitch or arrest in breathing. “Once again, I seem to occupy more space in your brain than you occupy in mine.”

“Yeah? And why again have you agreed to tie yourself to me?”

She finally turned around, and Tyler stood under the moonlight in his full naked glory, unabashed and proud. Her eyes roamed without restraint — flat, clinical — but he was so close by in proximity that she could have traced the hardlines of his muscles with her tongue if she’d wanted. His chiseled chest, his ridiculous abs, the enticing V-shape muscle above the ridge of his hips, and down further below, to his manhood on display — it should have been embarrassing that Wednesday found such conventional beauty attractive.

There were only a few scars littered across his body, nothing that much marred the naked expanse of him — but she felt her throat go annoyingly dry as she finally lifted her gaze from his body to his face. Instead of the smug arrogance she expected to find in him, so full of himself at the sight of her outright studying his body, even in that practiced cold stare that spoke of a clinical detachment, she found only hunger reflected in his gaze. Dark, wanting, lingering danger. The Hyde wasn’t in control, but his madness still lurked behind Tyler’s cravings.

She wondered what it would take for Tyler to lose control under these circumstances. Probably not much.

“I’m going to become your master,” she pointed out, an important distinction, one he seemed to want to underplay. “This isn’t an equal exchange, Tyler. Need I remind you that I’m holding your leash like an owner does her pet.”

“Not the way I’d put it,” Tyler replied, evenly. “But unlike you, I’ve done this before.”

“Sex or submitting to the will of a master?”

“Both,” Tyler answered, bluntly. “Though admittedly not at once.”

She nodded. For all she didn’t understand the dynamics of Thornhill’s control over him, she knew it hadn’t been sexual in nature.

Before she had even given voice to the thought, he was pressing forward again, instantly crowding what little space she had, hand curving around the base of her skull to hold her. His palm cradled her jaw, fingers crawling up to her ear. In other circumstances, this same hand could have crushed her skull in a single clenched fist. She didn’t try to analyze why that turned her on; it was just an accepted appetite that Wednesday was not surprised to feel the bite of.

His eyes softened, just a fraction. “Did you ever think to ask,” he said, “if any of what I said or did before — the way I acted around you before — was real?”

Wednesday froze, staring up at him, feeling a host of conflicting emotions. A bite of anger, shame, humiliation — as she remembered how thoroughly he’d fooled her into believing he was just a normie, a cute boy who had feelings for her. Looking back, Wednesday could never forgive herself for falling for something so prosaic, so cliché. It hadn’t been as nauseatingly mundane as all that, not once the secret of his Hyde was out, but that hadn’t meant she could refuse the impulse that had taken over her to let a teenage boy affect her the way Tyler had done. Crawling his way past all her high walls and stark defenses, toppling her protests, spearing her objections open like a stake through the heart.

“It wasn’t all lies,” he told her, pressing his unfair advantage while he loomed over her, kissably close. His gaze darted from her eyes to her mouth, darkening. “What I felt—”

“I don’t care,” she told him, stiffly.

This wasn’t about emotions or sentiment. It was a practical arrangement, a neat solution to a complicated equation where the death of her loved ones hung in the balance. Wednesday was being efficient — cold hard math.

The best way to defeat a Hyde was to become his master.

“You may have the rest of the world fooled with your little unflinching act of cold-hearted cruelty," he breathed sharply, his lips hovering over hers. “But you don’t fool me, Wednesday Adda—”

She surged up to kiss him, if only to shut him up.

His lips were certain as he responded, licking open her mouth, fire meeting gasoline as he clutched bruisingly at her waist. A long thorough slide of his tongue followed, the taste rich with him. One hot open-mouthed kiss slipped into another, then into another. He took over her senses, blotted out everything else. She could feel the naked press of his body against hers, and it was intoxicating as it was bold in its unfamiliarity.

He didn’t allow any space between them, affording her no room for the hesitation of the inexperienced. There was little finesse to the embrace but his pure hunger, the facade of control slipping away entirely, all pretense forgotten. His mouth was messy and vehement, crossing against hers like a clash of blades, a hint of vengeance in his claiming kiss that thrilled Wednesday’s dark heart.

When she bit his lower lip hard enough to bleed, he made a sound, a small groan of need, and it went through her like liquefied fire. Once he was certain she wouldn’t pull away, Tyler let go of her hair and face and began touching her wherever he pleased. There was an element of abandon in this, a release, like he’d finally been given freedom to indulge in his basest desires — a feeling that Wednesday could only reciprocate. This was nothing like the other kisses she’d shared with him — and she was gladdened by the facade being cast off. There was no pretense to this, no lies.

She was not soft, and he was not gentle.

Instead, his fingers twisted in the scalp of her hair like he could not stop himself from pouring everything into the embrace – his longing, his hunger for her, even his anger. Hands moved from her face, to her waist, skimming her sides, greedy and possessive, not an ouch of hesitation to feel her up where she was already growing heated for him. His touch was restless against her, groping, sometimes too tight — a bruising force. She made another little noise at that, and his hands fell to cup her ass and press her firmly against the now-solid ridge of his cock. It heated her blood like fire.

She hadn’t been aware of it, entirely swept up in his embrace, but he’d already begun the process of removing her clothes. The Nevermore Academy school uniform was nothing if not pragmatic, always a line of skirts, shirts, and coats that every female and a few non-binaries wore. The black and gray pinstriped coat was undone and shrugged off underneath his roving hands, the white collar shirt untucked from her skirt, rolled up and then yanked wide open at the collar — not even bothering with the buttons, as Tyler tore them loose with a wrench of his hands. Underneath she had on a modest black bra, to match her black underwear, her black skirt, her black stockings, her black shoes.

Tyler pushed off the tattered pieces of her shirt over her shoulders, and moved to plant kisses down her throat, across her exposed collarbone, through the valley between her breasts. His fingers played with the material of her bra with a certain flavor of mock civility given the treatment he’d rendered her shirt. The pads of his fingers tucking under the wires of her bra, cupping her flesh and kneading them possessively, before he fumbled for the clasp and took it off entirely.

His hot mouth immediately covered a nipple in a sharp wet suckle, running a wide hand across her arching back, smoothing a large palm over the frame of her hips, dragging it upwards to her ribs, skimming over the sides of her breasts. Wednesday felt that like a livewire current was running through her body everywhere he touched, bowing her back towards him.

Her fingers threaded through his soft brown hair, clenching in a fist. Then, “Wait,” Wednesday demanded, abruptly.

Tyler halted, gaze dark, flashing up to meet her eyes with a question.

Wednesday reached down and grabbed the ceremonial knife. Without breaking eye contact, Wednesday knelt within the circle, the black sheet stark beneath her knees, the air heavy with the scent of salt and ash. She held the ritual dagger—a slender blade of blackened steel, its hilt wrapped in worn leather. Without hesitation, she turned the blade toward herself. The metal bit into the pad of her thumb, sharp and cold, parting flesh with an almost reverent ease. A bead of crimson welled instantly, fat and glistening, before sliding down to drop into the silver chalice at her side. The sound it made—a soft, wet tap—felt obscenely loud in the cabin’s stillness.

Tyler had loomed tall over her kneeling form, but then seemed to realize his part, too. He didn’t flinch as he dropped to his knees in front of her, bringing them to equal height. When she took his hand, his eyes locked on hers, restless in the dim light. The blade kissed his skin, and blood bloomed there too—hot, vivid, surprisingly human. She tipped his hand over the chalice, watching the two shades of red mingle in the shallow pool.

Then she lifted the cup in both hands. “Drink,” she told him.

She handed the chalice over. Tyler’s jaw tightened. Without breaking eye contact, he pressed the rim to his lips and drank. She took her turn next, drinking too, swallowing the bond with their mixed blood. The metallic tang flooded her tongue, thick and warm, sinking into her like a poison.

Wednesday began to speak, her voice low and deliberate, the words ancient and heavy: "By salt and ash, by blood and bone, I claim what stands before me. By the breath of life and the slice of death, I bind your will to mine. Until the end or by my decree, you are tethered to me."

He repeated the words, his voice deeper, rougher—yet carrying the same undeniable weight, ending in, “ Until the end of all things, I am tethered to you, Master.” The only three real changes which Wednesday noted simultaneously: the possessive voice, the omission of the bond ending by Wednesday’s decree, and the single word attached at the end — Master. It was enough to make the oath binding.

The air in the circle tightened, almost humming, and the ash symbol at their feet seemed to shift with the power of their vow. Even the flame of the single lamp guttered, shadows crawling up the walls at something unseen.

Tyler’s pulse thudded wildly in the cords of his neck, his hands curling into fists as if bracing for impact. He swayed once, a ripple of tension running the length of him, and then he froze—every muscle drawn tight, like a predator scenting something it couldn’t see.

Wednesday felt it, too.

The bond was not a clean, gentle thread—it was a hook buried deep, raw and unyielding. His presence pressed against her mind like a heavy hand, a strange double-sensation of self and other colliding. There was a moment where her heartbeat wasn’t entirely hers anymore.

For a fraction of a second, she felt the echo of his thoughts—fleeting, jagged images of running under a black sky, the metallic tang of prey on his tongue, the intoxicating pull of violence. The Hyde, rising to the surface of his mind, meeting the force of Wednesday’s insatiable curiosity and intense awareness. It lifted its head, staring back at her through Tyler’s green eyes, and it seemed to grin — as if in victory, as if in recognition.

Then the image from her mind was gone.

“You better know what you’re doing, Wednesday,” Tyler warned, tightly.

“Bit late for caution now,” she returned.

She curled her hand into his hair, angling his head, slotting his lips back to hers where he belonged, where she needed him. He groaned against her lips, pressing against her everywhere, the remnants of her uniform doing nothing to keep the onslaught of him away from her. His hands clutched tightly into her sides, pressing her closer, until she could feel— yes. The tremor that rushed through Wednesday’s veins when he rutted against her parted thighs, his obvious desire skidding perfectly against her cunt, her clit, lighting her up like fire — there were no adequate words for her to describe it, and Wednesday had always prided herself on her talent with words.

“Lay back,” he told her, stripping her skirt off, restless to get her the rest of the way naked. “I already told you,” he grunted, baring her legs one firm tug at a time. “The beast wants to taste you.”

Before, she wouldn’t have known if he meant devouring her alive in an act of cannibalism or an act of passion. Now, she was certain. He slid his hand between her legs, forcing her slender frame to open up to him. His thumb found her wet underwear and hooked underneath it, jerked her waistband down, his hand firm against her in a blink, giving her pressure, friction, exactly where she needed it. He gave a groan of approval at the damp curls between her legs, at the wetness he found. He planted both hands around her knees and pried them further open, keeping her knees parted —presented, as if on display. She could feel the weight of his favorable gaze between her thighs, the animal in him flickering to the surface beneath the savagery of his eyes.

Then, circles, slow and then urgent with the pad of his thumb, exactly how she liked it. It was so easy, perhaps too easy, the duality of his thirst, his fingers flicking her clit, making her wet and moaning.

“You have no idea, Wednesday,” he sighed her name like a deep regret. “I’ve been thinking about this for so long.” He tipped his head forward and pressed his mouth over the neatly trimmed hair above her mound. “The first time I saw you, so resolute and focused,” a lick, the flat pad of his tongue across her soaked entrance. “Every time afterwards, so curious about the big bad monster in the woods,” he teased, using his thumb to spread her open a bit more and brushing the tip of his tongue across her clit. “So singularly dedicated to my destruction.”

Then, finally satisfied with his fill of looking at her cunt, he finally moved with full confidence and focus. His mouth, licking up her center — a sharp flame. His tongue, flicking across her clit. His fingers, wide and warm, spreading her open.

From that moment onward, her clever tongue and witty quips all wiped out, his lips playing a rather devastating effect on her intellect. The abnormal stagger in Wednesday’s acumen gave way to bliss, relief, sheer hot-blooded desire. She was defenseless beneath the delirious onslaught. Any remaining thoughts dispersed in a burnt flash of startlement as he pushed in with two long fingers, a sudden breach. She moaned, unable to help herself this time, the sensation so new, so much bigger than her own fingers or any of the other paraphilia she’d ever used before.

She moved again, grinding her hips into his face, shamelessly chasing her pleasure. His hand swiftly came up, his long arm a far reach, cupping her firmly around her throat until the pressure threatened her airway. It ignited a feverish spike of pleasure — the prospect of pain, choking — but he only used the pressure to keep her still, pressed to him and unable to pull away; she shuddered against his lips, his mouth greedy and filthy at her cunt, though the pace of his attention went choppy when her hips stuttered against him and again.

His groan made it abundantly clear he liked this almost as much as her, that he was equally caught up in the moment. The suckling became a scrape of teeth, threatening to bite her at her most intimate place — and she gasped and came just like that, a tightly pulled band finally snapping, flinging her into a release with the torment of his tongue.

She convulsed in a twitch of uncontrollable spasms, long and hard, mouth falling open, toes curling.

“Fuck, Wednesday,” he said, muttering in delirium at the sight of her, his thumb persistent on her clit, giving her a little aftershock, a little wash of vibrating energy, that sent her flying again.

When she finally came back down, it was to find him already slotted firmly against her entrance, soaking his long cock on the juices of her arousal. She couldn’t help the way she squirmed against him, completely unthinking, watching him stroke himself once or twice in his hand, feeling the rumble of his groan as he pressed against her so fast, it made her head spin.

The shock of his intrusion was a thing done without mercy, without a moment of pause to give her breath — just a barrage of sensations, almost violent in his thrust.

Wednesday groaned, and even still, her body did not allow him the victory of that charge without resistance. His incursion was earned, inch by inch, each retreat and stroke back in giving way more and more, battering down her defenses with that singularly focused drive of his hips. Sensation became a mongrel of pleasure and pain, a searing stretch that burned and pillaged, piercing through her core. She felt sensation along every nerve ending in her body, until the only thought left in her head was how full she was of him when she took him in to the hilt.

Tears welled in the corner of her eyes, and she blinked blearily up at him.

There was a terrible pressure inside her, and she could only think he was making it both better and worse at the same time.

“Do you like that, Wednesday?” he asked her, articulating on a rough thrust back into her. “Do you like the way I fucked you open?”

She groaned. “You—you talk an awful lot for a man begging me to master him,” she told him, trying to regain full coherence; it had never been more challenging in her life. “I’ve decided, the only—the prudent way to remind you of our evolving dynamics is to remind you who’s in charge. You’re not going to come until I tell you to— do you understand, Tyler?”

He groaned, long and undone, slamming his hips into hers.

“Answer me,” she pressed.

“Fine,” he hissed.

“Fine, what?”

A deathly glare, even as his eyes flashed in approval. “Fine, master.”

She would have gloated more — but then he adopted a fast and hard rhythm immediately, a brutal pace built all at once. Ruination threatened the horizon until her mouth fell open and stuttered breathes were fucked out of her with every savage stroke.

Wednesday — always so used to being in control, always so in full possession of her faculties — trembled and shook under the onslaught. It wasn’t enough for Tyler, though. Even with the totality of his bombardment, he needed to claim more. He dropped a hand to her neck, angling her face up in a rough grip to meet him when he devoured her mouth in a rough kiss. Harsh and bruising, she could not focus on one thing — his tongue or his cock — both invading her, both taking over her senses.

Wednesday didn’t shrink away from the blitz, either; wound her legs around his driving hips, feet crossed at his back, encouraging a rougher take, greedy for the bite of pleasurepain. When he tore away from her mouth, he only turned her head to the side to give him better access to her throat. Suckles and scraping teeth, then, no doubt leaving behind a colorful contusion that would molten her throat in a trichrome array of bruises.

She squeezed her eyes shut, but that only angered Tyler. “Don’t,” he barked, sharp and biting. “You don’t get to hide from this, Wednesday. Not me, not ever again. You can’t fucking hide from this. You let me in — into your cunt, into her body, into your mind. I can feel what’s going on in that brain of yours, Wednesday. Can you feel me?”

She could — his desire, his devotion, his utter obsession and possession of her. It was all a heady cocktail, a toxic clash of his worst inclinations meeting hers, because she was no better. She wanted him — all of him. His submission, his chaos, his searing kiss, his frantic fucking — his atttention focused upon her to the exclusion of all else.

Their appetites were equally matched, spinning out in spiraling madness, diametrically opposed only in their desire to dominate.

“Harder,” she told him, fiercely, snagging him by the neck, bringing him closer. “You call this fucking? I still have feeling in my legs, and I seem to recall the promise of you fucking me so senseless my legs would give out.”

A deep stroke followed. “That’s it, Wednesday,” he told her, mockingly. “Call me out while pretending you’re not about to come on my cock like you’re a helpless cumslut for me. I can feel you fluttering.”

She was — close to another shattering brink, eyes welling with tears as the feeling inside her built to an explosion. Over her, panting, grunting, he seemed driven to make her come; the sight of him almost looked more desperate for it than her — sweat-damped hair flopping over the frame of his face, his arms stretched out on either side of her as he took her until there was nothing but sparks bursting across her skin, the thick taste of his name choking up her throat as she came.

He kept fucking her through it, and beyond. “See?” he gave her a half-grin, his hair disheveled. “I knew you’d sound pretty when you screamed for me.”

She groaned, hand trailing the sweaty ridges of his abdomen, down the dip of his hipbone, watching their bodies slot together in a way that spoke of pleasurable violence. Wednesday’s mind blanked, only a torrent of desire—for a fraction of a second, she felt the echo of his thoughts—familiar fleeting, jagged images of running under a black sky, the metallic tang of prey on his tongue, the intoxicating pull of violence.

He inhaled sharply, his gaze snapping to hers, eyes reddening. “Did you get off last night to the thought of me fucking you like this?” he asked, grunting. “Or did you fuck your little fingers until they pruned to the idea of the Hyde taking you?”

Wednesday groaned, and knew what that glint of red madness meant in his eyes, the harbinger of his beast arising.

He breathed hard, and even as he fucked her, he rolled his shoulders as though trying to shake something off. “It’s—it’s in my head,” he muttered, his voice low, edged with a mix of something like fear and anger. “You’re in my head, too.”

The words hung between them, tasting like blood and inevitability. She was in his head — she could sense the rise of an appetite wholly the Hyde. The urge to rip her apart, to feast on her blood, to taste her and take her.

So, Wednesday flipped the script.

Wrapping her legs around him, catching him by surprise by utilizing all those sparring lessons — until she had them flipped and found herself seated on top of him.

“So easily distracted,” she said, looking down. “So easily conquered.”

The sharp line of his jaw tightened and he made to retake control with his brute Hyde strength. Except before the other telltale signs of his transformation could take hold, she only planted a hand against his chest and told him, “heel,” and he halted, mid-transformation.

He lay flat against the ground, panting, red eyes receding — staring up at her, only waiting for her next command.

“I should finally let you come, huh?” She posed to him, merciless, levering up and dropping back down onto his cock. He groaned, breath stuttering. “But you’re not going to, are you? Not until I tell you to.”

The twisting tension at her core clenched at the sight of his gritted teeth, at his accompanying nod. The thrill of her absolute power over this man, the one that had been so conceited in his pursuit of her, the craze of the animal raging inside him. She remembered another one of Fairburn’s written remarks in the margins of her session notes: Immediate and indefinite separation of the two parties is advised. The risk of psychological and physical harm—stemming from the convergence of violent fixation and potential mutual attraction—is extreme. The good doctor had no idea how true those words were.

She rode him like that, hips a taunting sway that brought him close and threatened to push him off the edge. She toyed with him like that, over and over again — pulling back when he was at a knife’s edge, even though she knew how dangerous such a gambit could be with him still inside her. The threat of his Hyde emerging. The desperation of his grunts were too intoxicating for Wednesday to heed the warnings thrumming in his veins. He wanted to come so bad she saw flashes of the Hyde emerge here and there, in bursts of anger and brutal desperation, the rough whine caught in his throat. She’d driven him to the edge of his control, but he needed to be tamed, not taunted — the edge of sanity was exactly where Wednesday dangled him.

Even though she’d been the one to accept this, she knew the ugly truth. She’d wanted him even when she hadn’t known what or who he truly was, but she’d sensed the madness in him and it had called to her own; twin flames of insanity reflecting back upon each other in the darkness.

She saw him clearly now.

“Let me—” he grunted, begging. “Let me come, Wednesday.”

She shook her head.

He groaned, gripped her hips and fucked up into her with brutal thrusts as a merciless reprisal. She shattered apart again, coming again, at this point having lost count of how many times he’d made her orgasm tonight.

It wasn’t until afterwards, after the convulsions had died down, after she’d blinked up at him, sweaty hair splayed across her face — that she realized he’d halted the strokes, that his grip on her hips had frozen, bruising, whiteknuckled; his lips were bleeding open from where he’d bitten it raw from restraint.

“Alright, Tyler,” she told him, benevolent. “You can come.”

Immediately, his hips snapped up into her, a few ragged thrusts, and he spilled himself inside her with a groan so feral and low she felt it like another molten bruise forming across her pale skin.

She sat—no, he sat—under harsh fluorescent lights that made everything a sterile blinding white. The air reeked of flower fragrances, and straps bit into his wrists and ankles, holding him down to a steel chair slick with sweat.

Thornhill’s face loomed over him, red hair framed by the halo of a lamp behind her. Her smile was sugar on the outside, rot at the core. “This is for us, Tyler,” she cooed, her hand stroking his damp hair back from his face. “When you wake up, you’ll be better. Stronger. We’ll be unstoppable—together.”

Her words slid into him like hooks, catching on raw nerves. He wanted to believe them—God, he wanted to believe them—because her voice was the only thing tethering him to anything in that moment.

She leaned closer, the mask of her breath warm against his ear. “You don’t have a mother anymore. That’s why you need me. I’ll be her for you. I’ll be everything.”

The promise curdled in his chest. She said it like a vow, but her eyes were cold calculation, measuring what she could break and remake.

And the world narrowed to his restraints, and her voice, soft and sickly sweet. “Shhh… we’re going to be perfect together. Forever. You’ll see.”

The scene bled, the edges of the memory trembling as though her consciousness wanted to spit it out. But the bond held Wednesday there long enough to feel it all—his fear, his aching need for someone to hold onto, the violation that the hands that held him were the same that would destroy him.

When she was ripped back into her own body, Wednesday was shaking, breath sharp in her chest. She awoke to the sound of someone else—too close, too intimate — after such a sickening scene. Instinct was faster than thought. Her hand shot up from underneath the black sheets, blade whispering free, and in the next heartbeat its edge was pressed against warm skin.

A pair of green eyes stared back at her, steady. Tyler, sitting up, bare from the waist up—no, bare entirely. “Do you often wake up to men attacking you?” he asked, voice roughened by sleep.

Her grip didn’t slacken. “Thing tests my reflexes to make sure I’m never caught unawares.”

The corner of his mouth ticked up, but it wasn’t his usual smirk—it was smaller, sharper, almost private. “Guess you passed.”

She lowered the blade, slow and deliberate, as if to remind them both it had been her choice to stop.

He hesitated, watching her, then his fingers reached over slowly, deliberately, brushing her face and wiping away residue— black stained tears. Tyler was studying her, eyes dark and knowing. He didn’t need to ask if she’d seen a vision. The proof of it was all over her face.

Twice, now, in a single night. Her powers were coming back.

This latest vision was sickening, though. She’d seen the memory of how Thornhill had unlocked him. And in the silence that followed, she wondered if she’d seen this vision now because that was why Tyler clung to Wednesday now—because she was the only one left who could fill the hole Thornhill had carved out in him.

Something unreadable shifted behind his eyes as his gaze swept over her. Not her face, not the defensive lift of her chin—but lower. Her skin. The pale canvas now painted with him. Beneath the black stained tears drying tacky on her skin was a host of other blemishes. Bruised handprints blooming like ghostly brands along her hips and thighs. Crescent bitemarks sunk deep enough to still ache. The faint scuff of skin-burn where he’d gripped and dragged her closer. He didn’t speak for a long moment, but she saw the flicker in his expression—a tightening in his jaw, the shadow of possession and desire all tangled into one.

But his voice went low, not quite steady, “Did I hurt you last night?”

“Only when I wanted it,” she said, each syllable deliberate, letting the words land between them with weight.

Something in him loosened at that—just barely. A real smile ghosted across his mouth, though it lacked the sharp, Hyde-born arrogance that used to curl there like a threat. This was quieter and almost straining, like he was a man relieved and unnerved in the same breath.

“I feel—” His exhale jagged, forced loose. “I feel—more myself than I have in months. Years, maybe. The Hyde—it’s still there, but I’m clearer now. The voice in my head is my own, and the Hyde is just— hibernating, waiting for you to give it the next command.”

“That was the point,” she told him.

He looked up, unfettered in his gratitude. “Thank you, Wednesday.”

Her stomach clenched—not with satisfaction, not exactly. It was something molten and yet sharper. Something that could burn and cut at the same time. Something she’d buried under brick and steel, hidden behind stubborn willpower and stung pride — the one that led back to the moments when she’d wanted him, trusted him, allowed herself the dangerous comfort of believing he saw her .

And he’d taken those moments and smashed their rare and fleeting existence to pieces.

Left her drowning in the humiliation, mistaking the predator for a partner. He’d worn his betrayal like armor, every taunt afterward hammering the point home.

Except now she could feel him.

It wasn’t just a guess, or some dangerous foolish sentiment that she could dismiss when it suited her. The bond was a living thing between them, coiled in her veins like a second pulse. It beat with his heartbeat, dragged his emotions through her in raw, jagged waves—fear, hunger, relief. There was no veil to hide behind, no mask to mistrust.

And what came through wasn’t arrogance. Wasn’t manipulation.

He had wanted her all along. Even then—when she’d been naive, even when she’d let herself believe she could trust him, when she’d mistaken a predator’s attention for something human. She had spent months convincing herself that his betrayal had been clean, simple—just cruelty for cruelty’s sake. Easier to dismiss him that way. Cleaner to think there had been nothing real between them at all. But this— this was more messy. This rewrote every memory she’d banished to that dark place inside her. It meant the moments when he’d looked at her, touched her, lingered near her—they hadn’t been part of some sick game, not entirely. They had been rooted in something real, something that Thornhill had twisted to suit her needs.

Her chest tightened. The panic was sudden, cold, a clawed thing scraping against her ribs.

And he felt it. She knew he did—because the moment the panic flared in her, it jolted through the bond like a live wire, and his gaze sharpened on her.

“Wednesday,” his voice was low, deliberate, carrying that dangerous stillness that always made her feel like she was standing too close to him. “Why am I not surprised that after everything that happened between us last night, it’s the first hint of emotions that makes your scent flare up with fear?”

She clenched her jaw. “I’m not afraid of you.”

His hand came up, fingers curling under her chin, dragging her face up toward his. “You’re afraid,” he said—not a question, just a statement carved in stone, and she felt the faint, dark curl of satisfaction in him at knowing the truth. “Not of me,” he murmured, leaning in just enough that the heat of him rolled over her. The hand at her chin tightened—not hurting, just reminding her how easily his touch concealed power. His mouth brushed her jaw, not a kiss, not yet, but enough to make her hold her breath. “Of this,” he said. “Of us.”

Her jaw tightened. “I’m not afraid of anything,” she declared, but it came out thinner than she wanted, threaded through with that same breathless, dangerous awareness that had once made her weak for him. He studied her for a long moment, eyes hooded, searching. And she could feel what he found—not malice, not gloating. Just want. “People think the problem was the monster,” she said, her voice low, bitter. “That I couldn’t stomach the blood on your hands.” She shook her head, almost laughing, but it was humorless. “My family’s full of killers. That was never it.”

His grip on her chin tightened just slightly. “Then what?”

“You fooled me,” she said, the words like glass in her throat. “And I don’t forgive people who make me question myself.”

Something flickered in his expression—pain, maybe, but there was heat in it too, rising at some unnamed challenge. And underneath it all, the bond thrummed steady, whispering the truth she didn’t want to hear: he had never been faking it with her.

Not then.

Not now.

And now, not ever.

Chapter Text

It had only been a week since the ritual, since she’d last seen Tyler, but the slow torture of time had become like a tickling clock forever persistent and maddening. Wednesday had never felt its crawling scraping essence more infinitesimally. The following days were an enterprise in futility, as she tried to return to her standard Nevermore routine despite everything feeling distinctly offkilter.

On Friday morning, the sun was as unwelcome as ever, searing through the stained-glass windows of Ophelia Hall. Its colorful shards spilled across the floor like a crime scene made garish by an amateur serial killer. Wednesday sat rigidly at her desk, her journal still open to a page where the ink had begun to blur as a headache formed behind her eye. The silence was only broken by the scratching of her pen across parchment. She had meant to finish an essay on revenant pathology before noon. She prided herself on her focus, on her precision, on keeping her mind sharper than any blade. But today the words slipped sideways, ink blotting into the margins, her script trailing off into a line that bent into nothing.

The bond pulsed again.

It came like a ripple in still water—Tyler. Not his voice, not his thoughts, but a tug in her blood, an echo reverberating through her nerves. He was restless. Waiting. Wanting. The sensation crawled across her skin, low and insistent, as if her own body had been exploited by some primitive yearning. Wednesday’s hand tightened on the pen until the nib snapped. Ink bled across her fingertips like blood spilling from a cut. She stared at the mess with narrowed eyes, loathing the way her body betrayed her.

Frustration, of several different kinds. Images and memories of the bonding ritual flashed across her mind, skin and flesh, sin and sensation. That was all it was. Petty teenage hormones and the sinister grasps of her newly formed bond. She could name it clinically as sexual deviancy, as if dissecting a cadaver, but naming it did not dispel it. His hunger was bleeding into her through the bond, a raw visceral heated undertone that set her nerves buzzing in places she had never allowed herself to dwell on before. Unlike her parents, she had never been consumed by the pleasures of the flesh, and she was not about to start now. Nevermind the root of the ritual was physical as well as spiritual, a paranormal bond that went past Wednesday's normal defenses.

Wednesday was not normal.

She replaced the quill at her desk. This was normally the time she would set out specifically for typing out her fiction, but her mind was too cluttered. Ink smudged faintly across her fingers as she scrawled into her journal with deliberate strokes the parameters of her bond, listing out the latest side-effects in her experiment: Distractions. A lapse in judgment. The biological response of an overstimulated nervous system. Nothing more. Her hand paused. She dipped her pen again, pressing harder, as though the weight of words could overwrite the memory of heat against her mouth, the faint tremor in her chest when she hadn’t pulled away. A weakness that can be overcome. A data point in an ongoing experiment. He is still the Hyde. He is still deception wrapped in flesh. I will master this, like I will him. The pen stilled again. Her other hand curled against the desk, nails digging crescent moons into the wood.

And then it came stronger over the bond like a larger variant ripple in that still water—Tyler. A door inside her mind creaked open, and he stepped through, eyes catching on the journal she snapped shut. Her wide eyes followed him as his presence was pulled through the bond, thick and heavy, an apparition.

“What is this?” he said lowly, shocked. “Is this real?”

She paused, thrown so entirely that her faculties failed her.

“A tether,” Wednesday realized, dimly.

Hopefully nothing more than an impermanence like a reflex. A spasm, like coughing up blood.

“Fuck,” Tyler said, sounding just as thrown.

Then — he vanished in a blink of an eye, as quickly as he’d formed.

For a heartbeat, Wednesday said nothing. She felt something clawing at her throat— Tyler’s incorporeal presence — and all its new complications. She rose abruptly, closing the journal. Her throat felt too tight. Her legs, restless. Her mind, fracturing. She was not accustomed to distraction. And certainly not this kind. Her movements were precise, military, as though she could walk the feeling out of her bones. Enid was out—thank the Fates—otherwise there would have been too much to explain; she might have asked questions that Wednesday refused to dignify with answers.

This was intolerable. The ritual was meant to give her control, not tether her to Tyler’s basest impulses like some hormonal marionette. To feel his want was one thing. To feel her body responding, even faintly, was another—one she refused to accept.

She pressed her palm flat to her desk, steadying herself, her jaw set like iron. “This is an inconvenience,” she muttered to the empty room, but she hoped Tyler felt the echo of it nonetheless. “Nothing more.”

The hum beneath her skin said otherwise.

Her studies were supposed to be a rooting fixture. Necromantic Theory. Advanced Alchemy. Fencing. She told herself that today, of all days, she would descend into the machinery of Nevermore’s curriculum and let it grind her into its familiar rhythm. But the rest of the day unfolded without permission, every sound—the squeak of chalk on slate, the hum of the crystal lamps, even the muttered invocations of her peers—slipped past her as though the Earth had been thrown off its axis by only a few points of a degree, and Wednesday was the only one to notice.

The bond was a new feeling, and Wednesday knew she needed time to get used to it, to master it — much like her visions. For the moment, the wrangling of it was more distracting than anything else. She could feel it constantly, a tether, unseen but unrelenting, humming beneath her skin like a low electrical current. Tyler. Somewhere beyond these walls, in the stunted, ordinary streets of Jericho, he lurked in hiding. Yet she felt him—his pulse, his turmoil, his restless pacing—as though a part of her had been stuffed inside his chest and was now rattling against his ribcage.

Classes had always been a distraction, a necessary exercise to sharpen her intellect. But now? Each passing hour was a reminder that something had shifted fundamentally in Wednesday, enough that even others were beginning to notice.

She sharpened a stake too viciously during Necromantic Theory and splintered the shaft. The vampires across the class had looked at her with narrowed eyes, determined to avoid her and her mood, and she hadn’t taken it to heart that they’d avoided her gaze for the rest of the day. In Alchemy, she mismeasured wolfsbane powder, and the brew curdled into a hissing black sludge. Even dueling practice became laughable; her blade should have moved with clinical precision, yet she found herself distracted against her match with Bianca, the clang of steel less focused — echoes of another night, a binding where claws and blood and whispered oaths had sealed her claim, distracting her.

She lost two out of three points to Bianca, which had only soured her mood all the more.

“Something up?” Bianca asked, afterwards. “Your footwork was uncharacteristically sloppy, and you’re the only one that really challenges me in these classes. Don’t tell me that coma made you go soft.”

“A slight miscalculation and a momentary imbalance,” Wednesday dismissed. “Do not mistake that for weakness. If provoked, I can still disassemble you piece by piece and repurpose what remains as a cautionary exhibit for those who mean to underestimate me.”

Bianca only raised an eyebrow, as if sensing something off even in Wednesday’s standard threats. “Look,” she said, sighing. “I know you’ve been through a lot lately. The coma, the brush with death, all that shit that went down with the barista boy. Enough that—”

“Please, I’d normally enjoy the prospect of spilling the contents of my stomach across the floor at your feet, but I doubt you’d find it entertaining. If you imply sympathy right now, I will not be held in contempt of my stomach’s actions."

Bianca smiled, undeterred. “In any case, if you ever want to talk — I’m here.”

It was a preposterous prospect, of course. Wednesday could speak of this to no one.

And it was Enid, naturally, who tried repeatedly to break the brittle mask Wednesday kept intact.

The pixie werewolf had been staring at her since early morning, and by dinner she could no longer contain herself. “Okay, spill,” Enid whispered as they sat at the benches outside in the quad. Her nails tapped against her juice glass like tiny warring drums. “You’re— different. Not in your usual gloom-queen kinda way, which innately inspires a certain charm once you get inoculated to it. But— different different.”

As sporting as it would be, a kind of mental torture exercise that could keep Wednesday on her toes, she was not volunteering herself to be dissected under a Spanish Inquisition today.

“You’re reading too much into nothing,” Wednesday dismissed.

Enid leaned closer, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial — if confused — murmur. “It’s your scent. You smell— off. Like… wilder? Or something. Not bad, mind you, certainly better than you smelled after you came back from the mortician’s office smelling of formaldehyde that one time. Just—changed.”

Her blue eyes shimmered with worry, and Wednesday hated that she wasn’t entirely wrong. Of course Enid’s lupine instincts would betray her. The ritual had altered Wednesday in more ways than she had calculated.

Wednesday stabbed her fork into her food with unnecessary violence. “Perhaps you should focus less on me and more on containing your own lupine proclivities. I’ve seen both Ajax and Bruno sniffing outside our dormitory lately. I’m surprised you can smell anything over those rampant teenage hormones.”

Enid flinched. “Yeah, things have just gotten a little— complicated, with them.”

That was an understatement. From what she’d gathered, Enid still was keeping them both caught on the proverbial hook without a clear decisive answer as to who she liked more. Before, Bruno had been the clear front runner, but something had shifted while Wednesday had been in that coma; Ajax was back in her favor.

Normally Wednesday would commend Enid on her ability to torture both boys simultaneously, but this was one of those instances where the torture was getting tedious for Wednesday to watch.

Enid aptly read these thoughts off Wednesday’s severe face, and frowned. “I know, I know!” she cried out. “But don’t change the subject. We were talking about you.”

“Unfortunate and futile.”

“Wednesday,” Enid said, softly. “You can tell me, you know. Friends share.”

Wednesday forced herself to meet her gaze, her mask of indifference cracking just slightly. For one treacherous moment, the hum of the bond surged, and she felt Tyler’s restless hunger on the edge of her consciousness. The beast obeyed her now—or so she presumed—but the tether between them had made her less immune than she intended.

Even if Wednesday found herself able to speak of the unfolding ramifications of her new bond with anyone, she was especially unwilling to share them with the only person she reluctantly considered her only friend. Enid was prone to dramatics, with a talent for turning any inconvenience into a catastrophe on an operatic scale. Wednesday had once seen her roommate wail as though the world had ended when a clawed nail broke mid-manicure. If Enid reacted that way to split polish, Wednesday could only imagine her theatrics when confronted with the truth of Wednesday’s newly acquired role as master to a Hyde. To Tyler. Hyperbole would multiply to exponential degrees, likely accompanied by hand-flapping and the sort of shrill commentary that could shatter glass.

The subject of Tyler Galpin was more treacherous than even Enid’s usual theatrics could encompass. To confess the bond with Tyler would be a breaking point. Enid would not understand the necessity of the ritual, the control it had given her, the thin line it allowed her to walk between mastery and monstrosity. She would only see danger, even betrayal. Betrayal of her peers, of the fragile safety Nevermore had pieced back together, and perhaps even of Enid herself.

The thought of Enid turning away— hardening with disgust or worse, hurt—was an image Wednesday refused to linger on.

“You’re overthinking things,” Wednesday said, at last.

Enid’s jaw clenched, offended and trying to hide it. “Dismiss me all you want, but I know something's up, Wednesday. I’ll figure it out.”

Wednesday remained silent, keeping her own counsel. It was better this way. For both of them. She rose, leaving Enid blinking after her. If she lingered, the girl might pry further, and the truth was a luxury she couldn’t afford to share. Enid would never understand the logic—Wednesday had justified it enough to herself—but any attempt at explanation would sound like betrayal. And that thought — unwelcome, inconvenient — plucked at some deep, dark recessed part of Wednesday that she did not like to examine too closely.

Because Enid mattered to her.

Her opinion mattered to her.

Even if Wednesday could not entirely explain why. The very idea made her restless, like an itch beneath the skin. Affection was not a currency she traded in. Yet Enid had wormed her way past Wednesday’s usual defenses with an infuriating persistence that defied logic or madness. She was brightness intruding on Wednesday’s shadow, warmth insisting on existing beside shade. And for reason Wednesday refused to articulate, she found herself unwilling to invite Enid’s disappointment. Worse still, the possibility of Enid’s rejection hovered in her mind like an axe.

Wednesday had grown accustomed to the prickling sensation of being observed. It was the curse of her newfound and irksome notoriety; her every movement in Nevermore was cataloged, dissected, and whispered about. But this was different. A weight pressed against the back of her neck, deliberate, familiar. The sort of gaze that hid just out of sight but never out of her sharp instincts. Wednesday closed her book and turned her head, eyes narrowing on the shadow pooling in the corner of Ophelia Hall’s corridor.

“Agnes,” Wednesday said. Her voice was flat, but the corners of her mouth tightened in irritation. “Your stealth still has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.”

A ripple—and there she was. Agnes stepped out of the shadows like a deranged sentient doll. Pale, braid-plaited red hair, with eyes that widened and glittered too brightly. She smiled with an admiration that felt invasive, entirely parasitic. “Morning,” Agnes breathed, her voice quivering with delight. “You did a good job of covering up your bruises today. I can’t even see any marks.”

Wednesday glared. “There are no marks.” Addam’s skin was notoriously resilient. “And keep your voice down.”

“Sorry! It’s just so exciting.” Anges pressed her hands together. “An unholy bond with a Hyde. Of all the things you could bind to yourself. The maximum potential of true anarchy.”

Wednesday regarded her coolly. “You’re either naïvely. or tragically delusional. I haven’t yet decided which is worse.”

Agnes ignored the insult, as she often did. Stalkers were tenacious that way, and she had to give Agnes her due when it came to persistence. “Imagine it,” she said, giddy. “The carnage you could unleash. A Hyde on a leash—your leash. The terror of Jericho, the butcher of Nevermore, and now he’s yours. Have you figured out what kind of chaos you’re going to spread yet?”

Wednesday’s expression did not change. Chaos. Destruction. That was what everyone assumed Wednesday wanted.

Most of the time, they’d have been right.

“You mistake me for someone who wastes their resources on theatrics,” Wednesday replied. “If I intended havoc, I wouldn’t delegate it. I would deliver it myself.”

Agnes’s grin stretched. “Of course, but as your first and most loyal underling, I do hope you’ll delegate some of the chaos down. If only to clear your plate and devote your attention to more important chaos."

Wednesday stepped closer. “If you tell a single soul of this, Agnes, understand: invisibility will not save you if—and when—I decide I’ve had enough of your devotion. Cross me, and it will be the last time anyone will ever see your body.”

For the first time, Agnes faltered, insulted, her smile flickering. “I won’t tell anyone. I know how to keep a secret.”

“Good,” Wednesday said. “Because your life depends on it. And stop following me around.”

Agnes’s hands twitched at her sides, restless, eager. “But—”

“If I sense your shadow in my footsteps, I’ll disembowel you. I don’t tolerate minions, least of all ones who make such a poor showing of their abilities and aptitudes, much less their ability to follow orders. Your deficiencies outweigh your uses.”

Agnes swallowed. Her grin returned, weaker this time, an imitation of its former fervor. “I can be useful,” she protested, almost pleading.

“Only if you can follow my orders,” Wednesday warned. “Now leave. And don’t shadow me again.”

Wednesday did not move. She watched the space Agnes had occupied, her face unreadable, her posture a perfect stillness carved from stone before the other girl disappeared. Only when she was certain the girl was gone did she allow herself to exhale.

Agnes knew. Another variable. Another liability.

The bond within her hummed again—faint, restless, insistent. Control. Secrecy. Desire—unwelcome, intrusive, coiling through her like a parasite she had invited in. It knotted itself tighter, tangling her reasoning with impulses that did not feel entirely her own.

Wednesday needed to master this. She needed to wrangle the leash.

Her headache sharpened, stabbing behind her eyes like an ice pick. Complications had never unsettled her this much before, but this was becoming a particularly vexxing complication. Wednesday could untie knots with her hands bound behind her back, but this one was proving — irksome.

The Gardeners Cottage sat at the far edge of Nevermore’s grounds, quaint and nauseous looking by Addams standards. Wednesday moved across the damp lawn and slipped the duplicate key from her pocket, a spare set to the family hearse. The black beast of a vehicle gleamed faintly in the moonlight, crouched like some slumbering hound. Tonight, it would be hers again.

The key slid into the lock with satisfying precision—only to halt. A shadow fell over her shoulder.

“Look, cara mia,” her father’s voice shot out, oozing warmth and delight. “Larceny runs in the family.”

Gomez stepped from the shadows in his striped suit, a grin splitting his face.

“Darling,” Morticia’s voice followed, greeting Wednesday low and velvet, “Did you really think you could steal the car multiple nights in a week? It's a mark of sloppiness and poor planning to assume no one would notice.”

Wednesday turned, caught between them, her expression carved from stone. “You’ve been watching me.”

“Observing, my raven,” Gomez corrected proudly. “And you nearly got away with it, too. That duplicate key is a masterpiece. How did you manage it? Don’t tell me you bribed Thing.”

Thing wiggled smugly from Morticia’s handbag, clearly complicit.

Wednesday’s eyes narrowed. “I require the hearse.”

“Alas, not tonight,” Gomez sighed, producing the original key with a flourish. “I’ve planned a surprise for your mother. A dinner that will end in moonlit dueling and, hopefully, bloodshed. Romance, you see, requires ambiance. And ambiance requires wheels.”

Morticia’s gaze lingered on Wednesday, her smile faint. “But surely, my little blooming corpse, the hearse was not all you wanted.”

Wednesday met her mother’s stare. For a moment, silence stretched between them, thick as smoke. Morticia’s eyes seemed to pierce through her composure, stripping her bare, unraveling layer after layer. It was an unspoken knowing, a maternal intuition sharpened into something almost supernatural.

Her mother had always seen too much. She knew too much, too.

The last conversation they’d exchanged had been over her mother’s occult tomes—dusty volumes bound in leather and stitched with warnings. Morticia had spoken with her usual languid cadence about the dangers and temptations of dominant bonds, about the power—and peril—of tying one’s soul to another through ritual. She had not forbidden it; Morticia never outright forbade. Instead, she had spoken with a warning wrapped in silk, as though she already suspected that Wednesday was entertaining the thought of binding herself to a monster, courting chaos.

And now, in the dark sheen of her eyes, Wednesday thought she saw confirmation: her mother knew. She knew the occult knowledge had not been left on the page. She knew Wednesday had put theory into practice. Wednesday’s jaw tightened imperceptibly. She refused to fidget under scrutiny, but the pulse of the bond hummed in that instant, traitorous, as if Tyler himself had stirred at her spiralling thoughts and quickening heartbeat.

“Knowledge,” Morticia murmured, voice low and rich, “is a beautiful curse. Once possessed, it insists on being used.”

Wednesday said nothing. Words were dangerous here, so she held Morticia’s gaze, cold and defiant, even as she felt the weight of being seen in a way she was unaccustomed to enduring.

Morticia inclined her head, letting the silence stand. Her father, caught between them, noticed the spiking tension, and swivelled his attention between the two, unnerved. In his usual obtuse way, he could not discern how deep the treacherous layers ran between mother and daughter, but the look Morticia gave her daughter—sharp, quietly knowing—clung like a shadow on a skeleton.

Gomez, oblivious and trying to defuse the tension, beamed at his daughter and clapped her on the shoulder. “You’ll get your chance to steal her again soon, my girl. But tonight, let your old man have his evening. Even a corpse must rest in its coffin before it can rise again.”

Morticia reached out, brushing a strand of hair from Wednesday’s cheek with a tenderness that unsettled more than any threat. “Be careful, my pernicious nightshade. Don’t be eager to grow up too quickly.”

Wednesday broke the gaze first, slipping the duplicate key back into her pocket. “You overestimate my sentimentality. I only intended a drive.”

“Of course,” Morticia murmured. “And yet,” her smile faltered, indulgent, secretive — concerned. “You smell of something new. Something different.”

“New perfume,” Wednesday announced, flatly.

She turned on her heel and stalked back toward Nevermore.

Behind her, she heard the click of the hearse door, her parents’ voices spilling into the night.

Wednesday had never considered herself beneath theft. The act itself was almost cleansing—removing the unnecessary and reclaiming it for one’s own purpose, but this particular crime tested the limits of her tolerance.

The bike was pink.

Not merely pink, but aggressively, nauseatingly pink. It was festooned with glittering decals, its handles crowned with plastic tassels that shivered in the wind like mocking laughter. The bell on the handlebars was shaped like a daisy. It belonged to one of Enid’s saccharine pack of acquaintances, left leaning against the stone wall near the dormitories. Wednesday had stood before it for three long seconds, weighing the merits of burning it where it stood, before logic forced her hand. The hearse was unavailable. Walking would waste precious time.

So she mounted the bike, reluctantly.

Her boots barely fit the pedals, the frame too small, but she forced the clunky contraption forward with mechanical precision, ignoring the way the tassels fluttered at her wrists with every push. The humiliation was exquisite, like being stabbed repeatedly with glitter-coated knives. As the school’s gothic spires fell behind and the path twisted into the woods, Wednesday rode the absurd bike like a horseman of the apocalypse—one clad not in black steel but in pastel plastic. She imagined Enid’s inevitable commentary if she were ever caught: “Wen, you look adorable!” The thought alone nearly made Wednesday veer off the path into a ditch. But she did not stop. Her jaw set, her hands locked on the handlebars, her eyes fixed on the dark tangle of woods ahead. The bell chimed once when the bike hit a rock. The cheery note echoed far too loudly in the night. Wednesday scowled. And on she went until the trees finally broke into a small clearing.

The cabin rose ahead, a crooked silhouette softened by the glow of a lantern inside. It looked different from when she had last seen it—previously a ruin of dirt and disuse. Now the ground around it had been swept clear. The porch had been patched, planks nailed into place. Tools lay abandoned in the grass, a hammer, a saw, even a bucket of nails. It was not perfect, but it bore the signature of repair. Of restless hands filling restless days.

A sharp bark split the night.

Wednesday froze, boots sinking into the earth. From the shadows of the porch bounded a dog—medium-sized, long-eared, his coat mottled with wet leaves. The animal skidded to a halt several feet from her, nose working furiously.

Elvis.

She remembered him, faintly, from Jericho—the sheriff’s dog, always hovering in Tyler’s periphery. The hound stared at her, tail hesitant, nostrils flaring. Then, as though something in her scent confirmed what his instincts demanded, Elvis trotted forward happily. He pressed his muzzle against Wednesday’s coat, snuffling eagerly, tail wagging with a sudden unreserved approval. Wednesday stiffened, her hand hovering at her side. Dogs did not usually take to her. Children did not take to her. Few living creatures ever had. Yet this one leaned into her with unflinching recognition.

Her brow arched, the faintest narrowing of suspicion. Can you smell it, little beast? This tether, this corruption I have sewn into myself?

Elvis whined softly, as if in answer.

Before Wednesday could test the thought further, the cabin door creaked open and Tyler emerged into the pale wash of the moonlight. He wore a flannel shirt, sleeves rolled up to his forearms, and jeans that bore the faint smudges of earth and wood dust from his repairs. For an instant, the sight of him was so ordinary, so domestic, it was almost grotesque—a wolf in a shepherd’s clothes. His boots scuffed against the porch as he descended. Though the bond had announced her arrival long before the sound of the ridiculous bicycle bell had, she felt distinctly offkilter. He looked different—not in body, but in bearing. Cleaner. Steadier. The silence that stretched between them was almost unbearable.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” he said at last, voice low, rough.

Wednesday’s reply was flat. “I wasn’t sure I’d bother, but you were— insistent. That was you, wasn’t it? Visiting me this morning?”

“When you were writing at your desk?” Tyler said, nodding. “I’m still not sure what that was. You called it a tether?”

“For lack of a better name, yes.”

Wednesday’s jaw tightened. She despised the word for its lack of clarity. Yet there was no other name for this—this raw, intrusive new and unexpected vulnerability. Tyler had already proved it functional: a voice pressed into her mind when he had been miles from her dormitory. She had read up on it immediately when the opportunity had presented it. A tether, or a conduit. It allowed communication without proximity. Thought becomes speech, carried across distance as though whispered directly into the ear. The occult texts called it a “thread of marrow,” forged when a bond’s inception was— aberrant. A master–servant ritual twisted with emotional debris. Paranormalists argue it was an accident of intent. Others insisted it was the inevitable result of proximity between a predator and the one foolish enough to lay claim to it.

She tested the parameters of this new intrusion by thinking: The tether is a liability. My talents in the paranormal, sharpened by my clairvoyant discipline, must have reinforced its existence. Without it, the bond might have remained merely flesh-deep.

The tether thrummed again, heat behind her ears.

His voice slithered through like smoke: And now it’s bone-deep?

She flinched and whirled away. That answered that question.

“If you abuse this conduit,” she hissed aloud, “I will experiment on you until I find the limit of your skull’s resilience.”

The silence that followed wasn’t silence at all. The hum of the bond betrayed how much this was affecting him too, surprising him. Even now, with him standing just behind her, she could feel the air thickening, tense, as though both of them were standing on the edge of something fragile, volatile as napalm. And for the first time since the ritual, Wednesday allowed herself to admit how dangerous this reunion felt—not because of Tyler’s nature, but because of her own response to it.

Elvis finally retreated, circling back toward the porch as if giving his master and his master’s chosen counterpart space.

Wednesday's gaze followed the dog for a beat, but then her eyes returned to Tyler, locking onto him. “You kidnapped your old pet?”

“He was in the pound,” Tyler said, jaw clenching. “After Dad died, he had nowhere else to go. I even stopped by my old house, picked up a few things.”

Wednesday didn’t nod, but she glanced aside and made no further comment.

“You rode here,” he said, tilting his head, noticing the tassels on the ridiculous bike abandoned at the edge of the clearing. His mouth twitched, almost a smile. “That’s— not what I pictured.”

“Necessity,” Wednesday replied, dusting the hound’s fur from her sleeve. “I make do with what’s available. Which, tonight, was a pink glittering humiliation that you would do well not to comment upon if you value your life.”

His chuckle was brief, rough. Silence reclaimed the space.

Wednesday stepped closer. “You’ve kept busy.” She gestured faintly toward the patched porch, the tools left behind. “Normies occupy themselves with hobbies when they wish to dull the edge of their primal instincts. You are no normie. Explain.”

Tyler’s jaw worked. “It keeps my head from splitting apart. The bond—” His throat tightened around the word. “It changed things. Calmed me, when I don’t let it overwhelm me. I don’t want to lose myself again. And I— I used to do this stuff with my dad, before. Help around the house. Fix things.”

A faint hum stirred inside Wednesday’s chest at his words—sympathy— unwelcome, intrusive. Her own self betraying her, the bond echoing with quiet recognition. She forced her expression to remain carved from stone. “You sound as though you expect me to praise you.”

“I don’t need praise,” Tyler said, voice low, his eyes sharpening. “But I need you to understand—this isn’t like before. I don’t feel out of control anymore.”

“Don’t fall under the delusion that you have control now,” she offered. She stepped closer, boots crunching against the earth. “This bond will require testing before you do something as foolish as letting your guard down.”

His gaze darkened, searching her face for cracks. “Testing?”

For the first time in a long while, Wednesday found her silence did not shield her as effectively as it should have. The bond dragged with it a whisper of something infuriating—yearning, sharp and intrusive—something she despised.

Her lips pressed into a bloodless line. She forced her voice to stay cold. “I think—” The pause was uncharacteristic, and it angered her more than his question had. “That this arrangement will require discipline. Yours, if you value survival. Mine, if I wish to avoid being distracted and detected by my peers and relatives.”

Tyler’s eyes flickered from her eyes down to her lips. He stepped down from the porch, closing the distance so that only little space remained between them. The lanternlight carved his face into sharp lines, but his voice was soft when he spoke. “Distracted,” he repeated, “by me?”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

But the bond pulsed again, contradicting her, mocking her composure.

Tyler’s grin was faint, slightly crooked, and far too certain. “Funny,” he murmured, “because it’s hard not to take it personally that I can affect you so much now. Getting under Wednesday Addam’s skin is a feat.”

Her jaw tightened. She hated that he was right.

Finally, in uncharacteristic clemency, Tyler relented in their silent duel, the stare that had felt more than a mere meeting of eyes. He broke first—stepping back, gaze slipping away as though he’d grown tired of trying to pry apart her armor. Without another word, he turned toward the cabin.

Wednesday followed, her boots crunching softly against the leaf-littered path. The cabin was illuminated by the dim orange glow of the lantern inside, and as she entered, her eyes swept over the changes. The last time she had seen this place, it had been a ruin, a feral den half-eaten by rot and mold. Now, the floors had been patched with uneven planks. The broken window frames had been nailed together, though the glass warped where it didn’t quite fit. A shelf leaned slightly to the left, but it held a few of his belongings instead of only cobwebs. His handiwork was imperfect, sloppy in places, but it was manageable.

“It hasn’t collapsed yet,” she remarked.

Tyler gave a short laugh over his shoulder. “High praise, coming from you. I’ll take it.”

She glanced at him, brow faintly arched. “I meant it literally. It stands. That’s all.”

His mouth twitched, fighting off a smile. “You always did have a way of making a guy feel appreciated.”

The remark was inane. Harmless. Almost boyish. She should have dismissed it immediately, yet it struck her as odd—this tone, this lightness. For a moment, it was as though she had stepped backward in time, into that coffee shop where he had once leaned on the counter, hair falling into his eyes, trying to look charming while hiding his nerves. She had always assumed that had been an act, the mask of a predator waiting for Thornhill’s command.

But what if it hadn’t been?

Her gaze lingered on him, sharp and calculating. Could he really have been just a small-town boy, trapped in the purgatory of Jericho, working shifts at a coffee shop, killing time by trading smiles with girls who came in for lattes? That he might have been ordinary once—ordinary enough to be annoying, almost endearing—before Thornhill had unlocked the monster inside him, twisting every trace of warmth into something rabid?

“I can practically see the wheels turning,” Tyler said softly, interrupting her thoughts. He leaned against the patched doorframe, watching her with an expression she couldn’t quite read. “You’re wondering if I’m still that guy. The barista. The one who flirted with you over a quad.”

Wednesday’s lips pressed into a hard line, but she didn’t deny it.

He smiled then, small and real, and sad, the kind of smile that didn’t belong to the Hyde at all. “The truth? I don’t know either.”

And for the first time, Wednesday hesitated—not in suspicion, but in the uncomfortable recognition that there was more truth in his uncertainty than she wanted to examine.

“We must determine the tether’s range,” Wednesday began, her tone crisp, as though dictating an autopsy. “Its thresholds. And, most importantly, how I can shut you out.”

Tyler smirked faintly. “That bad already, huh?”

“An uninvited presence inside my head is a violation,” she said flatly, meeting his gaze. “One I will not tolerate.”

He tilted his head, studying her. “And yet you’re still here.”

Wednesday ignored the jab. She took out her pen and small pad from her pocket, pressed the tip to paper as she wrote down a few of her experimental parameters. “Concentrate. Think something deliberately at me.”

His eyes narrowed, and for a moment he seemed almost too eager. She braced herself. Then it came—not words exactly, but a scrape of thought brushing across her mind. You’re trying too hard to look unimpressed.

Her hand twitched. She wrote it down as functional, even as she reprimanded, “There’s nothing to be impressed about.”

He grinned. “Your turn.”

Wednesday closed her eyes briefly, focusing. A whisper of intent slid through the tether, quick and sharp. Stop smiling. You look like an idiot.

Tyler chuckled aloud. “Rude, but effective.”

It continued like that for some time, each one sending a thought across the tether, until Wednesday’s pen had scratched across the page a list of growing parameters:

• Strength increases with proximity.
• Thoughts can be targeted with intent.
• Emotional leakage possible.

That last point she did not speak aloud, though she felt it—like the echo of his heartbeat when her focus brushed too close. They’d both done an admirable job of ignoring it, but even now the threat of their mutual attraction was an unspoken albatross between them. Wednesday swallowed past it.

“Now,” she said, snapping the notebook shut. “Let’s work on shielding.”

Tyler raised a brow. “Like, what, putting up walls?”

“Precisely. Focus on a barrier. Visualize. Do not let me through to see what you’re thinking.”

He exhaled, leaning back. His eyes slipped shut, jaw tight. Wednesday pushed against the bond—gently at first, then harder when she met some resistance. For a moment, she tasted his concentration, his stubborn effort. There was a barrier, but then she was barrelling through it without thought, without much hindrance at all; either he hadn’t tried that hard or they truly had their work cut out for them because the barrier had been flimsy at best. A piercing of a thin skin, and then Wednesday had full access to his thoughts again — but she stumbled, then, seeing what was preoccupying his mind on the other side.

He’d conjured up the memory of the other night in this very room, their binding ritual.

The way he’d appreciated her naked body glistening in the moonlight, the smear of bloody handprints on her flesh, the way the faint candlelight highlighted the bruises he’d left on her. Her movements as they’d fucked raw and passionate — from his point of view — when she’d thought she’d moved with only efficiency, skillfully riding him, he’d seen her through a haze of lust as she’d leveled up and lowered her hips back down onto him over and over again in a serpentine type of grace.

Before she could stop herself, she was flooded with the sensations that came with the memory — heat, a bloom of unmitigated desire, perverse nostalgia. She liked the way he saw her, especially when he bit his lower lip as he stared at her now and presented her with an unabashed image of what she’d done to him the other night; how she’d torn down his defenses, his walls, claimed him.

Before she entirely knew it was happening again, they were attacking one another — lips colliding in a brutal assault of kisses in the middle of the cabin, clothing torn off in a frantic drive to feel naked flesh. The sudden spell between them had broken their stalemate, pure unadulterated instincts in drive now as Tyler slammed her against the wall of the cabin so forcefully she had a brief rising concern that they’d do structural damage to the shoddy foundation. The thought was overridden as Tyler tore open her schoolgirl uniform with none of the mindfulness that she would regret later on, when she slipped the clothing back on.

Before she could groan in pointless protests, before she could dare to tell a lie that she wanted him to stop, to slow down, he pressed his mouth against the column of her throat and sucked hard enough to leave a bruise. Wednesday groaned, even as she knew it would be another hindrance come morning when she applied a fresh three layers of foundation and concealer to remove the stain of a hickey. He tasted too intoxicating, too primal, for her to think about restraint. He unwrapped her between bites of greedy kisses, between a trail of wet suckles along her throat, up her jaw. The clothing spilled open like black ink spooling around her shoulders, revealing her pale skin, when he slipped his fingers underneath her waistband and found her wet center.

His name spilled partially between their lips, her fingers sinking into the curls of his hair, tugging him closer with an insistent enough grip that he groaned and obeyed as she commanded, reducing any negligible distance between them into nothingness as he rubbed her clit with merciless friction until she was gasping.

“Turn around,” he ordered, breathless.

She blinked up at him. “What?”

“Turn around, and brace your hands against the wall.”

She paused. She was interested enough in the position that she forgave the command. Turning around, planting her hands against the wall, she was only slightly startled when he kicked her legs apart with his feet, widening her stance. He made quick work of the rest of her clothing — bra and shirt thrown off, skirt unzipped and tugged down roughly, taking her underwear along with it — until she was presented on full display for him, naked.

He grabbed a plump palmful of her backside in his broad hands, apparently appreciating the new view. “You have any idea how distracting it’s been constantly thinking about fucking you?” he murmured.

“I thought that’s all teenage boys thought about?” she remarked, unimpressed, eyebrow lifted as she looked over her shoulder at him.

He snorted. “True, but take that and double it,” he breathed into her ear. She couldn’t suppress the shiver, and even more so the idea of him pleasuring himself to the thought of her repeatedly. “Do you like that, Wednesday?” he taunted. “The fact that I can’t think straight because all I wanna do is get my hands on you?”

He used those same hands now to fulfill the promise of it, dipping his fingers between her parted thighs and sliding a digit up her wet center. A few strokes, and then she felt him unbuckling his jeans, then the delicious slide of his cock coating himself on her juices. She groaned when he reached around and his thumb bumped against her clit, sloppy and urgent, almost buckling her knees from underneath her. The duality of his fingers and his cock was an enticing dyad that worked to drive her to agitation.

“Hurry up and fuck me, Galpin,” she hissed, impatient.

He chuckled. “Your wish is my command,” he taunted.

Then he pushed into her with one single breach that felt like an assault. A full brutal thrust, down to the hilt of him, and Wednesday swallowed an inhuman sound around the force of him fucking into her without mercy, a delight of a pleasurable pain that she couldn’t describe in words. She’d left this cabin last full of his seed, aching muscles that had been left deliciously sore in the aftermath of their indelicate mating, but Wednesday had relished in the burn and almost missed its sting when it had dissipated. This time, she hoped the bruises would last longer. She hoped the sting would ache more.

He took her like that, against the wall.

Her hands planted flat against the decaying decrepit state of the cabin, until Tyler covered one of it with his own. For a while there was just the brutal grunting of him in her ear as he invaded her again and again, before he finally took her arm and twisted it around her back, forcing her body to flex in a way that wasn’t wholly natural, bending back, a curved arc in her spine. It gave him a different angle to penetrate her, and with a strength that belied his supernatural strength, she was lifted in midair. He planted both hands at her hips and lifted up and down the slide of his cock like she weighed nothing. It was exhilarating. It was intoxicating. It was slightly demented how much pleasure she took in the display of his hyde strength in his human form.

Before she was done with him, she determined she would fuck Tyler in his Hyde form.

It was inevitable.

She just had to be certain she could control him entirely before she put herself in such a position, confirming her mastery of him through another series of trial and error experiments.

For now, the bond that thrummed between them had flooded open. There was no distinction between his thoughts and hers, no line of demarcation between his pleasure and hers. When her fingers joined the slippery slick between her thighs, rubbing at her clit, she could feel the reverberation of Tyler’s groan through his chest, melting into her spine. He felt her pleasure, the spike of bliss when she rubbed herself, and his accompanying thrust, a quickening of the pace, was the only answer he could manage.

“You’re gonna go back to your school tonight, Wednesday,” he murmured, sounding both wrecked and possessed, grunting with each thrust, “with me leaking down your thighs. With my marks on you. You won’t be able to get rid of me anywhere. Not your body, not your mind.”

She would have responded, but he took that moment to redouble his efforts to fuck her senseless, a series of hammering thrusts that hit a spot inside her that had an unfortunate deteriorating effect on her sanity. She came like that, the first time, barely holding onto consciousness as he pummelled into her with a quick and brutal fuck that left her body convulsing around his cock.

When she finally came back to awareness, she was spread on all fours on the ground. He reentered her from behind and didn’t give her an opportunity to recover; she preferred it that way, the mindless rutting of animals, the delirious explosion of sensation that felt like a riot overcoming her body. She groaned, planted her hands against the floorboards, felt the puff of his brutal animistic grunts behind her as he took her — and she didn’t know what it said about her that the idea of him turning mid-fucking, transforming into the Hyde, was what got her off the second time.

He must have felt the thought skitter across her consciousness, the primal brutal lust of it. “You’re a freak, Wednesday.”

She could hear his unsaid thoughts: how’d I get so fucking lucky?

“Flattery,” she said, fucked out of her brains and trying to recover, “will not work on me.”

“Seems it’s gotten me plenty laid,” he returned.

She almost groaned, unable entirely to argue with the merits of that, but she could never let that fly without a response — even if she was getting her guts currently rearranged by him. “Your conceit continually astounds me,” she hissed. “You're a means to an end, an itch that I’m scratching.”

“I’m inside your head, Wednesday. This is the worst time to lie to me. I can feel your pride warring with your pulse, your mind scatter when I whisper filth into your ear. You can’t lie to me.”

She groaned, flinging her skull back to headbutt him as retaliation, but he anticipated the move because he was truly in her head; he evaded the hit, just chuckling while his grip on her hips went to bruising force.

“Remember who’s in control,” she warned him. “If I tell you to stop, you’ll obey.”

He grunted out a huff. “And what if I said the minute your control breaks, baby, I’m going to put you on your back on that dirty floor and fuck you until you scream?”

Don’t threaten me with a good time.

The thought skittered across her mind into his before she could recall it. He must have felt it, the grin she sensed against her ear told her as much. The way he sped up, the pace of his strokes going choppy at the end, a herald that he was on the brink. She felt the jerk of his body into hers as he came, coming wet and sticky until he pulled out and she felt it trickle down her thighs. She groaned, annoyed she hadn’t come again — before the shock of his quick fingers found her center, uncaring about the mess, drawing tight circles against her bud until he carried her over the edge of another orgasm.

Good monster, she thought afterwards, mind wiped clean of criticisms for once. Always serving your master well.

After that, they continued their experiments with the tether.

Tyler leaned back, unabashedly naked, closing his eyes as though he could simply will the tether to give way for him as he tested Wednesday’s resilience and barriers. For a moment, she felt his presence spike—like someone banging on a door at the end of a long corridor. Her lips pressed into a thin line. It was a clumsy effort by him to battle against her defenses, because already she was getting better at her wards. Interesting, she thought deliberately, seeing if he sensed the thought. Nothing. No ripple, no echo. She had managed, in a crude way, to shut him out momentarily.

Then, the corner of her mouth twitched. “See?” she said, pleased. “There’s nothing that can’t be mastered with enough practice.”

With enough time, she’d block out his distraction entirely.

Tyler’s eyes opened and narrowed at her. The challenge inherent, irresistible. She sharpened her focus, like a needle poised to slip between bones, and pressed against the space where his mind had folded in on itself. For a moment there was only resistance, a wall he’d cobbled together out of sheer stubbornness.

Then—crack.

His shield buckled far easier than hers, a paltry thing. A flicker of heat, a memory not meant for her consumption, flooded through. Her breath caught before she could stop herself: the memory — the quiet lift of her head as she’d gone on her toes to kiss him that first time, their first kiss in the Weathervane; the sharp press of his palm at the nape of her neck as he held her, delicate, careful; the pressure of her lips against him that felt perfect to him. It wasn’t a rampant onslaught of desire this time. The memory of their first kiss, instead, was tinged with too much nostalgia, too much softness. Wednesday didn’t know what to do with that. Her own eyes widened, betraying her surprise and discomfort at the unexpected vulnerability she’d prodded from him like a festering wound.

Tyler’s head snapped to hers instantly. His jaw clenched. “That wasn’t fair.”

“You were careless,” Wednesday reproached, coolly.

He leaned forward now, bracing his elbows on his knees, studying her face with that too-human expression of disappointment that made the tether pulse. She ignored his lingering look and the downturn of his emotions, flipping her notebook back open with surgical precision and scrawling across the page.

• Shields possible, but fragile.
• Breach more likely with emotional pressure.
• Memories unstable under duress.

She snapped the book shut again. “We’ll refine it more as the days go on,” she told him.

“Of course,” Tyler replied, voice cut like a blade. “And Wednesday’s grand experiment continues. Tell me, don’t you ever get tired of treating people like objects?”

“Don’t tell me I hurt all two of your feelings?” she replied, tartly. “Pride and anger.”

He exhaled sharply, looking away with a slump of his shoulders. “Just get out, Wednesday. We’ve fucked, you came three times, you made progress on your little experiment on our bond. You got what you came for. It’s time you ran back to safety.”

She narrowed her eyes. She didn’t like that he was kicking her out, but she liked the potential emotions hanging in the air less. She got up, collected her things, reassembling her outfit like a soldier putting on armor. Tyler seemed prickly for a man she’d just let fuck her on all fours like an aminal, and she couldn’t entirely understand why the mood in the air had soured. The memory of their first kiss was one of those things best left banished to the void. She was not that girl anymore, and he had never been that boy.

“Goodnight, Tyler,” she told him, bidding him farewell with: “Think of me in your nightmares.”

Then she walked out the door without looking back.

Chapter Text

A new day came with an old threat announcing itself via the newspaper.

Wednesday sat in the corner of the quad, the Jericho Ledger folded into thirds at her side. The newsprint bled faint black smudges onto her fingertips, the paper itself smelling faintly of damp pulp and small-town desperation. Beside her, a cup of coffee sat cooling—a quad-shot, procured not by her own hand but by her self-appointed minion, Agnes, who had materialized and vanished with only minimal fuss today. The girl’s invisibility was both useful and irritating; Wednesday suspected that even now Agnes was lurking within a few yards, watching her drink grow cold.

It had already been a disagreeable morning. Wednesday had gotten little sleep the prior night, only managing to make it back to the Nevermore dormitories well past curfew, sneaking into Ophelia Tower by scaling up the side of the building. She’d been forced to deviate to take a quick shower, hastily getting rid of Tyler’s scent all over her, before she’d entered her dormitory and tried slipping into bed wordlessly.

Unfortunately, both Thing and Enid had been up, waiting for her — worried.

The words exchanged had been sharp and terse, both last night and then again this morning. As the cold front had settled and cemented, she’d been forced once again to meet the two displeased dispositions before breakfast this morning before any coffee had hit her veins.

Enid and Thing had become a pair. “If I didn’t know Wednesday was allergic to romance,” she’d murmured, conspiratorially, and yet obnoxiously loud, “I’d suspect she was secretly seeing a boy.”

The accusation still echoed, an irony so rich it almost amused Wednesday. Almost. The truth, of course, was far more damning than a teenage tryst. Romance was far too banal a word for what drew her again and again into Tyler’s orbit.

Now, under the gray morning sky, she tried to banish the irritation by focusing on the newsprint. But even with the paper and the bitter scent of coffee drifting under her nose, Wednesday felt the tension clinging to her like a second skin—part Enid and Thing’s suspicion, part the residue of last night’s encounter with Tyler and how abruptly it had ended. It was ridiculous that his ill temper was bothering her; she hadn’t gotten into this to sooth his ruffled feathers. Wednesday cared nothing about the fact that she’d apparently hurt his feelings somehow. The notion was puerile.

Still, it was only when she finally shook herself loose of distractions did she unfold the newspaper, and find the frontpage headline bold enough to warrant her attention:

WILLOW HILL MENTAL INSTITUTE REOPENING AFTER SUFFERING CATASTROPHIC POWER FAILURE AND 46 ESCAPED INMATES.

Her eyes traced the column with clinical detachment.

Authorities have confirmed that Willow Hill Mental Institute is officially expected to reopen before the year’s end, following last month’s catastrophic power failure which resulted in a mass escape of forty-six patients. The incident—one of the most severe in the institution’s history—left the community shaken after sirens blared across town and state troopers combed the woods for weeks. Of the forty-six escapees, forty-three have since been recaptured and returned to custody. Three, however, remain at large: Fester Addams, Tyler Galpin, and an unidentified John Doe.

Wednesday’s lips curved, faintly. At least Uncle Fester is keeping the family name proud.

Her gaze traveled further down.

John Doe is suspected in the deaths of multiple Jericho residents, all of whom were found partially devoured, cranial cavities stripped clean of gray matter. Authorities warn residents to remain vigilant and—

She skipped to the important bits:

One of the patients was the sole son of the late former Sheriff Donovan Galpin, who was brutally murdered last month in an yet another unsolved homicide. Tyler Galpin is a confirmed Hyde, a dangerous and unpredictable Outcast classification associated with violent urges and homicidal tendencies. Local law enforcement has cautioned residents not to approach him under any circumstances, citing his condition as “volatile and potentially lethal.”

Wednesday wondered what it said about her that the description of Tyler now inspired pride when before it had mainly inspired vexation.

In the aftermath, Willow Hill has announced its plans to reopen within the month after a temporary closure to address security breaches. Chief Psychiatrist, Dr. Rachel Fairburn, remains on sabbatical while recovering from severe injuries sustained during the incident. In the interim, administrative duties will be handled by Judy Stonehearst, whose history in rehabilitative care remains under heavy scrutiny by state regulators given the recent crisis.

Wednesday lowered the paper, tapping one black-polished nail against the margin. “Stonehearst,” she muttered, detesting the name. The woman had a résumé scrubbed to a polite clinical shine, but Wednesday knew better. Cheerful, ever-smiling Judy Stonehearst had been responsible for more deaths than the public record would ever tally, though the authorities remained blissfully, willfully clueless. Even Wednesday, with all her suspicion and spite, lacked proof strong enough to pierce Stonehearst’s veneer.

But Wednesday knew.

The experiments that had forged Stonehearst’s avian pathology—and the price had been through outcast blood. The patients under L.O.I.S. were all cruel victims of circumstance: abductions, vivisection, and the dissection of outcasts in the name of cruel science. The secret program running in the bowels of Willow Hill, tucked neatly beneath the psychiatric wards, had gone unnoticed. No paperwork, no oversight—only cages and screams. Forty-six official patients had been lost in the chaos of that night, but the true casualties were the ones no one ever acknowledged.

By the time Wednesday had awoken from her coma, she’d known Judy had swept all those victims conveniently under the rug while the authorities congratulated themselves on recapturing the more visible threats. Even the one woman Wednesday had dragged into freedom with her own hands—Patient 1938—had vanished. A frail woman with mousy hair, hollow-cheeked but kind-eyed, who had clutched Wednesday’s arm with desperate gratitude as she staggered out of the chaos. Unlike the others, whose abilities and identities Wednesday had catalogued in her meticulous research, Patient 1938 had been an anomaly. No file, no obituary, no obvious outcast signs or power that Wednesday had glimpsed. Just a number etched into her wristband and a haunted look that would not leave Wednesday’s thoughts.

She folded the paper shut with surgical precision, the image of Stonehearst’s painted smile hovering in her mind like a crow’s shadow. The trouble with Judy Stonehearst was that her power had no natural ceiling. The crows, the ravens, the black-winged scavengers of the world—all were her soldiers, her messengers, her executioners. A single whistle, and the skies themselves could turn into an outpouring of blood.

That was what made Wednesday’s vision so insidious. She had seen it once, months ago, in the bleak clarity of a premonition.

Enid’s gravestone.

The birds flocking overhead.

And Wednesday could not allow that.

Not that she told Enid, of course. The werewolf would only wring her hands, fret, or worse—try to play the heroine in her own tragedy. No, Wednesday had decided that some knowledge was poison, best swallowed by her alone. She would alter the course of the vision, intervene before Stonehearst could draw her string tight. It was for Enid’s protection that she withheld the truth.

At least, that was what Wednesday told herself.

Even as the reality was proving harsher than she intended. Her secrecy was already corroding what bond they had. Enid sensed it – the growing pile of secrets and lies. The suspicion in her voice when she’d teased about Wednesday seeing a boy had been closer to accusation than joke. Enid knew something was wrong. Knew Wednesday was hiding truths with the same cold precision she wielded in every other part of her life. And Wednesday—who had always considered her solitude a fortress—was discovering what it meant to withhold from those she loved. The more secrets Wednesday accumulated, the more brittle her bond with Enid became.

But Wednesday could not stop.

Not if it meant she would stop Enid from dying.

With both roommate and appendage nursing grievances, returning to her dormitory felt like a waste of her considerable patience. The library of Nevermore loomed with its usual gothic hush, a cavern of shadowed shelves and too-large chandeliers. Saturday mornings were generally tolerable; the fewer students infesting the halls, the better. Wednesday sat hunched over a carrel table tucked against the window, black fountain pen poised above her notebook. Normally, weekends meant progress on Viper de la Muerte’s next installment, but today the muse hung motionless, caught between distraction and irritation. So instead, she had sought sanctuary in academics. Ancient Occult History. Psychopharmacology, an adjunct of her Herbology class. The notes spread before her were orderly enough—nearly surgical in neatness. But her mind was elsewhere.

“Studying? On a weekend?”

Tyler’s voice, dry as ash, curled through her skull. She stiffened, gaze snapping up to find nothing in the air before her. Then she saw it—his outline. Barely there, incorporeal, tether-thin. Tyler. Manifesting through their bond. He came more clearly into her line of vision like a camera slowly coming into focus, and then he was standing there in front of her desk as though conjured from shadow, every detail rendered with unnerving precision—the fold of his flannel, the scar along his jaw, the restless flex of his hands as if he were alive and touchable standing in front of her.

Despite appearances, when he reached across the table for her, his hand went right through.

So, not touchable.

Wednesday’s pen froze. “You’re intruding.”

“I prefer to think of it as visiting,” he replied, his tone faintly amused. “As soon as I realized this tether thing would let me haunt you like a ghost, I worked harder to master it.”

Wednesday’s lip curled. “I’d welcome a haunting. This is a nuisance.”

“Semantics,” he said lightly. “What are we studying? Ooh—rituals of the seventeenth century? That’s— fascinating.”

The word dripped with just enough mockery to make her fingers twitch with the desire to stab her pen through his spectral eye. It occurred to her—horrifyingly, irritatingly—that her first crush might be an imbecile. She searched her memory: beyond his penchant for bullying, his barista skills, his driver’s licence, and his horrific taste in cinema, she had no clear idea of Tyler’s aptitude for academics. He wasn’t a genius—of that she was certain. But she had hoped he’d at least been passable. Anything less would be an insult to her own intelligence. Wednesday Addams did not abide cretins or idiots.

She narrowed her eyes. “Must you belabor the bond? You’re encroaching everywhere and it is becoming tedious. You are there when I wake, you are inside my head, and now you are invading my afternoon leisure.”

“I’ve been inside your body several times, too. I guess I should be happy I don’t hear any complaints about that.”

She ignored that. “Go away,” she hissed.

“Can’t. Won’t. Don’t want to.”

Other students had begun sneaking glances—curious why Wednesday Addams was speaking at nothing.

She measured her options. There was no satisfaction in ignoring him, though she could manage it with extensive levels of pure stoic aloofness—but his persistence would only increase the noise inside her already overcrowded mind. And noise was what she could not abide. His presence through the tether was curse enough: the brush of his thoughts against hers, the constant itch of awareness.

It was probably a boon that he was incorporeal, unable to touch her — she doubted they’d have gotten much at all done if she found herself fucking his corporal projection in every shadowed corner of Nevermore, because to her surprise, pleasures of the flesh were turning out to be just as distracting as everyone had always warned her. Even the memory of last night’s encounters tugged at her focus like a centrifugal force she could not counter.

“What are you thinking about, Wednesday?” Tyler asked her, tone threaded with curiosity.

Wednesday did not answer. She kept her gaze flat, the epitome of controlled detachment. Her thoughts were carefully packed, stacked in neat compartments she had labeled irrelevant, dangerous, and to be ignored. But she could feel the tether pulse, vibrating at a frequency that carried more than idle curiosity. She wondered, fleetingly, if he knew. If he sensed the dangerous swirl behind her calm exterior—the thoughts she had no intention of voicing.

The darkening of his gaze told her the answer. He did.

Irritating. Distracting.

Her nails tapped against the desk in sharp percussion only twice, and she tried to use some of the methods that had worked last night to block out his thoughts, his presence in her mind. To her mounting annoyance, the effort was harder today. Where last night she had thrown up a barrier with minimal exertion, tonight he pushed back—his thoughts slippery, his presence invasive, like smoke seeping through in the crack beneath a locked door.

Her eyes narrowed. “Why are you resisting my barriers?”

A faint smile flickered across his lips, infuriatingly playing at innocence. “I don’t know what you mean.”

The pause that followed chilled the air between them. Her annoyance at his defiance, the steady tilt of his head daring her to call him out when she could barely raise her voice above a whisper because of the public attention. Tyler had always been persistent—relentless in the way he prodded every raw nerve she had—but she hadn’t accounted for the sheer eagerness which would override his own sense of self-preservation. If she had no privacy, then neither did he. She could hardly fathom why anyone would want that—this unfiltered bleed of thought and feeling. It was obscene. It was invasive.

But she may have underestimated the sort of torment Tyler seemed to relish, stripping her defenses bare. If that was what he wanted, he was in for a rude resurrection. There was not an obstacle yet that Wednesday Addams hadn’t learned to dismantle.

“You don’t want to annoy your master now, do you?” she taunted, lightly.

And then—“Wednesday?”

Agnes. The invisible girl wasn’t invisible at the moment; she stood at the end of the table, her pale outline awkward beneath the chandeliers, red hair in its usual frizz.

Wednesday’s spine stiffened. “What do you want?”

Agnes stared at her. “Are you feeling okay? You’re talking to yourself. Out loud. I’ve read that comas can have long-lasting effects on brain function.”

Behind her, Tyler said. “Who’s this?”

“My minion,” Wednesday replied, then addressed Anges herself. “Your perception, while occasionally commendable, is irrelevant at this moment. I have a task for you.”

Agnes perked instantly, a desperate puppy eager to please. She was always more manageable when given a task. “Yes, Wednesday?”

Wednesday leaned forward, voice low, controlled. “I want you to follow Judy Stonehearst. From afar. Do not let her see you. I want confirmation of her movements, her associates. Nothing more.”

Agnes looked eager. “Is this about revenge?”

“It is about precision,” Wednesday corrected flatly. “Do not overstep. Distance. Observation.”

Tyler groaned, audible only to her. “That’s a bad idea. You’re sending a girl to do what I should be doing. I owe Willow Hill a debt. None of them walk away clean. Least of all the people in charge.”

“Stop editorializing,” Wednesday snapped beneath her breath.

Agnes stared unblinking, confused. “Sorry?”

“Not you.” Wednesday waved her hand, dismissive. “Revised instructions: Stonehearst herself is not to be approached. You will only obtain classified files. Her apartment may contain them. Focus on those labeled with patient histories. Particularly Patient 1938. The L.O.I.S. programme.”

Agnes’s eyes widened, but she nodded fervently, already eager with over-enthusiasm. “I’ll get it done.”

“Do not get caught,” Wednesday said, her tone sharpening. “And if you do, stay vanished. Stonehearst is an avian, one that has already killed several people. I need you to understand that I value good judgment more than any benefits from your stealth. If you do anything foolish—”

“You don’t have to worry about me, Wednesday,” Agnes cut in, disappearing fully from sight.

“Who’s Patient 1938?” Tyler asked, confused. “And what’s an avian?”

Wednesday’s eyes slid toward him, flat and assessing. Silence was always her preference, and Tyler had a long way to go before she trusted him with intel, perhaps an insurmountable path. She didn’t even care to factor in that he was an unwanted passenger with this tether in place. She knew he had never been one to leave questions untouched. Even when he’d been pretending to be a normie, he’d managed to finagle more out of her than she would have admitted otherwise under torture and interrogation — but she was far from that ignorant girl anymore who’d trusted him too easily.

Without a word, without attracting anymore unwanted attention from more of her peers, she lifted to her feet and left the library.

Tyler followed, much to her annoyance.

She wondered how long this connection would endure—if it might wither on its own like a diseased limb, or if she would be forced to sever it herself.

And in an act of further needling, Tyler had decided to fill the silence between them with an incessant stream of trivialities, a grotesque parody of companionship. Nothing was beneath his notice, or beneath his determination to irritate her with it: the insipid hues of Nevermore’s banners, the overgrown sprawl of the grounds, the dull-eyed students, even the weather—as though she cared whether the clouds were brooding or merely sullen. The gravel path of Nevermore’s courtyard crunched beneath her boots, each step a punctuation mark to her restraint. She kept her stride brisk, her posture a rigid blade. Her hands remained clasped behind her back, not out of decorum, but to resist the temptation to throttle him—if only his form were mercifully corporeal enough to strangle.

“Left foot, right foot,” Tyler’s voice crawled through the tether, maddeningly solid in her ear. “It’s almost like you’re marching off to war. Oh wait, you always walk like that. You must be fun at parades.”

Wednesday’s eyes flicked to the side, just enough to remind herself that no one else could see him. He ambled alongside her with infuriating leisure, his long legs making it easy to keep up with her brisk pace, hands shoved in his pockets, smirking as if her silence was performance art designed solely for his amusement.

“You notice how no one stops to say hello to you? If I didn’t know better, I’d say people here don’t like you very much.”

They fear me, she almost snapped. And so should you.

“You’re too tiny for me to fear,” he drawled back.

Her jaw clenched, a minuscule flicker of movement masking the flinch that threatened. She hated—loathed—how easily her thoughts leaked through the tether if she didn’t constantly marshal herself. Another vulnerability she would have to cauterize. Clearly, Tyler had forgotten that Wednesday’s bad side was not a place to trespass. Wednesday’s bad side was where things went to die.

She spared him no response.

The sprawling Nevermore grounds teemed with chatter, each voice another needle in her skull. As Wednesday navigated, everyone around her seemed to be vibrating with the same feverous topic: the Gala next weekend.

“Did you hear Bianca’s mask is being custom-made?”
“Oh my god, Chimmie, you need feathers—like, black ostrich feathers. It’s so Venetian.”
“Do you think Jazon will ask me, or should I just ask him?”

The chatter carried on like a plague of cicadas as she stalked through the long pathways. Some girls had laid out fashion sketches across the benches, others clutched glossy catalogs, others planned a last minute trip to the shops in Jericho — as if they would find any favorable fashion left rotting on the mannequins there. A group of siren sophomores were outside, planning their synchronized entrance steps. Even the fanged and clawed creatures of Nevermore seemed reduced to anxious teenagers buzzing about gowns, masks, and dates.

“A gala, huh,” Tyler said, uncharacteristically solemn.

She flashed him a sideways glance as he kept pace with her. The tone had been too soft for all his prior needling, lacking his usual bite. She caught him looking back at some other girl’s sketches of a dress, with that same pinched expression on his face that reminded her of last year. She’d seen that same expression on him just before the debacle of the Rav’N had unfolded, when he’d been hinting at wanting to take her.

Through the tether, she felt a small craving go through him — as if he wanted to attend to the ball with her just like he had last year.

The thought was entirely absurd for so many reasons, she didn’t even have time to list all of them out. Even ignoring the fact that he couldn’t attend because he was an escaped convict and deemed criminally insane, first and foremost Wednesday felt a splice of incredulousness at his gall. As if last year hadn’t just been a ruse orchestrated by Thornhill to get Tyler closer to her. Even his little sniveling rendition of jealousy he’d tendered towards her when she’d told him she’d been strongarmed into inviting Xavier had been an act, surely.

“So, are you going?” Tyler asked her, when he fleetingly met her gaze.

Wednesday’s voice dropped to a hiss, sharp as broken glass. “This entire grotesque charade is the handiwork of my mother. Attendance is compulsory.”

For the moment, no one seemed to care if Wednesday Addams was talking to ghosts as she walked by; perhaps they assumed she was talking to an invisible Agnes, but more likely they were all probably too consumed by their own insipid self-obsession.

Of course, her mother had designed the perfect torture instrument for Wednesday.

Because Morticia Addams, in all her ethereal grandeur, had fashioned the lavish ball after a gothic-Venetian masquerade, and it had been the inane talk of the school for weeks, a plague following Wednesday's every footsteps. Even Grandmama had been dragged into town. Wednesday knew full well Principal Dort had been circling her riches like a vulture hoping for a sizable donation snatched from her aging fingers. As if her grandmother wouldn’t take all her riches with her to the grave. At least, the thought of her grandmother’s cackle echoing through Dort’s dimwitted brain as she denied him even a single penny did something to warm the cold cockles of Wednesday’s heart.

The hollow chatter about velvet and feathers still polluted the air as they walked, but Tyler seemed to be listening to a passing group of werewolves chattering about matching brocade masks.

All this for a dance? Wednesday was appalled.

“Yes. A dance,” Tyler spoke to her, apparently sensing her mounting disgust.

“Yes. A dance,” she repeated, voice cool as frost. “The great altar of adolescent self-delusion. A carnival of hormones disguised as ritual.”

His reply was too smooth. “So were hormones in charge of you last year when you asked me to the Rav’N?”

She refused to turn around and glare.

She felt it before he said anything more—his quiet needling that covered for something else, something too much like regret and longing, that bruise pressing against her through the tether. He did truly have an absurd desire to see her in another gown. To see her descend a staircase, the way she had at the Rav’N Ball, when the lie between them had still been intact.

Her jaw clenched. She did not appreciate the memory he was conjuring up. The Rav’N had ultimately been another point against her in the shortly-stacked columns of humiliation and deception: first the charade of him pretending to be jealous about Xavier, then the grotesque reveal that Tyler had only attended the ball likely because his master had bid him to. Wednesday still remembered the cloying moment, under the absurd sparkling lights, when Thornhill had come upon them, pretending to only know Tyler from his barista duties.

The fact that Wednesday hadn’t spied the deception right in front of her now stung like a thousand needles across her skin.

At least Tyler’s felonious status made the point of his attendance at the Gala entirely moot.

The tether shivered again, as if he had picked up on her thoughts, a flare of jealousy spilling across her consciousness like a rising tide. The image of her, masked, arm hooked with someone else— not Xavier anymore, but perhaps someone worse than him, some nameless fop in a rented tuxedo. Tyler’s incorporeal presence bristled with that thought, and she caught him grinding his teeth before he could squelch it entirely.

“You’re jealous,” she accused, flatly.

The tether pulsed. Genuinely jealous. Not contrived. Not commanded. And with that, Wednesday realized—last year’s jealousy had been genuine as well. Thornhill had ordered him to infiltrate, yes, but his reactions had not been fully hers.

Now Tyler refused to look at her. She sensed that he hated that she could feel his thoughts, but he only had himself to blame. For her part, Wednesday kept silent. His neanderthal emotions and curiosity were wasted and pointless. Wednesday was not going to bother with getting a date to ‘go with’ her. And she did not dress for the benefit of the condemned or formally convicted, either.

“Your master once commanded you to seduce me,” she whispered, scathingly flat, still briskly walking. “Don’t make the mistake of believing that command still applies.”

A long pause followed. “Yeah, of course,” he pressed, low and level enough to be dangerous. She’d struck him again in some tender part, and Wednesday felt a sliver of satisfaction at the hit. “You know, if you don’t acknowledge the fact that what we have between us is real, Wednesday — that what we had has always been real — there’s going to be a problem.”

Her nails bit crescents into her palms behind her back. She moved faster. They rounded the hedge maze, her shadow lengthening across the grass—and with it, his.

“You know, you walk faster when you’re angry,” he mused. “It’s almost kinda cute.”

That did it.

She whipped around towards him. “What I wear and who I go with is none of your concern—”

“Wednesday?” a voice cut in suddenly.

She stopped.

Bianca had appeared at the edge of the garden, watching her with one perfectly arched brow. “You okay?”

Wednesday straightened. “Of course.”

Behind her, Tyler smothered a laugh.

“You’ve been—off lately,” Bianca said, arms folding. “Weirder than usual. And that’s saying something. Are you—talking to yourself?”

Wednesday’s face remained impassive, but the tether quivered with Tyler’s laughter. Oh, this is good. Tell her the truth, Wednesday. Tell her your monster won’t leave you alone.

Bianca tilted her head. “Seriously, the whole last week, it’s like you’ve been—distracted. Did something happen? You can talk to me.”

Tyler leaned in over her, his agitated exhale like a wolf’s heavy breathing in her ear. Yes, Wednesday. Tell her the truth. Tell her you’re being haunted by your own personal monster-slash-boyfriend. Tell her you’ve been distracted because I’ve been fucking you raw every chance I get. That you’ve been distracted thinking about me every other second apart from that.

Wednesday snapped the paper-thin thread of Bianca’s curiosity with a curt, “I’m fine,” before brushing past her in one fluid motion. Thankfully, Bianca muttered something sharp under her breath but didn’t follow after, and the conversation effectively ended.

Tyler was in a mood, but he’d been in one the entire day. It finally crept through like crawling vines the reason why. She could play the flat emotionless master all she wanted, keep deflecting more of his inane inquiries and accusations, but she could only think his insufferable behavior today was some petty form of vengeance for his wounded pride from the prior night.

She would not give him the satisfaction of descending into petty emotions alongside him. Instead, she let the silence stretch—a noose she hoped he would grow uncomfortable with—as she cut across the outskirts of the campus toward the far hedge-lined perimeter, a place of suitable seclusion.

Her mind ticked through the calculus of her options. To ignore him was inefficient. To indulge him was insipid.

To leash him, however—

When they were finally alone, she pivoted abruptly on one foot. “Congratulations,” she said at last, the word laced with venom so cold it could have flash-froze the air between them. “You’ve exceeded even my lowest expectations. I shouldn’t trust you with so much as a triviality, let alone anything of consequence. The spike of jealousy and petty emotions from you make my stomach churn in disgust and second-hand embarrassment. Your lack of restraint is almost artless—it should humiliate even the Hyde.” Her gaze locked on him, unblinking, blade to the bone. She let the silence sharpen before twisting it. “So,” she hissed, every syllable precise as a stitch pulled too tight, “be a good dog for once in your pathetic life and actually please your master. Heel, Tyler. Leave.”

The effect was instantaneous.

The air between them shifted, taut like a cord snapped too tight. His smirk dissolved, replaced by a hard glare, molten resentment banked just beneath the surface. For a fraction of a second, she thought he might resist. But the tether trembled, thrummed—and then he was gone.

No sound, no flicker, just absence.

Wednesday blinked, her eyes scanning the empty pathway where only a moment ago he had been lording over her. Her breath left in a soft, measured exhale. The silence he left behind was deafening, but there was power in it. So it was true. He could be compelled, bound by the command of his master as much as by the tether itself. Her lips curved the faintest degree—not quite a smile, not quite satisfaction, but something darker. This master–servant dynamic could prove useful in more ways than one.

Wednesday resumed her walk across the grounds, boots striking stone with deliberate finality. She would not think of the flicker in his eyes just before he’d faded—the flare of defiance that promised this game between them had only just begun.

And she told herself she would not think of the flicker of hurt in his eyes, either.

The command had worked far too well. One sharp lash of her tongue, one imperious order, and Tyler had vanished like smoke. She didn’t see him for the rest of the day. Wednesday carried on as though the tether was not there, stalking her from the shadows as she walked, ruining her mood through the rest of her day, through the rest of her studies, through the brief stop she made to visit and torment Pugsley, through lunch and dinner where she sat alone, unhindered by company.

But the tether still existed, tying them together even when neither of them particularly wanted it.

She felt it disrupt her sleep that night, and sour her mood the next morning.

On Sunday afternoon, she felt it dissecting her insides during a particularly long rendition of a Hungarian Sonata piece on her cello, the blade of her bow carved deeper than usual, bleeding with conflicting currents of irritation and something perilously close to reproach. She poured herself into the music to serve as a distraction, but it only highlighted the turmoil within her more.

And yet silence was worse, because it was not true silence.

She’d tried to ignore it for as long as she could, to dismiss its importance, but Tyler’s absence felt heavy, like her tongue darting out to flick against the spot where a festered tooth had been rooted out. She could feel him through the tether, not his voice, not his incessant chatter, but the marrow-deep impression of his mood. Wounded pride hummed faintly, low and stubborn, but beneath it something uglier twisted. The friction of desire against resentment, the way he loathed himself for needing her at all, the way he loathed her for making him want. The tether translated none of it into words, but she felt it. A raw, electric burn, as if her veins had been lined with salt.

It made her think, even as she wielded the bow expertly across the old family heirloom, her cello, its strings made of animal parts, not metal. Never an inorganic material. Tradition demanded gut, the real kind: animal intestines stretched and dried until they thrummed with a sound richer and darker than any metal could dream of producing.

While she struck the notes with precision accuracy, Wednesday found herself as she often did when playing — ruminating on too much. On everything. On the fates that had aligned themselves in such a way to bring her into the role of being someone’s master — into not only the orbit of Tyler Galpin, a Hyde, but also serving as the constellation to which he could orbit around, the center point of his entire gravitational sphere.

To a Hyde, their purpose was servitude at the altar of their master’s ambition and frenzy.

And Wednesday knew her appetites were extreme.

More than that, she knew Tyler didn’t want to want her. He may have been a Hyde, subservient by design, but he didn’t want to be anyone’s lackey, at anyone’s beck and call. He’d chosen Wednesday because she had been the only viable option to keep him from descending further into unmitigated madness, but he had never liked the idea of being under her servitude. Wednesday knew that, but now she felt it. The noxious burning disgust at himself and the situation through the tether.

And that made it all the more intolerable.

She told herself she could ignore it, that she would even revel in the reprieve from his running commentary. But his silence hadn’t been silence. It was a different kind of intrusion: an echo of him lurking in the black corners of her skull, the phantom weight of his presence she couldn’t quite shake. He was gone, but not gone. Not absent, merely smothered, like a body trapped beneath floorboards—no sound, but the rot still seeped through.

Wednesday didn’t like being forced to dissect her own behavior, but the realization struck her with fatal precision that coalesced in the middle of the third movement of the song: she had not merely wounded him once, not twice, but thrice. First, with the ruthless end of the previous night at his hideout. Then again, when she’d mocked his emotions that she’d only felt because of the tether. And thirdly, with the command, the way she had reduced him into nothing more than a servant to be ordered and dismissed. Exactly as Thornhill had done, although admittedly without the nauseating, saccharine Oedipal complex that had colored Thornhill’s manipulations. The thought coiled in Wednesday’s gut like poison, black and acrid. To resemble that woman—his abuser—in any form was revolting and intolerable. Thornhill had stripped Tyler of his personhood, carved him down until he was nothing but a sharpened fang to be unleashed at her whim. She had groomed him, made him a monster on a leash. A Hyde with no will beyond hers.

When Ms. Capri had drifted in, lured as always by the notes of misery, she offered another veiled compliment on the pain in her music. Wednesday accepted it with a curt nod and no explanation, and had stopped playing entirely, beginning to clean her instrument with a soft cloth to remove the rosin dust before settling her instrument back into its black coffin.

By the end of it, she was seething at herself as much as at him.

All she had wanted was reprieve, and she had only gained static.

As she shut her casket on her cello and flipped closed the locks, she knew she had unintentionally echoed Thornhill’s degradation, if only for a moment—and it felt like the taste of ash on her tongue. The idea was as insufferable as it was humiliating. Cruelty for cruelty’s sake had never been her vice. When Wednesday chose violence, she did it with precision, with artistry, with purpose. Thornhill’s methods had been neither elegant nor clever—merely crude and obvious. To find herself echoing such banality of evil was a stain she could not abide.

And so, against every instinct within her, Wednesday admitted to herself that she had erred. A misstep, unbecoming and rare. Unacceptable.

Which meant it had to be corrected.

Wednesday rarely afforded herself the luxury of remorse, so she decided to act upon it before the feeling passed. When nightfall descended, she retreated to her dormitory without word to Enid, who was already snoring with the heavy satisfaction of the oblivious. Wednesday lowered herself onto her bed, arms folded over her chest in the proper pose of the deceased, eyes fixed upon the cracks in the ceiling. She did not try to block the tether. Not this time. It had always been Tyler coming to visit her through the tether, and until this point she had seen no reason to utilize it the other way around.

For the first time all day, she let it breathe.

The connection surged. A thrum, low and resonant, like a pulse of electricity licking the inside of her skull. She had not realized how much effort she had spent damming the current until she let it loose. Her mind slipped sideways, disciplined, cutting through the noise with the kind of precision she reserved for her cello or her blade or her visions (back when they responded to her without black-stained tears).

And suddenly—she was there, in the forests east of Jerricho.

The tether bent space and sense. No flickering outline, no transparent ghost. The world snapped into grotesque clarity. Cold night air. The sharp metallic stink of blood on bark. And before her, not Tyler but the other half of him—the Hyde. He towered monstrous, pale skin stretched taut, veined and seething, claws curled into weapons. The grotesque snarl cut across his distorted face as he stalked through the trees, a predator wrapped in sinew and shadow. She found his quarry immediately: a moose of enormous proportions, its antlers glinting like bone scythes under the moonlight.

Her breath caught, and she realized what this was. A hunt, perhaps as sustenance to later feed Tyler, perhaps to satiate the Hyde inside him with violence. The anticipation of witnessing the kill up close made Wednesday's blood flood with adrenaline.

The woods were hushed in anticipation, the kind of silence that Wednesday knew preceded bloodshed. The autumn leaves were spread thickly over the ground, but Wednesday’s footsteps over them truly made no noise as she was not really here. The moose moved heavily between the trees, its bulk a testament to primeval power, breath steaming from its nostrils in rhythmic bursts. Each step sank deep, antlers wide enough to crown it a sovereign of the forest.

And yet it was being hunted.

Wednesday studied the Hyde, who had yet to realize he was being watched through the tether. His focus was fixed upon his prey. She caught glimpses of him between the tree trunks — a shadow that bent the dark around itself, a distortion more than a figure. There was an arachnid grace to his gait that she admired. His flesh gleamed in pallid tones under the moon, stretched over impossible muscle, claws flexing as though eager for blood. His grin was grotesque, a rictus mask carved with too many teeth.

He was beautiful.

Especially in the moonlight. Wednesday was transfixed.

And then the Hyde bellowed once, a warning echo through the forest, before he leapt to attack the moose. The force of the collision rattled Wednesday’s teeth, even here inside the tether. The moose thrashed, powerful enough to crush a lesser predator, but Tyler’s other self was stronger, faster, driven by a feral precision she had never quite witnessed up close without being the target of it. He leapt. The movement was both ungainly and terrifyingly fast, claws ripping grooves into bark as he vaulted off a tree, angling downward onto the moose’s flank. The animal raged when it took a deep clawed hit, but used the outsized antlers to shake the Hyde off with a wild head swing that nearly gutted the monster.

The Hyde hit the ground with a rough roll, and when he looked up, his gaze caught on Wednesday.

Those molten eyes—feral, bulging red—locked on her, and she felt the tether pulse like a struck vein. She had intruded upon the hunt, and the hunter had noticed. For a moment, Wednesday felt the tether pulse so strongly it was as though the forest itself leaned closer, pulling her into his feral focus. He snarled. Not a warning, not a greeting—pure irritation, as though her very presence had spoiled his hunt. The sound vibrated through the trees, shaking loose leaves from the branches above. His claws flexed, the muscles in his back rippling as though he might spring at her out of annoyance.

But the distraction nearly proved fatal.

The moose, still staggering and alive, seized its final chance. It lunged with staggering force, antlers ramming into the Hyde’s ribs. The crack of impact echoed through the clearing. But the Hyde’s claws made the final kill sweep, and the beast staggered, legs buckling, until the Hyde wrenched it down with brutal finality.

The woods went silent, save for the ragged rasp of monstrous breath.

And then, slowly, those molten eyes flickered toward her. It was as if the recent kill didn’t exist at all to him. The focus was exclusively Wednesday. Covered in blood, he lumbered over and stood looming over Wednesday’s smaller form. She kept her back straight, not an ounce of fear in her body, not anymore.

What did she have to fear of her own monster?

“Don’t change back,” she told him. “Not yet. You still need to lug that beast all the way back to the cabin.”

The Hyde sniffed, and nodded, intelligence in his incomprehensible form. It still looked at Wednesday for a long moment, as though debating his interests still, but Wednesday only lifted one neat eyebrow, as if to push the monster into movement. He grunted, then turned his back on her. Then, with terrifying ease, he hooked his claws beneath the animal’s massive bulk and dragged it across the ground, the antlers carving twin trenches through the dirt. Every motion radiated strength, even wounded as he was—an apex predator unwilling to leave his prize behind.

Wednesday followed the trail with a faint pleased smile playing across her features.

Not after long, the cabin loomed in the distance. At its threshold, the Hyde dropped the carcass with a thud that shook the boards. He hunched, trembling, claws sinking into the wood as though trying to tear his way out of his own skin. Then the change came—brutal and graceless. Limbs twisted back upon themselves, grotesque muscle snapping and reforming until what crouched before her was Tyler. Naked. Blood-drenched. His chest smeared with gore, a single wound carved across his ribs, slightly seeping.

He leaned against the doorframe, panting, slick hair plastered to his forehead. His gaze found her through the dark. A thin, crooked smile tugged at his mouth. “It’ll heal,” he rasped, voice roughened by the beast’s echo. “I took six gunshots a few weeks back—walked it off. This?” He glanced at the gash like it were a scratch. “This is nothing.”

Wednesday studied him—stripped bare, wounded, dangerous. The scent of blood hung between them, copper and heat. And her eyes, in an obsidian-dark stare, gleamed with something that wasn’t pity.

It was interest.

Tyler grinned back. He knew what that look meant.

Chapter Text

Despite the carnal desire that had overtaken Wednesday at the display of Tyler‘s prowess, his bravado was betrayed almost immediately. He staggered through the cabin door with the moose carcass dragging behind him, blood streaked across his torso in a cruel slash that glistened under the dim light. His breath was slightly uneven, but his voice tried for nonchalance. “It’s fine,” he muttered, wiping at his side with a crimson hand. “It’ll heal. Quicker than you think. A day from now I won’t even feel it.”

That may have been true enough, but it was obvious he felt it now. His voice was dismissive, but his body betrayed him with every stiff breath. Wednesday’s gaze dropped to the torn flesh, the way his abdomen tightened involuntarily when he moved. With his body was on full naked display, there was nothing for the gore and history of violence to hide behind. Etched atop the brutality of flexing hard muscles and past assaults, a riot of everything he had gone through. The old claw marks across his pectorals, done by his own hand last year to throw Wednesday’s suspicion in any other direction; the marks of no less than six bullet wounds across his chest, torso and arm, through and through to his back, remnants from his escape from Willow Hill; even Enid’s claw marks littered his skin like a faint signature.

This newest antler scrape would hardly merit much concern in the long run, but Wednesday wasn’t a fool to underestimate the dangers of an infected wound.

“Your attempt to downplay pain is neither novel nor convincing,” she said, stepping past him.

The scrape of something against wood interrupted her reprimand.

From the shadows near the stove, Tyler’s scenthound lifted his head, ears drooping, eyes slack with sleep. Elvis. The creature blinked blearily, then got up slowly to his feet with a long stretch and padded across the floor. His tail wagged with more enthusiasm than the rest of his medium-sized body, quicker and more deliberate the more he awoke, as he pressed his muzzle against Tyler’s hand in quiet greeting. His fingers curled briefly into the folds of the dog’s ears, the gesture softer and more genuine than she’d seen him offer any people.

Elvis huffed once, a low, worried sound, but his eyes passed right over Wednesday to the scent of blood in the air and its humongous sized source: the corpse of the moose. Not so much as a twitch of recognition at Wednesday. Sensible, she thought. She wasn’t truly there. To Elvis, she was less than a draft in the woodsmoke.

It appeared that once his owner had reassured him, once he’d gotten a good sniff at the moose, Elvis was determined to go back to sleep again, exhaustion overtaking him. “He’s getting old,” Tyler murmured, a rare moment of tenderness in his voice. “All he does is sleep these days. The pound wouldn’t have found him a home, he’s so old.”

Wednesday nodded, and looked around. The cabin smelled of old wood, damp earth, wet dog, and fresh blood. The place was distinctly lacking anything beyond basic necessity, stretched thin on supplies and even further extended on anything of comfort. She catalogued the changes since she had last seen it: more crude repairs patched into the walls, slats replaced unevenly, hinges hammered into place with more desperation than skill. Scavenged things were scattered throughout—tools that were unmistakably from his father’s house, a jacket flung over a chair that did not belong there, the pathetic remnants of a life Tyler had tried to cobble together out of scraps.

She ignored his confusion when she located a chipped bowl, filling it with water from the dented tin pitcher. The cloth she wrung out was stiff but serviceable.

When she turned back, he was standing where she’d left him, streaked in gore, staring at her with a lifted eyebrow. “How can you touch that?” he asked. “You’re not even here.”

Wednesday paused. Truth be told, she hadn’t thought about it. The actions had been instinctive, unthinking. Clearly, the intent mattered on the control she had through the tether.

“Sit,” she ordered, her voice sharp.

Tyler’s jaw twitched, glaring as though her presence itself was the greater wound. “I told you, it’s nothing.”

Wednesday advanced, water dripping from the cloth into the bowl, her expression carved from stone. “And yet you’re bleeding all over the floor. You’ll oblige me.”

His defiance wavered, but only barely. “Is that an order?”

She clenched her jaw. “It doesn’t need to be. Stop being stubborn, Tyler. It’s not your most attractive quality.”

He paused; she’d given him too easy an opening. “And what is my most attractive quality?”

She counted to three in her head to ease the rising urge for violence. “Sit,” she repeated.

He grunted, but relented. With a hissed breath, he dropped into the chair, shoulders tight, eyes burning into her. Wednesday pressed closer, boots cutting a slow rhythm over the warped floorboards. If he expected her to hesitate because of the immodesty—or to keep the customary distance she always maintained—he was in for a surprise.

She knelt at his side and pressed the wet cloth to his wound, wiping away the gore from his body. Déjà vu slithered up her spine, unwelcome but undeniable. She had done this once before—cleaned his wounds, sat too close, seen too much. Back then it had been his living room, his chest scored with claw marks he had oh-so-innocently passed off as someone else’s handiwork. He’d lounged in that ridiculous flannel shirt, unbuttoned and pretending to wince against the sting of antiseptics that first time she had seen his skin bared. A slightly humiliating memory in retrospect: the warmth that had crept into her cheeks, the fleeting flutter of attraction and girlish interest.

That girl was dead.

Now he sat naked, utterly indecent and exposed, streaked with blood like some barbarian—lewd in ways too obvious to ignore. His body betrayed him with the same feral intensity she had come to recognize in him; the half-strain of arousal at her kneeling figure was proof enough. Wednesday’s eyes flicked down, then away, cool and clinical. If she had not already begun the night with intrusive thoughts of him—thoughts sharpened by the grotesque beauty of his Hyde’s savagery—she might have skewered him with a remark about indecency, or castrated him with words alone for such an unrefined display.

Instead, she scrubbed harder at the blood, punishingly thorough, and said nothing.

The blood came away in thick, dark smears, staining the water pink and muddy brown as she worked with meticulous precision. Her hand hovered, then pressed against his chest, directly over his thudding heartbeat. Tyler jolted, every muscle tensing. His mouth parted as though to ask how she could manage to touch him so effortlessly, because he had tried earlier himself to touch her through the tether and had failed, his hands sliding through her like mist.

But her touch was solid. Cold fingers against fever-hot skin. Real.

Her gaze flicked to his, sharp and unblinking. “Yes, it’s fascinating. You couldn’t do this when you intruded upon me earlier, but I can do it here. Evidently the tether favors discipline and will. Both of which you lack.”

He gritted his teeth. “So it’s just you being better than me?”

“As usual.” She withdrew her hand, studying the smear of blood across her pale fingers as though examining an ink blot. “You feel real to me,” she said, almost to herself, as though cataloging a specimen under glass. “More solid than when you intruded into my world.”

“Maybe it’s because you want to touch me.”

Her expression didn’t falter. “Want is irrelevant.”

“Doesn’t feel irrelevant,” he murmured, leaning just slightly towards her, cocky and inspired. “Feels like the first honest thing between us that’s always stood there.”

Wednesday exhaled evenly, trying to get them back on track to a productive conversations rather than one that would entirely descend into primitive fucking. “I have greater experience with the supernatural,” she pointed out. “More control. The tether bends to me as it should.”

“Because of your visions?”

Her eyes narrowed, but then she inclined her head slightly, conceding the point. “I mastered them, until they recently shuttered to me due to psychic exhaustion.” Her voice grew sterner. “But I had learned to wield the visions and bend them to my will before they’d manifested those insidious black tears.”

“Right,” he muttered, solemnly. “Wondered what that had been about.”

Of course. He’d witnessed one such incident the morning after their bonding ritual. Two visions in that single day. Since then, any attempts at visions had once again produced static noise. Wednesday was now more careful with pressing against that depleted power. It had come to her; the ability was still there. She may have to force the issue of patience, but for the moment she had no choice but to trust that the visions would come to her again when needed. At least it wasn’t a gift entirely depleted, indefinitely.

His expression shifted, and that normal smug curve fell away from his mouth. For once, there was no smirk, no cruel teasing. Just something that almost resembled concern. “And you just— live with that?” He sounded skeptical. “Like it doesn’t matter that it’s refusing you now?”

“Of course it matters,” she snapped. “Everything that strengthens me demands a price. I’ll pay it. Right now it is simply replenishing the well of its source.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It means you ask too many questions.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “It means you don’t know either, doesn’t it?”

She found it insufferable that he thought he knew her so well. His smugness, his uncanny ability to read the shifts in her silences, the precision with which he seemed to press against her limits—it was all an offense to her carefully constructed defenses. No one was meant to wield that kind of insight into her, least of all Tyler Galpin, whose judgment was erratic at best, self-destructive at worst. What made it intolerable was not simply his presumption, but the betrayal of her own body and mind in conceding the truth. He was right.

He searched her face as though looking for cracks, but she would offer none. Finally, he said quietly, “You really don’t trust people, do you? Not with this type of stuff. Not with much of anything. Especially not me.”

She exhaled harshly. “Is this because I refused to indulge you about Stonehearst and Patient 1938? That’s on a need to know basis.”

“And maybe I need to know?”

“Not yet, you don’t.”

“You trusted the invisible redhead,” he pointed out.

“Agnes,” she supplied the name. “And she needed to know as she was recovering the intel.”

He leaned into her personal space, half bent over her. “What’s the point of having a Hyde at your beck and call if you don’t use me to do your dirty work?”

Wednesday was starkly aware of the rising scent of him—animal blood, sweat — feral and heated. Not unpleasant. “I prefer to do the dirty work myself,” she returned, clipped.

His nostrils flared, lips parting as though he meant to say something sharp or stupid—perhaps both. “You’re never going to trust me, are you?”

Wednesday stood and moved away, in the pretense of retrieving a tin first-aid kit from the shelf with mechanical efficiency, another one of the supplies he had raided from his father’s house.

She snapped the box open as she returned to him. “Trust is for the weak.”

His jaw clenched and then rose up to stand himself. She had already scoured his chest of blood, leaving pale skin marred only by fresh scratches and fading bruises. Yet he remained unkempt, a mess of sweat, grime streaked into his collarbones, his hair damp and matted like some cornered animal. No amount of her effort could tame the chaos of him. The most feral thing, however, was not his appearance but his gaze. His eyes darkened as they fixed on her, black with something that went beyond violence, beyond survival. It was something that spoke of defiance, a silent declaration that he would not sit docilely under her ministrations and commands. He stood looming over her, and Wednesday hated how he used his size against her, how he could dominate the space in a way her more diminutive form could not.

Jaw ticking, he stared her down, the air between them charged with the kind of tension that felt less like intimacy and more like a standoff. Wednesday did not flinch. If anything, she leaned into the moment, her chin tilting upward, her black eyes meeting his with the flat certainty of a guillotine blade. Let him tower. Let him imagine he had the upper hand. She had seen the Hyde crouched beneath his skin; she knew what lay behind those eyes. It did not frighten her. It fascinated her.

Whether man or monster, both were hers.

“Wednesday,” Tyler said, watching as she tore gauze with clinical precision without even looking at it. “If this bond is going to work, things need to change. I’m not asking you to bare your soul, but if you treat me like Laurel did—nothing more than a tool, ordering, using—”

“I’ll snap the bond myself before I’d ever let that happen,” Wednesday cut in, severe. “I am not your former master. I am not cut from the same cloth.”

She meant it as reassurance, but she wasn’t sure she hit the mark. Wednesday wasn’t used to the idea of reassuring someone. She was usually too busy instilling fear in them. Her lips thinned. She hated the look of doubt on his face, as if he didn’t trust her entirely to live up to her end of the bargain, but she hated being told she resembled Thornhill even more. Yet the faint tug of his wounded pride still echoed along the tether, and she knew he meant it.

“I swear it,” she told him.

A pause. Addams' oaths were not flimsy, ornamental things like the promises of other families or other children. Perhaps Tyler knew she would not give her word easily, not without it bearing the weight of everything inside her. Even Enid with her insipid pinky promises had no inkling of an idea what it meant for Wednesday to swear on something.

It seemed Tyler may have understood the gravity of the moment, the weight of her words. She saw it dawn on his features, the realization that she said it and meant it with every fibre of her being. Perhaps he felt it through the tether, too.

For once, he was not looking at her as an opponent or alley or reluctant master anymore, or even as someone he just wanted to fuck senseless. He looked at her with a flicker of that boy she had once dissected with her eyes across the linoleum floors of the Weatherwane, the one who’d shown her the soft underbelly of him, who had displayed a bewildering understanding of her and all her ‘spooky’ idiosyncrasies. The same lightness of him, the same innate trust — she felt it thrum through the bond.

The barista boy Tyler used to be was still inside him; perhaps buried deep under layers of scar tissue and trauma, but he was still there.

They were finally at a crossroads that both recognized.

“Sit,” she commanded, again. Not cruelly this time—just simply, quietly.

For once, he obeyed without reluctance, once again lowering himself onto the single wooden chair in the entire cabin, still wounded but no longer as defensive. She knelt beside his naked form, antiseptic in hand. The sting made him flinch, but he didn’t move away. Wednesday’s fingers were deft, impersonal yet precise, dabbing, pressing, binding. She worked in silence, the air between them heavy with blood and oaths and unspoken things.

Finally, without looking up, she tried to return to some semblance of normalcy: “This tether is already too dangerous to be left to your fumbling. If it is to remain intact, it will be because of my discipline. One you need to echo.”

The bandage she tied was neat, firm, protective—care disguised as control. Tyler winced at the pressure, watching her through the dim light of the cabin. He seemed to understand—if not consciously, then in the marrow of him—that she wasn’t leaving this time. Not yet. Her fingers lingered a fraction too long at the knot of the bandage. Cold, deft, deliberate. She should have withdrawn the instant her work was finished. Instead, she remained crouched before him, dark gaze fixed, watching for the slightest tremor of response.

Something in him flickered— wounded pride soothed, but also something else alive, restless. Budding desire, quick to catch flames. His hand lifted, reaching for her wrist. As expected, his fingers passed through her, phasing through her skin like smoke.

“I still can’t touch you back,” he said finally, voice low, rough around the edges. “That’s not fair.”

Wednesday didn’t move. She only watched as his mouth came dangerously close, hovering just above hers, not yet touching. The tether strained, hot and insistent. At the last possible moment, she lifted her hand again—palm against his chest, keeping the smallest, cruelest distance. He could not touch her, but she could hold him exactly where she wanted. Her palm against his chest, cold and unyielding, should have been enough.

“Fairness is a construct for children and optimists,” Wednesday replied, her tone even, though her hand did not withdraw from his chest. She pressed a little harder, watching the way he flinched at the sting but didn’t move away. “What matters is control. Clearly, I have it.” He swore lightly under his breath, and she tilted her head, clinical as ever, pressing against the wound with a touch more pressure. “You see? The tether responds to dominance, not desire. I’ve spent years bending the supernatural to my will. You’ve spent years being bent.”

His laugh was sharp, humorless. “Jesus, Wednesday.”

“That’s not cruelty. It’s merely stating facts.”

“Is this your version of an apology? Because it sucks.”

“I don’t apologize,” Wednesday insisted, final and flat.

He raised a single brow, a smirk threatening. “You keep saying that. But you forget—I can feel you now. Over this tether. I know when you’re lying. Or regretting. Or pretending you don’t.”

Her jaw tightened. The admission stung, but it wasn’t news. She had spent days drowning in his moods and memories, his anger, his shame, his inconvenient want. It followed that he would taste her emotions too—the irritation, the creeping recognition that perhaps she had overreached. That perhaps she had been— uncharacteristically harsh in a way she hadn’t intended.

But then she startled them both. She turned her hand deliberately, sliding higher across his chest until her fingers rested at the column of his throat. A movement that was no longer strictly medicinal. Her palm pressed lightly to the pulse beating there, feeling his heartbeat quicken from her touch, and then higher still, cool fingers smearing a line of blood up across the rough stubble of his cheek.

Tyler inhaled sharply, pupils blowing wide.

For a long stretched moment, she didn’t move. Didn’t retreat. Her fingers had smudged blood up across the stubble at his cheek, cool against the fever heat of his skin. Her thumb brushed—just barely—against the corner of his mouth, leaving a smear of his own blood there. Wednesday had no intention of dignifying him with an apology. Words were flimsy, corruptible things. But this—this gesture, precise and unyielding—cut sharper than any syllable.

She had always believed actions spoke louder than words.

She leaned forward, aware of his sudden accelerated breathing, and pressed her lips along his collarbone and throat just to feel him tense more, just to hear the stifled groan escape his chest. It was satisfying how much he responded to her. His entire focus was so singularly fixated upon her, arrested by every inch of movement of her, the press of her lips over the firm muscles on his chest as she started the venture southward.

She shoved Tyler back against the chair, keeping him pinned there, savoring the brief flicker of surprise and anticipation blooming across his face.

Then she dropped to the floor between his knees, her free hand wrapping fingers deftly around the base of his cock. He’d been half-erect the entire time, just from her proximity and medicinal touches, but under her grip and one or two strokes, he came to a full aching hardness so fast he groaned. “Fuck, Wednesday—” Tyler’s fingers twitched restless at his side again, like he was resisting the urge to touch because he couldn’t. Good. For the moment, Wednesday liked that the privilege of touch was hers alone. She had no doubt that under her tutelage he would improve, obtain a reciprocal grasp on this tether that would manifest in him being able to touch her back. But for the moment, she liked the uncontested control and power this offered her over him.

She let her tongue flick out, licking up some of the sweat off his abdomen, feeling his muscles jolt beneath her. She finally directed attention upon his stiff cock, finding it strained with tension. The veins in his shaft were already pronounced, skin flushing red, precum at the tip — he was so easily excitable. She looked up, eyes locking on him, and then stuck out her tongue and deliberately traced a long slow path up his cock before pulling back, watching him groan and stiffen in every way.

“God, this is so fucking hot,” Tyler panted out.

Wednesday gave him a smirk of her own, leaning forward to catch the drop of pre-cum on her tongue, a thrill of arousal running through her at the shuddering gasp that escaped him at her actions.

Then she took him into her mouth fully.

The first full swallow of him was almost too much, but Wednesday had mastered the art of sword swallowing since she was a child. It had never been a trick, nor a parlor amusement—it was discipline, cultivated for years with the same severity as violin scales and fencing drills. Morticia had taught her the mechanics, Uncle Fester the recklessness, but Wednesday had perfected the ritual through sheer will.

A simple throat fucking by comparison was amauter work.

Her mouth opened, slow and deliberate, swallowing his cock with the same practiced precision despite never having done this before. There was no flinch, no hesitation. Only the controlled deepthroating of someone who understood her own anatomy better than most physicians. If anyone choked, it was Tyler. She felt him stiffen and groan, making an ungodly amount of noises as she worked him up and down her throat, hollowing her cheeks out to get a suction; she’d heard men liked getting their dicks sucked — as the colloquial went — and their balls fondled. The mechanics of this act were hardly complicated.

Again, it wasn’t all that different to swallowing a sword — in fact, far easier. The blade sliding past her lips, over her tongue, down the delicate curve of her throat. She did not gag; that reflex had been conquered years ago. Down, further, deeper—until the hilt of him rested against her lips and she began the rhythm anew, each time the tip hitting the back of her throat as the full length of him was buried inside her. Her lungs burned faintly from the discipline, but Wednesday remained unconquered. The sensation wasn’t clinical, though, not like sword-swallowing at all. It was exhilarating. Instead of cold steel against the warmth of her throat, a pressure that demanded stillness, she kept moving, keeping the focus on Tyler’s desires.

She wanted to test out all the ways she could drive him insane.

“Watch—” Tyler hissed, gasping, warning, “watch the teeth, Wednesday.” She almost gave a wicked smile around her work, but resumed her service without the scrape of her teeth against his overly-sensitive flesh, making his body jolt like he’d received an electrical shock at the next galling suction of her mouth. “W-Wednesday— Christ, how are you so good at this? I’m gonna fucking come too soon, fuck—”

Wednesday gave him a smirk of her own, leaning forward and catching the drop of more precome on her tongue. The tangly salty taste of him was fascinating, made all the better by it being Tyler’s. It felt like she was claiming him all over again.

“You’re enjoying this,” Tyler pointed out, voice rough, startled.

Her eyes darted up to meet him. Then, just to be cruel, she licked a slow, teasing stripe up the underside of his cock and took one of his balls into her mouth. Tyler groaned, his head falling back against the chair with a dull thud, throat swallowing so harshly, the tension in his throat strained as his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down once. The flush of redness had now spread to his chest, to his neck, crawling up his face. He looked almost in pain.

Wasn’t it a curious thing that Wednesday didn’t mind being face-fucked when Tyler looked like that?

“Christ, Wednesday,” he muttered, maybe reading her mind.

She went back to swallowing his cock again.

He was making beastly noises through his throat, exhaling heavily through his nose, eyes rolling into the back of his head like he was being taken over by a possession. He covered his eyes with a palm, sliding his hand into his hair and pulling back just enough like he had to scramble to reestablish some control over himself. Wednesday only used that opportunity to plant a hand over his lower shaft, at whatever her throat wasn’t reaching as she gave quicker bobs of her head up and down his cock, her tongue sloppy only because she was earnest at mastering this.

The faint strain of her lungs increased as her natural rhythm sped up, amplified when he began thrusting into her open mouth with driving hips that she couldn’t entirely decide were voluntary or involuntary movements by him; it was data easily gathered the more it went, the more he gave out small choked sounds that only highlighted how little control he had over himself. She catalogued each response of him through every moment: the way his muscles tightened, the strangled sounds, the groaning anger of him as he tried to reach for her — only for his fingers to go right through the strands of her head, catching on nothing.

At that point, he just gave up. Relenting to her completely, the razor-thin line between control and calamity expunged as he came down her throat with a long hot spurt; she swallowed the seed of him down without thinking as he twitched and spent himself entirely.

“Holy fucking shit,” he groaned — afterwards, drained in more ways than one. “You can say whatever the fuck you want to me if that’s how you apologize.”

He looked down at her in naked amazement. There was an unexpected flutter of excitement in her chest, a tingling anticipation in her nerves. To Wednesday, she had never thought this act would bring her pleasure too, but this was less performance than she had expected. It looked like yet another discipline that she would delight in honing, proof of another thing that could be subjugated to her will.

“Can you— can you come for me?” he murmured, sounding desperate despite the release. “I can’t touch you — fuck, I hate that I can’t touch your right now, but you can—”

He broke off, swallowing heavily, wild eyes watching her as she clinically thumbed at small speck of his fluids left at the corner of her lips that she then took back into her mouth, licking it clean; he squeezed his eyes shut, groaning, and his softening dick gave a small little twitch. Wednesday eyed it with surprise; perhaps a side-effect to being a Hyde meant a smaller refractory period, or maybe that was just the benefits of being a horny teenage boy.

“Touch yourself, Wednesday,” he breathed out, low, demanding. “I need to see you fucking come.”

She lifted an eyebrow. It was an enticing prospect, but she only tilted her head slightly, eyes never leaving his as she studied him and considered the prospect. Before Tyler could respond, she closed the infinitesimal distance between them. The kiss was not soft. It was another extension of the experiment, a precise incision—her lips pressed to his with cutting intent, as though she were dissecting the tether from the inside out. She wanted to know if her control over the tether would hold even when she was distracted and preoccupied, if his mind would bleed into hers with the contact.

It did.

The connection roared, louder than it ever had before. For one heartbeat she felt him entirely—his hunger, his ache, his unsteady hope, his fury at needing her, his shame for wanting her, and beneath it all, the fractured boy who had been chained, beaten, used — stretching outwards to her with genuine emotion, a feeling she refused to name, a craving so desperate and subsuming, it felt cavernous. She pulled back like she’d bitten into live wire, her eyes widening.

Then, with a swift withdrawal, she broke contact and rose to her full height.

Tyler’s gaze followed her as she stood, flinching, bloodied and blinking, but undeniably drawn toward her retreating touch. He flexed his jaw where her hand had been, as though testing whether the phantom imprint would remain.

His lips were still parted, his chest heaving. He looked half feral, half undone, and wholly thrown. “Wednesday, what—” his voice was raw, confused. “What just happened?”

“Nothing,” she interrupted coolly.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand like she’d tasted something she couldn’t understand. But before she could marshal her excuses—the tether snapped. Not gently, not like a thread fraying. It was a brutal, visceral wrench, the sensation of her mind being hooked and dragged backward through bone and sinew.

Wednesday’s eyes flew open.

Her body lay exactly as she had left it—arms folded across her chest, spine stiff as a corpse on her dormitory bed—but she was not alone. Thing scuttled across the blanket in frantic gestures, tapping at her sleeve with enough urgency to raise welts.

Beside him, Enid loomed, wide-eyed and pale, hands wringing the hem of her sleep shirt. “Wen–Wens, thank god—finally!” her voice broke on the edges. “Why do you take sleeping like the dead so seriously? God, something’s wrong—Agnes is on the phone.”

The tether pulsed. Wednesday felt it echoing inside her ribs, a rhythm out of step with her own heart. Her instincts screamed to cut it off, to sever the moment with a cutting finality, but her body betrayed her—rooted to the spot, uncharacteristically caught immobile in the middle of calculating her options.

But Enid was holding up her glitter-encrusted cell, the glowing screen illuminating her fear. The tiny whisper from the other end was faint but clear enough. Agnes. Whispering, panicked, words splintered by her own breath: “She’s dead. Judy Stonehearst—she’s—she’s gutted. I did what you asked, Wednesday. I broke into her place to get the L.O.I.S. files but—she was there tonight when she wasn’t supposed to be. On the floor. Stabbed multiple times. Chest. Abdomen. There’s—so much blood—”

The sound of Agnes’s breathing stuttered in and out, faint and ragged.

Enid clapped a trembling hand over the phone, as though that would spare them the horror. “Wen, she’s freaking out. I’m freaking out. We have to call the cops. Or—or tell her to get out before she gets arrested, or worse.” She dropped her voice to a rough whisper. “The killer could still be there.”

Wednesday sat up, movements precise and deliberate, though her mind still throbbed from the psychic whiplash of the tether. Her expression never cracked.

“No,” she declared.

Enid stared at her. “No?!”

“Tell Agnes to go invisible and stay invisible until I get there. I need to see the body before the police arrive and contaminate the crime scene with their incompetence,” Wednesday said coolly.

Enid’s jaw dropped. “Wednesday, this isn’t one of your little murder-mysteries! She’s actually—”

But Wednesday wasn’t listening. The tether still hummed faintly, vibrating under her skin like a bruise. She could feel Tyler’s concern tugging at her from across that unseen thread, sharp and intrusive. He had felt her abrupt departure. He must have felt the impact of the news hit her, but not the details itself. He was worried.

She ignored it.

Her eyes cut back to Enid. “Tell Agnes to stay put. I want her to keep the scene intact. I’ll be there before the police destroy everything that matters.”

Thing slapped the quilt in frantic disagreement.

Enid looked like she wanted to howl. “This is insane. You can’t just—”

But Wednesday was already sliding off the bed, reaching for her coat and gloves, the hunger for the crime scene pulsing through her like adrenaline.

“Someone has to look Death in the face with composure,” she said, buttoning her coat with calm precision. “It may as well be me.”

“Yeah,” Enid muttered back, incredulous. “And how exactly do you plan to get across town at this time of night? Even if we didn’t have a curfew in place because of your homicidal freak of an ex that’s still out there, lurking like a loser, we still have no way to get there.”

Desperate times, desperate measures.

“I’ll just have to appeal to the devil on someone’s shoulder for a ride,” Wednesday determined.

Murder, mystery, mayhem.

It was all exactly the sort of thing Gomez Addams delighted in.

In a stroke of luck—or perhaps fate—Morticia was not in residence when Wednesday, Enid, and Thing arrived at the ivy-laden entrance of the Gardner’s Cottage. Only Lurch greeted them, hulking and solemn. Wednesday pushed past him without ceremony, Enid trailing in nervous protest. The pine-fresh air of the cottage had significantly thickened once the Addams had taken over, noxious odors swallowing the whole house, every candle flickering in the foray casting looming shadows on the wall.

She found her father in the study, polishing a curved knife against a strip of leather, humming a jaunty tune beneath his breath. His eyes lit up when he saw her. “My little death doll, what brings you into my lair this late at night?”

Wednesday did not waste words. “I need you to drive me into town. A friend of mine is at the scene of a murder, and I must collect her before the police arrive and mangle the evidence.”

Gomez’s grin widened, showing teeth, but then faltered just enough to ask: “Who has been murdered?”

“Judy Stonehearst.”

The name shifted the atmosphere. His blade stopped mid-sharpening. He sat back in his chair, moustache twitching as though weighing the gravity of the news. Then a dark chuckle spilled out of him, warm and vicious. “Fester told me what she did in that institution,” Gomez said, voice dropping low. “The experiments. The cruelty toward our kind. She carved up outcasts like they were nothing but rabbits on a dissection table. I cannot say I’ll mourn her.”

“Nor will I,” Wednesday replied, flat. “But I need to see the body before the opportunity is lost.”

He studied her face, as though searching for the thing she was not saying. At last, he sighed, slipping the knife into its sheath. “Very well. But I will not keep secrets from your mother. Morticia is out at the cemetery tonight, communing with the dead.” His smile turned reverent. “Such a vision, when she whispers to the spirits.”

Wednesday’s lip twitched—the barest shadow of approval. “We’ll cross that crypt when we come to it. For now, time is of the essence.”

Moments later, the hearse roared to life, its engine growling like a caged beast. Lurch took the wheel, enormous hands steady as stone. Gomez slid in beside him, eyes alight with anticipation. Wednesday, Enid, and Thing crowded into the back, the latter drumming a frenetic rhythm against the leather seat.

As the countryside blurred past, Wednesday felt it—the persistent press of the tether. Tyler, testing her walls again. She’d mounted a strong resistance at first — she hardly needed his presence complicating the current company — but his insistence was relentless. With a sudden lurch, he broke through, and another presence filled the car. Tyler, dressed in flannel and jeans, incorporeal, sitting beside her like some spectral passenger, his sharp gaze trained on her with immediate suspicion and concern.

“Nice,” he muttered, voice clear to her and her alone. “I got ditched for a midnight family road trip. Care to explain why you just got ripped out of my cabin so unceremoniously?”

Wednesday kept her expression carefully blank, eyes locked out the window. Enid was already watching her too closely. “Not here,” she murmured under her breath, voice nearly imperceptible. To anyone else in the car, it sounded like nothing more than the exhale of someone thinking aloud.

Tyler exhaled faintly, sensing her difficulty. “Secrets, huh? You’re keeping them from everyone, not just me. I bet even your family doesn’t know what’s really up. That’s— dangerous, Wednesday.”

That was almost amusing, coming from the only known serial killer in the car.

Her hands folded primly in her lap, Wednesday’s only reply was the tightening line of her mouth. Explanations were treacherous things—especially when shared in a moving car filled with Addamses and a werewolf who already thought her “off” the past week. The car thundered on into the night, every shadow pulling them closer to the blood waiting in that apartment.

The town was sleeping, but death never slept. Judy Stonehearst’s small house was pitiful and hollow, its shutters closed like the eyelids of a corpse. Gomez strode at Wednesday’s side with the exuberance of a child set loose in a candy store, while Enid lagged behind, and Thing scuttled forward like a scout moving ahead of everyone else. Even before she stepped in, the air smelled of rot and blood, metallic and sharp. Wednesday paused just outside the crooked steps leading to the porch. She could still feel Tyler’s presence through the tether—silent now, but alert, as he leaned over her shoulder to see what she saw.

“Only Thing and I enter,” she ordered. “Everyone else stays outside. You’ll only contaminate the crime scene."

“No problem there,” Agnes muttered under her breath, sounding disgusted as she stared as Wednesday crossed the threshold.

A somber expression split her father’s face. “Crime scenes and collecting evidence — your favorite cocktail. Very well. Lead the way, my little viper. We’ll guard your back.”

Inside, Agnes stood waiting, becoming visible only when she saw Wednesday. Her voice was urgent and hushed. “She’s in there. I didn’t touch anything—I swear it. But she’s dead, Wednesday. Very, very dead.”

Wednesday brushed past her without hesitation. The door creaked as she pushed it open, and the smell hit her fully: iron and bile, thick enough to sting her eyes. The body lay sprawled across the living room floor. Judy Stonehearst. Her pale blouse was soaked through with blood, stabbed again and again through chest and abdomen. A knife still jutted obscenely from her side. Her mouth was open, lips parted as though mid-protest or plea.

Wednesday crouched beside the corpse, her hands folded primly over her knees. She tilted her head, studying the wounds with clinical precision. “Messy. Unrestrained.”

Gomez stood from the porch, leaning in. “Oh, stabbing is such an intimate crime. A crime of passion. Delightful.”

Enid made a choking sound behind them. “Delightful? Wednesday, we need to call the police. Like, now.”

Wednesday ignored her, eyes narrowing on the blood patterns spattered across the wooden floorboards. “No. The police will only contaminate the evidence. They will trample through with their lumbering incompetence, bagging nothing but their own footprints. Sheriff Santiago isn’t even passing her predecessor’s muster.”

Tyler’s emotion rippled through the tether, wary, as he came to stand beside her. “Conflicted over whether I should feel offended on behalf of my dad or not,” he muttered, wryly.

Her gaze flicked toward the walls—papers scattered, bookshelves tipped askew, drawers ransacked. “Someone was looking for something. Stonehearst was either an obstacle or a loose end.”

Thing tapped twice on the floorboards beside the corpse, then scurried toward the desk in the corner. He jabbed a finger at the drawer—splintered open, contents missing.

“Good eye,” Wednesday murmured.

Enid’s voice cracked. “Can we please not make appendage jokes when someone’s dead, Wednesday! We shouldn’t even be here.”

“On the contrary,” Wednesday replied, rising to her feet. Her hands were clasped behind her back, eyes sweeping the room like a hawk’s. “We are precisely where we need to be. Before the truth is buried under police ineptitude.”

Gomez smiled with faint paternal pride. “Spoken like a true Addams.”

Behind her eyes, the tether thrummed—Tyler’s unease bleeding into her. She could almost feel his clenched jaw, the tension in his shoulders. Be careful, he thought, though he didn’t say it aloud.

For once, Wednesday almost agreed.

Then, in the next second, Tyler disappeared. Vanished from the tether. Wednesday had no chance or ability to question why. She searched through the bond and only received a vague sense of urgency and concern as a response.

She had more pressing needs in front of her.

Wednesday prowled the edges of the sitting room, her boots silent against the warped floorboards. Blood was one thing, but she knew murder scenes often left behind far more incriminating relics: the things overlooked. Her sharp gaze fell on a stack of folders tossed carelessly near the hearth. Most were empty, their pages scattered across the rug like fallen leaves. But one thin folder had survived the ransacking, half-stuffed between the baseboards and the wall. She knelt, plucked it free, and brushed away the dust.

Her heart did not quicken—Addamses did not startle—but a faint chill wound its way up her spine as she read the name scrawled on the front in neat, archival ink:

Ophelia Frump.

The folder was decades old, brittle around the edges, the paper yellowed to parchment. Inside were typed notes, some bearing Augustus Stonehearst’s clinical signature, others belonging to successors at the institution. They documented experiments, genealogical lineages, speculations on bloodlines and “latent outcast abilities.” One note, written decades ago in a looping handwriting, read: “The Frump woman exhibits signs of heightened psychic resonance, possibly tied to ancestral rites. Her connection to death-energy is unusually potent. Recommend observation and containment if abilities develop further.”

Wednesday’s black eyes flicked back to the corpse, then to the folder again.

Her lip curled faintly, but she turned the page—and froze.

A grainy black-and-white photograph stared back at her. The woman in the picture was frail, her mousy-brown hair limp, her eyes kind but hollow, as though the life had already been bled from her veins. She looked nothing like a Frump. No resemblance to Morticia, or to Grandmama — but Wednesday recognized the woman nonetheless even if she had never been afforded a glimpse at the woman’s portrait before.

Because Wednesday had met her, at Willow Hill, the night of the outbreak.

Patient 1938.

The woman that Wednesday had personally released from the cages of the L.O.I.S. enclosures and escorted to freedom. It was not some nameless outcast, but her very own blood — her own aunt.

When Wednesday turned another page, earlier photographs waited. This time, she saw a girl. Decades younger, raven-black hair cut in a severe line, startling features painted with striking makeup. Her eyes were sharp, alive, defiant. And in that defiance, Wednesday saw the resemblance: the arch of the brow, the set of the jaw—echoes of her mother, of her grandmother, shadows carved into the bone.

Her grip tightened on the folder. Ophelia Frump. The aunt no one spoke of, gone missing decades ago. Not vanished, as the family lore suggested. Taken.

From behind her, Enid’s nervous voice broke the silence. “Anything important?”

Wednesday closed the folder with precise finality, slipping it beneath her arm before anyone else could glimpse the photographs. “Nothing useful,” she said flatly.

Tyler’s presence vaguely pressed through the tether, his voice a low hum in her mind. That’s a lie.

Wednesday ignored him, rising to her full height, slipping the folder to hide inside her jacket, against her chest — and said nothing to others, especially her father. She would confront her mother first, before sharing this revelation with anyone else. For the first time that night, the crime scene was secondary.

What mattered now was the truth buried in her bloodline.

The drive back to Nevermore was mercifully quiet, though Wednesday felt the tether hum like a taut wire the entire way. She ignored Tyler’s faint pressure there, just as she ignored Agnes and Enid’s sidelong glances and the twitching worry in Thing’s knuckles. Gomez hummed merrily in the passenger seat up front, the faint scent of cigar smoke and steel lingering about him, and for once Wednesday was almost grateful for her father’s theatrical distractions.

When they reached the Nevermore gates, she disembarked with a deliberate pace. She pressed a hand to Gomez’s arm before he could erupt into another monologue about the glory of midnight mysteries.

“Tomorrow,” she told him. “I’ll dine with you and Mother.”

His mustache twitched with delight. “Ah, mi condena preciosa, that is for the best. You know there are no secrets between your mother and I. We will await your arrival, and explain the events of tonight together.”

“Yes,” Wednesday said, evenly, ominously. “Explanations will certainly be necessary.”

Not from Wednesday, but from her mother.

She gave him a curt nod.

Enid set off to slink toward their dorm. “I’m—uh—gonna sleep. Or try to. Why is it that every time we go out these days, it ends in death or a neardeath experience?”

“One of the many benefits to being friends with Wednesday Addams,” Agnes replied, curtly. “You should count yourself lucky.”

Enid made a face, staring at the redhead like she’d grown a third eye. Deciding she was at her limits for the night, she turned towards Wednesday. “Don’t stay up too late, Weds. There’s still a curfew and Principal Dort said those breaking it wouldn’t be allowed to go to the Gala.”

“That punishment is not a valid deterrence for me,” Wednesday replied.

Enid groaned, fed up. “Well, don’t ruin it for the rest of us!” She whirled on her feet and fled up the stairs, Agnes choosing to torment the other girl for a bit longer by joining her.

“I make no such promises,” Wednesday said, in their wake.

She didn’t watch her roommate and stalker go up to their rooms. Instead, she lingered in the shadows of the courtyard, feigning calm though her mind ticked rapidly, already calculating what she could dig out before supper tomorrow.

Ophelia Frump’s face lingered like a phantom at the edge of every thought.

Then—hands. Rough, fast, clamping over her arms, pulling her into the dark alcove beneath the arched corridor. Wednesday nearly drew her blade, but the scent of him—blood, sweat, forest musk—struck her first. Tyler. Not tether-Tyler.

Flesh and bone Tyler.

His hand had clamped over her mouth, preventing her from declaring him an idiot. When he finally removed his grip, she spun and glared up at him. His breath came ragged, as though he’d run the entire way from Jericho. His eyes glinted fever-bright in the thin moonlight.

“I couldn’t—” His voice broke. He steadied it with effort. “I couldn’t just sit there in the cabin. Not after I felt you get ripped away like that. Not when you were in danger.”

“I wasn’t in danger,” Wednesday hissed. “I didn’t even get blood on my shoes from the crime scene. You realize this campus is on lockdown because of you.”

“I don’t care.” His voice was harsh, strained, as if the words were dragged out from somewhere deeper than logic. “I had to see you.”

Her expression remained flat, though internally she catalogued the lunacy conspiring to eek out in front of her. She could see his clouded gaze, the stiffness in his shoulders. There was a sense of mania to him that made it seem like the Hyde was only one thin layer beneath the surface, itching to break free. It stank of zealot devotion, the type a slave might render to his master.

She wondered if Tyler even realized he had so little control over himself.

Her curt assessment was cut off by the sound of a faint scrabble against stone — and she whirled to realize they had been witnessed. Thing. The disembodied hand froze in place at the mouth of the alcove, fingers curling in shock at what he’d just caught: Wednesday, pinned too close against Tyler Galpin, his chest heaving, his gaze devouring.

Wednesday stiffened, every instinct screaming complication. “Thing,” she said, sharper than she intended. The hand recoiled slightly but remained, trembling with demand.

Tyler glanced between them, jaw tight. “Great. Perfect.”

“You only have yourself to blame for this,” Wednesday snapped, curt.

Thing began tapping rapidly against the wall, accusatory, fingers darting like a furious typewriter.

“I am aware of how this looks,” Wednesday said, cutting across the tirade. “But you will not tell anyone. Especially my parents.”

Thing froze, flexing his knuckles in disbelief.

“I mean it.” Her tone was edged steel, but beneath it a rare plea threaded through. “Not yet. Too much depends on this. Do not ruin it with your dramatics.”

Thing hesitated, then tapped slowly, hesitantly. Why him?

Wednesday’s gaze flicked toward Tyler, who looked like he wanted to sneer and crumble all at once. “Because he’s necessary,” she said at last. “Because he will be useful.”

Tyler’s jaw clenched. “Gee, thanks— you’ll make me blush.”

The hand curled into a fist, quivering, but then slowly relaxed. After a pause, Thing slinked away from the alcove, motioning stiffly for them to follow.

Tyler frowned. “What’s he doing?”

Wednesday exhaled, her voice low and severe. “Finding you somewhere to hide before your recklessness damns us both.”

Thing led them through winding halls, past torchlit corridors, down into a forgotten passage that reeked of mildew and disuse. A hidden niche beneath one of the winding buildings; apparently Thing had discovered many secrets during his surveys of the academy grounds. He’d picked up on more than one secret entrance, carved between stone foundations where no sane student would ever linger. Wednesday surveyed the hidden room with a clinical sweep. Dark. Cramped. Secretive. It even had its own bathroom, which was for the best because even she was starting to think Tyler’s smell was overly ripe. Perfect.

“You’ll stay here tonight,” she ordered. “If you’re discovered, you’ll wish the police had found you instead.”

Tyler rolled his eyes faintly despite his exhaustion. “You really know how to make a guy feel welcome.”

Wednesday didn’t bother responding— she felt him through the tether, and his relief at being near her again, raw and unchecked, overwhelmed any sarcasm of the moment.

She turned towards Thing. Wednesday watched as he paused at the threshold of the hidden alcove, his small frame hesitant in the dim glow of the cavernous shadows.

“We’ll be all right,” Wednesday replied, tone flat but carrying the weight of authority. “You can go back, make sure Enid doesn’t hyperventilate herself to sleep.”

She could feel the question lingering in the curve of Thing’s frame, the unspoken doubt he held toward Tyler. She didn’t bother to deny it. Thing was reluctant to leave her alone with Tyler, but Wednesday knew better than to let him linger. He would only ask more questions. With a final pointed wagging finger at Tyler, he departed, his skittering echoing faintly against the stone walls of the hidden passage as he shuffled away.

Once the sound of Thing’s retreat faded, Wednesday turned her full attention to Tyler. The tether still hummed faintly in between them, the residual connection of their bond thrumming with unspent energy.

“You’ll note,” she said finally, her tone almost conversational but edged with lethal precision, “that I am perfectly fine and capable of handling myself in any situation. I wasn’t in any danger tonight, and even if I was, I do not need anyone else’s protection. Least of all from someone who presents such poor judgement as you’ve demonstrated repeatedly, most recently tonight. It was myopically stupid coming here.”

“What are you going to do, Wednesday?” he said, mocking, goading. “Punish me?”

“Don’t tempt me,” she warned.

She let the statement hang, the weight of it like a guillotine poised above the unspoken.

Tyler’s gaze, dark and unreadable, flicked down at her. For a moment, there was the faintest glimmer of a smirk—an acknowledgment of her dominance, maybe even the fact that he liked it on a level that was both base and sexual—but Wednesday didn’t allow it to bloom. She didn’t permit levity, or distraction.

“I am not dealing with you tonight,” she added. “I have enough questions piling up at my feet, I don’t need further distractions.”

The questions regarding Aunt Ophelia would not wait.

The file rested heavily against her chest, tucked into her waistband and hidden by her black coat. She could feel its gravity pressing at the edges of her chest, demanding attention. The questions it held, the truths buried within, would not wait for any chaos Tyler’s presence might invite. She needed to go over the file at least a dozen times before she confronted her mother.

“Maybe if you ever bothered letting someone in,” Tyler replied, tightly, “you’d find things easier to handle. Stop keeping secrets from me, Wednesday. You know with the tether it’s practically useless in the long run anyway. Might as well spill your secrets on your own terms.”

Wednesday’s jaw clenched. He was right in a way, though she despised the phrasing, the implication of weakness. A degree of education might dull the edges of his oncoming, overwhelming presence, outsized for the amount of space he should take up in her head. If it kept him from gnawing at her like a dog too long caged, she could give him something. She did not trust him with the whole truth, never the whole truth, but she trusted him even less with gaps in his own idleness. Clearly, on his own, he would get up to more trouble.

Information was a currency. In the right increments, it bought her something in return. So she considered, swiftly, what to give him: not enough to empower him to do something else reckless, but just enough to pacify. To make him believe he’d earned some ground when in reality she’d only given him a measured patch of dirt, carefully chosen, barren of any real estate she did not want him to have.

Her gaze sharpened, and at last she removed the folder from its hiding spot, the edges bent, the paper smelling faintly acidic. Tyler shifted to take the paper, his hand brushing against hers—not calculated, not even particularly intentional. Just contact. But the instant his skin touched her, something roared like a struck chord, vibrating with uncontainable energy.

Wednesday stiffened. A cold shock slid down her spine, her body locking in place. The folder slipped from her lap, pages spilling like pale feathers across the floor, forgotten. The world lurched sideways. Her eyes rolled back, and Tyler caught her as her knees buckled, his arms pulling her against him, alarm flashing across his features.

“Wednesday!” His voice broke, but she was already somewhere else.

The cemetery. Again.

The night air hung heavy, suffocating, but different this time. No sound of wings overhead, no crows wheeling in a frenzy. Silence, profound and final. Judy Stonehearst was gone; that much was certain. Her avian army had perished with her.

But the stillness offered no reprieve. Her gaze was drawn, magnetized, down the crooked row of gravestones, past the familiar names of strangers. Until she stopped.

Tyler Galpin.

The name carved deep into granite, black lettering etched with merciless precision. And not alone. Beside it: his mother. His father. A family of three reunited beneath the soil.

Her breath caught. Her stomach turned to ice.

Before she could make sense of any of it —she heard his voice.

“You did this.”

It echoed from nowhere and everywhere at once, low, seething, unmistakable. Tyler’s voice, but harsher, angrier, dripping with accusation.

“All your promises. All your control. And still—you let me die.”

She spun, searching, heart pounding in her ribcage. The grave stood still, silent, unyielding. But his voice followed, each word heavier than the last.

“My blood is on your hands, Wednesday.”

The vision snapped.

Her eyes flew open, breath ragged, body trembling as the graveyard dissolved into darkness. The black tears had streamed down her face like ink spilled from a ruptured source. Tyler’s arms were around her, holding her upright against his chest, his face stricken with fear.

“Wednesday—you okay?” His voice cracked, desperation clawing through his composure. “What did you see?”

For the first time in longer than she could remember, fear lingered in her gaze as she uprighted herself. Not for herself. But for him. Her lips parted, the breath thin, brittle, breaking in the air between them.

Chapter Text

Nevermore had grown quiet, the kind of quiet that pressed suffocatingly against the throat, that turned every footstep into a trespass, that made laughter feel like blasphemy. The quad, usually alive with chatter and squabbles, lay hushed beneath a dim sky. Students gathered in small clusters, black ribbons tied to their sleeves, some clinging to one another with pale, trembling hands. The mourning was palpable, a tide that pulled even the most stoic into its current.

Principal Dort stood upon the steps, his usual officious self subdued. The microphone in his grip squealed once, then steadied. His voice, always faintly pompous, was soft now, raw with forced solemnity. “As you all know, we have suffered a terrible loss today. A beloved classmate has passed. Out of respect, curfew will remain in effect until further notice. Memorial services will be announced shortly.”

A ripple moved through the crowd. A chorus of muffled sobs, stifled gasps, the shuffle of shoes on stone.

Enid Sinclair wept openly, tears streaking her pink-and-blonde hair, her arms wrapped around herself. Agnes, equally, shook soundlessly with her big dramatic eyes glistening with tears. Bianca leaned against a column, her perfect poise fractured, her eyes rimmed red. Ajax tried to comfort who he could, but even he seemed solemn as he rubbed Bianca’s back in silent solidarity. Eugene, so often overlooked, stood apart, glasses fogged, his shoulders caved as though the weight of the loss pressed solely against him.

Everywhere was grief. Genuine, uncontainable.

And on the periphery, a darker sight. The Addams family had assembled, draped in their finest funeral garb. Morticia in floor-length black silk, pale and statuesque, her eyes brimming with a sorrow so dignified it almost seemed like a picture perfect portrait of grief. Gomez at her side, handkerchief pressed against his mustache, though the wet shine in his eyes betrayed him. Grandmama muttered dark prayers under her breath, her taloned hands clenching a cracked rosary that might have been taken directly from a crypt. Even Pugsley stood stiff, his striped shirt hidden beneath a too-large black suit, his face pale with something more than grief—shock.

They had all come. All except one. The absence rang louder than any bell, harsher than any funeral dirge. A black-draped easel stood in the center, flanked by tall candles whose flames guttered in the draft. Upon it hung a single portrait.

Wednesday Addams.

Her face caught in somber stillness, black braids falling like ropes, her eyes unwavering and dark as obsidian. Around the portrait lay a bed of mourning flowers—white lilies, black dahlias, and black roses, their scent thick and funereal. No announcement was needed. The truth was undeniable.

It was Wednesday Addams who was dead.

Sixteen hours and thirty-six minutes ago…

Tyler Galpin was going to die, and it was going to be all Wednesday’s fault.

The sentence repeated like a bell tolling in her head, every reverberation increasing until it cracked a fissure faultline inside the shell of her skull. No matter how she shifted her thoughts, the echo returned, fracturing her bones open further and anew.

She could still imagine the confusion on Tyler’s face as she’d fled the secret compartment — the west hall of Nevermore, where she’d stashed him for the night. Wednesday had been so uncharacteristically rattled that she’d gathered the scattered file on her aunt with stiff mechanical movements, her face still streaked faintly with black stains she hadn’t even bothered to wipe away. Her retreat was so abrupt, so frenzied in its efficiency, that she didn’t notice she’d abandoned a page or two of her aunt’s file behind—crumbs of truth left at Tyler’s feet. He called after her, his voice tangled between protest and panic, but she didn’t let herself look back.

She didn’t stop moving until the sanctuary of her dormitory swallowed her, the familiar gloom pressing closed like a coffin lid. Enid’s breathing was slow and steady, her neon-colored sleep mask already in place, pressed upon her sleeping eyelids. Thing rested in his dollhouse corner, one finger twitching in restless curiosity. The instant Wednesday crossed the threshold, he scuttled forward, gesturing frantically, clearly eager to resume his unspoken accusations about Tyler.

“Not tonight,” Wednesday said, her voice honed and final, slicing through his protests. “Fetch him supplies. Clothes. Whatever you can pilfer without raising suspicion. Deliver them by dawn.”

Thing hesitated, fingers curling in sharp disapproval. She saw the accusation in the set of his palm: she was protecting Tyler, prioritizing him, shielding him.

“Do not mistake this for trust,” she said flatly, reading him as easily as a book left open. “Do not trust him. Trust me.”

Thing relented, though his retreat was stiff, his fingers tapping a reprimand she knew she deserved. She ignored it, as she ignored everything else that threatened to soften her resolve.

Alone now, she lit a single candle and spread what remained of her aunt’s file across her desk. The documents were pitifully thin, mere scraps from what must once have been a thick dossier. Patient 1938: Ophelia Frump. Premonitions, uncontrolled. Early signs of instability. Extended institutionalization recommended. That was it. That, and a few faded photos that seemed more ghost than woman. A girl who had once borne the raven-black hair and painted features of her bloodline. Then another, years later, a woman reduced to a shadow with mousy hair and weary eyes.

The truth she sought was not on paper. Too much had been stripped, destroyed, buried. Wednesday would need to go to her family for answers, or failing that—dig them up herself with her own bare hands, no matter how deep they were buried. Get her hands dirty and wet, just how she liked it.

But the cemetery of her mind would not let her rest.

She lay down in her bed, stiff-backed and unyielding, the covers pulled over her like a shroud. When she felt Tyler’s concern encroaching on her shadows through the tether, she warned him with icy precision masking her jumbled thoughts: “I am not in the mood for further discussion. Attempt it, and I will shut you out entirely.”

The line went taut, then quiet. At last, silence. She had hurt his feelings again, but it was for the best. She couldn’t afford to tell him the details of the premonitions until she had a handle on how to prevent it. Tyler was prone to reckless behavior as much as Enid was prone to hysterics. Neither of those predispositions afforded her confidence that they could handle the burden of her premonitions. No one else had seen the visions. Wednesday had. It was Wednesday’s responsibility to prevent them; Wednesday, who had been implicated as the responsible party in both deaths. Wednesday, that would figure this all out.

Yet every time her eyes shut, the vision returned. The cemetery. His name. His grave beside his mother and father. His voice, rough and vengeful, flaying her open with its blame. Forever anger. Forever a monster caged. In death, it seemed, he would imitate the worst parts of himself — the remnants of an abused angry monster who’d always put his faith in all the wrong people.

Except this time, Wednesday counted herself among the number.

By morning, Wednesday forced herself into the rhythm of classes, each motion deliberate, mechanical, as though she were some grim automaton wound up and set upon her daily track, but her mind lagged, heavy with the black teared residue from the night before.

At breakfast, Enid prattled on beside her, her words bubbling like a fountain that refused to shut off. Wednesday let it wash over her, the cadence soothing in its way, if not the content. She was only half-aware until one phrase pierced through the fog. “…and the papers said there was more than one murder in Jericho last night. Not just Judy Stonehearst. Another body, another skull cracked open.” Enid lowered her voice, eyes wide with fright. “The zombie again. John Doe.”

Wednesday’s fork paused mid-slice through an egg, her appetite already negligible but now obliterated. Normally, such grotesque revelations would have quickened her pulse with dark fascination. Another violent puzzle to dissect, another predator to study. But today her plate was already spilling over with mysteries, and every one of them bore her name etched in shadows. She forced the food into her mouth with methodical precision anyway, chewing like the act itself were a command she had to obey rather than any instinctive hunger.

Enid was still talking, still filling the air with the sugary drizzle of her voice, words tumbling over each other in their rush to escape. At first, Wednesday let it all blur together, each sentence dissolving into a background hum.

But then Enid leaned in, her voice softening into something uncharacteristically careful. “You know— I feel like we’ve kind of disconnected lately. Like, the most time we’ve spent together in weeks was last night, creeping through a murder crime scene. And don’t get me wrong, that was— very you. But I’d prefer maybe something a little more chill for once. Movies. Coffee. Painting our nails. You know, roommate stuff.”

Wednesday set her fork down with deliberate precision, her eyes cutting over to Enid. “Chill is synonymous with tedious. If you crave tedium, you should find a cactus to befriend. It will be equally unresponsive but infinitely less prickly than me.”

Enid’s shoulders deflated. “You don’t have to be mean about it.”

“I’m not being mean,” Wednesday replied coolly, gathering her tray with clinical detachment. “I’m being accurate.”

And with that, she stood, the conversation dismissed as thoroughly as the discarded yolk on her plate. Enid looked down into her cereal, hiding her frown, but didn’t push further. When at last Wednesday could slip away from the watchful neon gaze of her roommate, she made for the solitude of a quiet hallway alcove. The shadows there suited her—close, familiar, loyal in their silence. From her pocket, she withdrew a folded scrap of paper. She wrote quickly, her sharp hand slicing across the page with absolute finality: Leave the grounds. Now.

She folded it once, sealed it with a neat press of her blackened thumbprint, and held it out. Thing, crouched and twitching at her side, hesitated, his digits spelling protest.

“Deliver it,” Wednesday ordered, her voice flat as steel.

Reluctantly, Thing took it, scuttling off with a speed that betrayed his own unease. Wednesday remained rooted, her eyes narrowing as the silence of the hall pressed in around her.

It was avoidance, yes—disguised as command, wrapped in the armor of control. She knew it, even as the ink still dried on the page. Tyler Galpin was not a creature easily deterred, not by walls, not by rules, not even by her. And yet she clung to the hope that her words would hold him off, if only for a few hours longer. Long enough for her to think. Long enough to drag her gaze away from his name carved into stone in the recesses of her mind.

Even Wednesday Addams could admit—though only to herself—that delay was sometimes the only weapon left.

The echo of gunfire cracked across the rolling lawns of the estate, startling a cluster of crows from the hedgerows. Wednesday followed the sound, her boots sinking into the damp grass, until she found her grandmother perched on a dais of old stone, braced and firing at clay pigeons as though they were enemy combatants. Her grandmother was tall even in her older age, hair a halo of steel and shadow, her black mourning dress immaculate despite the smoke curling off the barrel of her shotgun. Her longtime henchman reloaded the target, and Grandmama only fired with smooth efficient motions, no wasted effort, every movement honed by decades of habit.

Wednesday stopped at the edge of the clearing. “I should have known you’d take pleasure in destroying small airborne creatures, even if they’re made of terracotta.”

Her grandmother didn’t turn. She tracked the next disc into the air, fired, and shattered it mid-arc. “This is practice, my dear. When you run a business of the dead, you learn efficiency. The pigeons aren’t real. My skill is.”

Wednesday inclined her head. “So is your empire.”

That finally drew her grandmother’s gaze, dark eyes sharp and assessing. She smiled faintly. “You’ve inherited my taste for blunt truths, and my dislike for flattery. What do you want, Wednesday?”

Wednesday drew closer, boots crunching on gravel. “Answers.”

“About?”

“Two things. Aunt Ophelia. And my visions.”

Her grandmother paused mid-reload, the spent shell casing gleaming at her feet. She rested the shotgun against her shoulder, eyes narrowing. There was always that brief flicker of hesitation whenever the missing raven in the family was mentioned—an old wound poorly stitched, festering beneath decades of silence. Still, Grandmama had always tolerated, even favored, Wednesday’s bluntness over Morticia’s affectations.

“Always the practical one,” Grandmama said, her voice dry as dust. “I’m glad you didn’t come here for affection.”

“Affection clouds the mind. I prefer clarity.”

That earned a laugh, short and rasping. “Spoken like a true Frump.” She took aim at another clay pigeon, fired, and shattered it to powder before finally answering. “Very well. About your aunt—what is it you want to know?”

Wednesday’s gaze was flat, implacable. “What happened to her?”

Grandmama’s mouth pursed into a grim line. “That’s a long story.”

“I’m patient,” Wednesday said, though her tone made it clear she expected no digressions.

“Ophelia was a raven,” Grandmama said at last, her voice taking on that reverent, almost funereal cadence she reserved for speaking of the dead. “Like you. Like me. She saw things your mother never did. Darker things. It drove her mad.”

Wednesday tilted her head slightly, her expression cool. “Define mad.”

“She had visions that wouldn’t end,” her grandmother said, her words clipped, as though each cost her something. “She spoke in riddles. Chased omens like they were lovers. And she did fall in love—harder than sense allowed. Your mother and she were similar that way, even as they were dissimilar in so many other ways. A pair of romantic fools,” she sighed, disappointment etched into her face, her eyes narrowing at the horizon as if she could still see the faint outlines of the past in the mist. “I suppose it was the age of them. Teenage years wasted, chasing after lust and affection. Fleeting, foolish things.” Her sharp gaze flicked back to Wednesday. “I’m glad you haven’t fallen into that trap, at least.”

Wednesday’s face remained unreadable marble. Not a flinch. Not a flicker. The thought of Tyler pressed against her ribcage like a blade, but she let it cut in silence. Betrayal of any kind—even of expression—was weakness.

Grandmama reloaded the shotgun with mechanical ease, snapping the chamber closed with the finality of a gavel. “Anyway. It was a whirlwind romance at Nevermore that set her off. She adored the suffering of it, practically bathed in it, as though misery were perfume. When it soured, she spiraled. Your mother and I could not save her. She was sent to Willow Hill.”

The word “sent” carried more weight than Wednesday expected, as if the institution itself had been a verdict, not a remedy. The older woman’s face hardened, lines of grief etched deep as carved stone. “After that, she escaped. Disappeared.”

Wednesday’s jaw tightened. The clipped delivery, the carefully chosen words—they all reeked of omission. A lie. Or worse, a half-truth. Ophelia hadn’t escaped anything. She had been swallowed whole, buried alive in Stonehearst’s experiments, carved into another casualty of their so-called research. But Wednesday knew the futility of pressing further. Her grandmother was granite: unyielding, impenetrable. One couldn’t get blood from stone.

“And my visions?” Wednesday pressed.

That earned a longer silence. Her grandmother studied her, sharp eyes softening almost imperceptibly. “You’ve been crying the black tears?”

Wednesday didn’t deny it. “Yes.”

Her grandmother set the shotgun aside, leaning on it like a staff. “Your power is exhausted. You are trying to drink faster than the spring can refill.”

“I need to restore it.” Wednesday’s tone was sharper than she intended. “My sight is all that stands between order and chaos. If there is a way—”

“There is always a way. But you will not like it.”

“I never like anything. Tell me anyway.”

Her grandmother gave a long, weary breath, and for the first time, she looked reluctant. “The last time I intervened in your powers, your mother burned Goody Addams’ spellbook out of spite. She thought I was turning you into me. She’s not entirely wrong.”

Wednesday’s eyes narrowed, but she waited.

“There was once a raven psychic of legend—Professor Rosaline Rotwood. She taught ruins and cryptology when I was at Nevermore. But her true gift was her sight. Extraordinary. Terrifying. She used to host secret soirees in her hidden séance chamber—at the very cottage your mother now haunts.”

Wednesday stiffened. Of course. Always another hidden chamber. Always another body buried beneath the floorboards.

“Rosaline lies in the Nevermore graveyard,” her grandmother continued. “Her stone is marked. Beneath her name, an inscription. If a raven speaks it aloud, her dark energy will flood you. Temporarily, your sight will be sharper, stronger.”

Wednesday’s pulse thudded once, cold and certain. “Temporarily is enough.”

Her grandmother stepped closer, lowering her voice until only the crows could hear. “Be careful, child. Rotwood’s gift came at a cost. Every vision is a bargain. Sometimes you don’t know the price until it’s already been taken.”

Wednesday met her gaze, unflinching. “Whatever it is, I’ll pay it.”

The path to the Nevermore graveyard was overgrown, brambles clawing at her boots as though the dead themselves were trying to reach up and grab her. Wednesday moved with purpose, the scrap of knowledge her grandmother had given her thrumming in her mind: Rosaline Rotwood’s headstone. A promise of answers.

But she wasn’t alone.

The tether stirred like a pulse beneath her skin, constantly irritating. She pushed it down, as she’d been doing all morning, but Tyler was growing more insistent, more restless, clawing at her awareness until—

Suddenly, he was there. Tyler.

Not in the flesh, of course, but close enough. His tether presence spilled across the path as if he had always been waiting for her, materializing through that cursed connection she had yet to master. His form sharpened, more tangible than usual, every detail irritatingly vivid: shower-wet hair pushed back carelessly, his borrowed black Nevermore slacks clinging loose on his frame, the white shirt untucked with its top buttons undone, sleeves rolled back to expose the lines of his forearms and the stark notch of collarbone. He looked both feral and composed, rebellion dressed up in discipline.

Wednesday’s gaze betrayed her for a fraction of a second, lingering on him longer than she intended. Too long. She felt the heat of his awareness spike in response, the tether humming brighter like it could taste her distraction. With a sharp breath, she wrenched her attention back to the headstones, their solemn stone faces more deserving of her focus than his.

“You’re intruding again,” she said at last, her voice clipped, controlled.

“I’m done being ignored,” he said flatly, resentment sharpening into resolve. “You can’t keep shutting me out.”

“You’ll find I am very good at ignoring things,” she replied coolly, “especially things that persist in being irritating.”

He stepped closer—no sound, no real weight, but the tether hummed harder in her bones as if it wanted him near. “You’re not listening to me. You never do. You just give orders, push me away, tell me where to go. But the tether doesn’t lie. You feel me. Deep down, you want me here.”

Wednesday’s hands curled at her sides. She did not grant him the satisfaction of a glance, though she felt his glare—felt it reverberate through the tether like a spark against exposed wire.

“I know your secret, Wednesday.”

Wednesday stilled. She looked over her shoulder, waiting—measured, indifferent. If he knew anything, he’d say it. If he didn’t— well, people did like to fill silence with assumptions.

“Why didn’t you tell me your aunt was another patient at Willow Hill?” he said.

She almost briefly closed her eyes. Relief flickered in her chest before she buried it again. That was the secret he thought he’d found. Not the one that mattered to him.

“You left a scrap or two behind in your mad dash out last night. Your aunt had your same abilities.”

“Yes,” Wednesday said flatly. “And it got her locked up at Willow Hill for nearly two decades.”

“What did you see last night that got you so spooked?” His voice carried a rough texture. “Don’t lie. I felt it. That fear—and you’re not afraid of much.”

She looked at him, saying nothing.

“I know your aunt was a patient at Willow Hill. One of Augustus Stonehearst’s patients. I also know that guy was a professor at Nevermore. You wanna know how I know that? Because Thing stashed me in a place where I can easily access the library.”

“If someone finds you—” she hissed, too sharply.

“Maybe I wouldn’t go looking for answers if you’d just answer my questions,” he snapped back.

She turned to him then. Slowly. Her gaze was cold enough to quiet the dead.

He gave a dry laugh. “Every time you shut me out, it only makes me more determined to knock down your walls.”

“Then consider this a test of your resolve against mine,” she said, her voice a low, lethal murmur.

And she pulled.

Not with hands, but with will—the same glacial, merciless force she used to summon her visions, to silence screams before they ever reached her throat. The tether between them twisted, convulsed, then began to unravel like sinew cut from bone. Tyler staggered, eyes flaring wide as his presence flickered like a candle in a sealed crypt.

“Wednesday—” His voice cracked, more startled than angry now.

But she did not relent. She gathered every ounce of her contempt, every shard of her discipline, and cut him from her mind like severing a vein.

His image shattered.

A sudden absence rang through her—not peace, not release. Something colder. Emptier. Wednesday exhaled slowly, her expression unbothered, marble-smooth. But inside, her chest pulled tight as if bracing for something unseen. She turned her back on the place where he’d stood, and only then—only then—did a thin crease of unease appear between her brows. The silence should have been victory. Instead, it felt like vacancy.

She moved past it, toward the iron gates at the edge of the cemetery. The fog swallowed her footsteps. Her shadow trailed behind like something reluctant to follow. Wednesday stepped off the path and into the gardens, her boots crunching over loose gravel until she reached the stone she sought: Rosaline Rotwood. The name was carved deep, the weather-worn granite still sharp where time should have softened it.

Wednesday stood, tracing the edges of the inscription with her eyes. “In the raven’s shadow, grant me use of your ephemeral sight. Be warned. Should my gaze be broken, a deadly trick I will play.”

She pressed her palm to the stone and whispered the invocation again—this time in Latin. The words hung in the warm air, strange and too alive, their weight vibrating beneath her tongue. The world ripped away. Colors bled, inverted, shadows devoured sunlight until she stood somewhere else entirely: a room drenched in black velvet and dim candlelight, walls lined with cracked mirrors, the air rich with forgotten secrets.

Rosaline Rotwood’s séance chamber — a place inside the same cottage that Morticia and Gomez Addams now resided in. A figure emerged from the gloom, gliding forward without sound: a woman draped in white, veiled in gossamer. Her skin was pale as candle wax, her lips deep as spilled wine. The resemblance to her portraits was unmistakable, though her presence bore a strange severity.

Rosaline tilted her head, veil swaying with the movement as if stirred by a wind that belonged only to her. “Hester’s bloodline. I remember her.” A dry laugh, brittle as splintered bone, scraped against the air. “She wanted my approval so desperately. Begged for scraps of my knowledge. But Hester…” Rosaline’s tone curdled with disdain. “Hester lacked what it took to be truly great. She traded power for petty promises. For the illusion of safety. For love.” Rosaline’s veil shifted as her cold, hollow gaze fixed on Wednesday. “Falling head over heels for a huckster.”

The word hung between them like poison.

Her head cocked slightly, birdlike and assessing, and her voice lowered to something more intimate, almost conspiratorial. “And I smell the same rot on you,” she accused at Wednesday.

Wednesday stood motionless, a perfect effigy of composure.

Rosaline drifted closer, her movements languid but predatory. Her translucent fingers brushed along Wednesday’s jawline, tipping her chin up with imperious command. The veil whispered against Wednesday’s cheek as Rosaline leaned in, her breath cold.

“You bound yourself,” Rosaline murmured, a thread of hunger weaving through her tone. “A tether forged, unbroken. I see it. I see him.”

The tether thrummed in response, faint but undeniable, as though Tyler’s presence rippled beneath her skin even here, even now.

“You were foolish,” the ghost sneered softly, venom in the velvet of her voice. “To tie yourself to a Hyde. Volatile. Ravenous. Untamable. You think you command him, but arrogance blinds you. You reek of it.”

Wednesday’s jaw tightened, but she did not flinch. Her voice remained cool, edged with steel. “I need answers. Tyler Galpin. His death. My aunt Ophelia. My visions are failing me.”

Rosaline began circling her, veils trailing like mist on water, the cadence of her voice rising and falling like a chant. “Multiple lives. Bloodlines snarled. Threads tangled beyond your sight.” Her expression shifted, sharp as flint. “And you dare ask me to restore what you squandered?”

“Yes.”

The ghost stopped, veil stilling as if even the air waited for her judgment. She studied Wednesday in silence for a long, harrowing beat, the weight of centuries in her gaze.

Finally, Rosaline smiled. It was not kind. “Then you must endure.”

A silver candlestick appeared in her hand, the wick aflame, the fire burning too white, too cold. She held it out, the glow rippling across her veils.

“Hold your hand over the flame, little raven. If you keep it there, your second sight will bloom again—temporarily. But if you pull away before it is complete, you will break the raven’s gaze.” Her veiled face tilted. “And the price for that— will be exquisite.”

Without hesitation, Wednesday placed her palm above the flame. The heat bit instantly, but it wasn’t anything to make her flinch. She held steady, jaw locked, breath slow and controlled. And then—Wednesday’s head snapped back, a cry tearing from her throat as the visions consumed her.

Flashes—ragged, violent, unrelenting.

A dark corridor, a lamplight swinging wildly. A scream—Ophelia’s voice—raw and distant.

The lamplight swayed again and Tyler’s face appeared, pale and bloodstained.

It swung once more: the Hyde, grinning with teeth like knives.

Back, and Ophelia’s face was there again, crying out her name.

Back, Tyler—dead this time, cold and still.

The pendulum swung faster and faster until the images bled into one, sight and shadow crashing together— and through it, she felt the tether spike abruptly; Tyler, the real Tyler, sensing her turmoil, responded to it, clawing through the bond, trying to reach for her. She felt him jolting against her barriers and— his struggle broke Wednesday’s concentration. Her gaze pulled from the flame, her hand snatched from the candle — and in real life, Wednesday was wrenched backward, violently slammed into her body at the base of Rosaline Rotwood’s tombstone. Her breath caught, then vanished entirely, her lungs seizing as though reality itself had stolen the air.

The gaze broken, the spell broken.

And in the tether, faint but urgent, Tyler’s voice came like a knife through flesh: “Wednesday? What the hell did you just do?”

And Wednesday’s body fell limply to the ground, silent, still — lifeless.

Wednesday woke to silence. Not the ordinary kind, but a silence so absolute it rang in her skull. She opened her eyes and found herself lying among gravestones. The Nevermore graveyard stretched endlessly around her, though it was transformed—smothered in fog so thick it veiled the world to shadows and whispers. The air was sharp, cold as iron, and she could feel it sliding beneath her skin in a way that made her certain: this wasn’t life.

She sat up slowly, brushing off her uniform, though no dust clung to her fingers. Her breath didn’t frost. Her heartbeat didn’t rise.

Because there was no heartbeat.

“Careful,” came a voice, velvet and cool, from behind her. “You’ll get used to it if you stay too long.”

Wednesday turned sharply.

Principal Weems stood a few paces away, her presence even more grand than it had been in flesh. The woman was dressed immaculately in her signature silk and pearls, hair swept into its flawless wave, though her edges blurred slightly against the mist—as if she were being painted in watercolors.

“I can’t say I’m surprised you’ve run into trouble again, Ms. Addams, but it truly astonishes me the depth and the gravity with which you have hit the trouble head-on.”

“You’re dead,” Wednesday observed flatly.

“I am.” Weems inclined her head, lips curling faintly. “You, however, are only mostly dead.”

Wednesday blinked, once, slowly. “That sounds inefficient.”

“It’s inconvenient,” Weems agreed mildly, her expression sharpening. “Rosaline Rotwood’s spell is playing a trick on you. You broke the raven’s gaze, Wednesday. And now, the spell plays dirty.”

Wednesday glanced down at her pale hands, flexed her fingers as if testing whether they were still hers. “Define dirty.”

“You’ve wandered where you don’t belong,” Weems said, her voice lowering, rich with warning. “Your body lies cold, still. But your tether to life hasn’t been cut—not yet. If you can solve the trick before dawn, you’ll return.”

“And if I fail?”

Weems’ gaze lingered on her, pity hidden beneath poise. “Then this becomes permanent.”

Wednesday rose slowly to her feet, spine straight, chin tilted. “What trick?”

Weems stepped closer, her heels making no sound on the damp earth. “Rosaline’s enchantment is cruel. It’s bound to secrets. Your secrets. The spell won’t release you until you unravel the innermost truth you’ve been hoarding—the one you’ve buried so deeply you won’t even admit it to yourself.”

Wednesday’s jaw tightened. “You assume I keep things buried that I don’t want to stay dead.”

Weems’ look was dry, sharp as glass. “You’re an Addams, dear. Secrets are practically the family currency.”

Wednesday remained silent.

“Your— entanglements complicate things,” Weems continued smoothly, circling her the way a teacher stalks a particularly stubborn student. “Your family, for one. Your mother and grandmother pulling you in opposite directions. The mystery of your aunt. Even your little five digit friend has felt the sting of your mistreatment. Enid Sinclair—your relationship there is as fractured as the day you met, despite what you won’t say out loud. And then—” Weems’ smile turned feline, knowing. “—Tyler Galpin.”

Wednesday refused to respond, her expression carved from stone.

“You’ve tied yourself to a volatile man, not just the creature underneath, Wednesday,” Weems murmured, almost gently. “Rosaline can see it. I can feel it. He’s stitched into your essence now, but perhaps you can use that tether to your advantage.”

“What do you mean?”

Weems stopped in front of her, close enough that the veil of mist swirled between them like a barrier. “So many threads. But only one can free you.”

“How am I supposed to determine which?”

“That’s the trick,” Weems said softly, voice fading like wind in leaves. “One truth. One confession. Find it, or the grave keeps you.”

The fog rolled thicker, swallowing the graveyard into darkness. Somewhere distant, Wednesday heard a bell toll—deep, deliberate, marking the passage of borrowed time. Dawn wasn’t that far off. And for the first time in years, Wednesday Addams felt the distinct, coiled weight of a deadline she couldn’t dissect or dominate.

For the second time in less than a few minutes, Wednesday woke to the uncanny stillness of death. Once again, she sat up slowly, disoriented, the damp chill of the earth seeping into her bones—except there was no breath, no heartbeat, no warmth. The realization crystallized when she turned her head and saw her own corpse lying sprawled against the grass, pale and cold beneath Rosaline Rotwood’s tombstone.

Wednesday regarded it without flinching, her expression carved from obsidian. She catalogued every detail clinically, as though she were dissecting some rare cadaver in a laboratory. Her fingers—curled slightly, stiffening already. Her lips—tinged with gray, pressed in their usual uncompromising line. The faintest smudge of black tears still streaked her cheeks, dark veins tracing her skin like spider cracks in porcelain.

She noted all of it, detached. She had seen death before. She’d always imagined her own would be different.

Then—a crash in the woods. Footsteps. Heavy, fast.

Tyler.

He came careening through the woods and cemetery, out of breath, eyes-wild as if he’d run the entire way from the academy grounds. The real flesh-and-blood version of him burst into the clearing and appeared entirely fractured — sweat streaked his temples, his hair clung damp to his forehead, his shirt plastered disheveled and half-wild to his frame — but it was the bulging eyes that were the main evidence of his splintering composure. The Hyde seemed poised to take control.

Especially when he saw her body. “No.” The word rasped out of him like broken glass. “Wednesday,” he whispered, voice cracking. “No, no, no.”

He staggered forward, dropping to his knees beside her corpse, trembling hands hovering inches above her unmoving chest, too afraid to touch, as though his fingers might shatter what little remained of her. His breath came in sharp, ragged bursts, loud in the suffocating stillness. The tether between them burned white-hot, thrumming with his panic.

And then something shifted in him.

The sound he made next was low and guttural, closer to a growl than a sob. His spine bowed forward, shoulders quaking. His breath deepened into something ragged, feral, dangerous. Then his entire body shuddered. His hands flexed hard against the grass, claws threatening to break the skin as his pupils blew wide and red. The Hyde stirred beneath his skin, called by grief and fury, gnawing at the fragile leash of his control. The tether burned, shoving his agony into her awareness, a current she couldn’t block even in death. Every muscle in his body strained to keep it caged as his claws punched through skin, glinting in the dim graveyard light.

And for the first time, Wednesday felt it all as though it were her own—his pain, his fury, his raw animal need to destroy anything that dared touch her.

She stepped forward, her incorporeal form flickering faintly in the fog.

“Tyler.”

His head snapped up, eyes black and wild, and for a heartbeat she thought the Hyde would tear through his skin entirely. Then he saw her—not the body, but her spirit.

His breath caught, chest heaving. “You—”

“You can see me,” she said, voice calm but edged with command. “Because of the tether. Which means you can hear me. Focus. Breathe.”

He squeezed his eyes shut, shaking hard, trying to anchor himself to the sound of her voice. His claws sank into the earth, tearing at it, but he fought to stay human, trembling with restraint. “You’re dead,” he rasped.

“Temporarily.” Wednesday’s tone was cold, clinical, meant to slice through his panic. She moved closer, and lowered herself until they were eye to eye. “Rosaline’s spell played a trick. My body is dead. My soul is not.” She knelt on the ground. “I have until dawn to undo this. If I fail—” Her voice trailed off, sharp and matter-of-fact. “Then I stay this way.”

Tyler’s chest rose and fell raggedly. His claws flexed against the earth, digging grooves into the damp grass, but when he reached for her, his hand slid through her shoulder like smoke. The realization seemed to hit him like a physical blow.

His breath caught, and for the briefest moment, his face cracked—raw frustration bleeding through the edges of his composure. “Tell me what to do,” he rasped, out of pure desperation.

It wasn’t a demand this time. It was a plea.

Before she could answer, another voice shattered the fragile silence:

“WEDNESDAY?!”

Enid’s voice splintered the air, sharp and panicked. She stumbled into the clearing, panting hard, her neon jacket half-zipped and mismatched sneakers coated in mud from running through the woods. Her claws had already begun to prick faintly at her fingertips—a sign of how close she was to shifting—and her bright, frantic eyes darted to take in the scene.

Thing clung to her shoulder, tapping wildly, his tiny digits stuttering against her jacket as if giving her directions.

Enid’s gaze landed on the tableau before her—the tombstone looming overhead, the pale body lying unnaturally still at its base, Wednesday’s lifeless form splayed on the grass. And Tyler. On his knees. The tremor of barely contained violence in his frame, eyes too dark, too wild, crouched over her body like a predator.

Enid’s breath caught. “Oh my god,” Her voice cracked. “You—” she breathed out, accusational, fangs bared, shaking with fury even as the tears formed. “You killed her.”

Chapter Text

In the next heartbeat, Enid lunged.

Her claws flashed in a myriad of colors in the sunlight, all nail polished a different color for each finger, as she barreled toward Tyler, a guttural snarl ripping free from her throat. She was quick—quicker than she usually allowed herself to be—but Wednesday recognized that grief had sharpened her instincts into something feral. Tyler jerked to his feet, his own strength bursting free. The Hyde inside him threatened to surge forward, stoked by the lingering residue of grief and madness inside himself.

For one blinding second, Wednesday thought he would tear Enid apart in front of her. “Tyler, no!” Wednesday’s voice cracked through the graveyard like a whip.

The tether burned white-hot in her chest through the words. She pushed everything she had into it—authority, command, the sheer weight of her will. The tether lashed out like a chain, seizing Tyler mid-shift. His claws trembled, his skin rippled, but he froze, locked in place as though invisible manacles bound him.

But it did nothing to leash Enid’s fury, her rage and grief making a weapon of raw accusation. Wednesday almost blinked at the sight of it, cataloguing the incongruity: daylight, and nowhere near the full moon. Yet Enid’s transformation was pushing farther than it should, as she enlarged, the whispers of a werewolf emerging from beneath her skin. Grief and fury were reshaping her, bending her nature past its limits. A dangerous surprise. Currently unwelcome, given the circumstances.

The fight was ugly, raw, and probably inevitable. Tyler held back—barely. Enid did not. Her claws tore across his arm, shallow but bloody, the scent of iron sharp in the graveyard air. He grunted, staggering but refusing to retaliate in kind. He shoved her back, only for Enid to spin and rake him again, catching his side this time. The Hyde snarled through him, urging him to rip, to rend, to end. His eyes went bulging red around the edges. His body twisted under the onslaught of Enid’s hits, shuddering violently, his breath coming ragged as he took slash after slash.

Even still, Wednesday’s orders drove through him like a commandment.

“Why couldn’t you stay away from her?!” Enid cried, her voice cracking.

Tyler finally snapped, grabbing Enid by the wrists. He shoved her hard against the trunk of an ancient towering tree, pinning her in place with sheer brute force. She snarled, thrashing, claws digging into his skin, but he held her, wrists pinned.

“Listen!” he roared. “She’s not dead!”

Enid spat in his face. “Liar! You killed her!”

He avoided her headbutt with a snarl, hands still locked on hers. Enid was breathless, startled by his sudden stillness. She bared her teeth, breathing hard, not daring to lower her claws. “What game are you playing, Galpin?” she spat. “Why haven’t you finished the change?”

Tyler’s chest heaved. His jaw clenched. His eyes flickered from green to red to hazel to red and back again. “Because she—” His voice broke off, raw. His gaze darted toward Wednesday’s spirit, the only one who could see her. “—because she won’t let me.”

Enid froze. Confusion rippled across her features, then fury returned tenfold. “You’re insane.” Enid’s gaze cut between him and her friend’s lifeless corpse on the ground, and her voice broke with anguish. “You did this. You killed her.”

“She’s not dead,” Tyler growled back, voice low and jagged as broken stone. “Not really.”

Enid’s claws dug deep grooves into the bark of the tree she was pinned against, splinters breaking under her grip. Her breath came ragged, her eyes flashing molten gold. “What are you talking about, you insane freak—”

“Wednesday is standing right next to you.”

The words landed heavy, vibrating with the truth.

Enid froze, eyes snapping to the empty air where Wednesday’s incorporeal form flickered faintly. She squinted hard, searching for something—anything—only to be met with nothingness. Her gaze snapped back to the ground where Wednesday’s pale corpse lay sprawled, motionless, black tears dried against her face.

Enid’s chest heaved. Then her lip curled, voice trembling with rage. “You’ve finally lost it,” she hissed. “You really did belong in Willow Hill.”

The insult struck like flint against dry tinder. Tyler’s head lowered, his teeth bared in a dangerous growl. His claws flexed, carving deeper into the wood as his control wavered.

“Don’t harm her,” Wednesday pressed, her spectral voice cutting like ice.

The tether snapped taut, dragging Tyler back to heel. He clenched his jaw until it creaked, then forced the words out, rough and reluctant, as though the truth itself burned his tongue. “She’s here,” he ground out. “She’s talking to me right now. I’m the only one who can see her. She’s trapped—Rosaline Rotwood did this. Some kind of spell. Wednesday was trying to regain her psychic sight. It’s—” He faltered, breath ragged. “It’s a trick. Her body’s dead, but her soul isn’t. She can come back—if she figures out what Rotwood wants.”

Enid’s eyes narrowed, molten with distrust, but her claws hesitated mid-swipe. Her breathing was sharp, too fast, but her ears twitched as though listening despite herself. The words were too precise, too saturated in impossible detail to dismiss outright.

“You expect me to believe that?” she spat, though her voice wavered on the edge of doubt.

“It’s the truth,” Wednesday cut in, her incorporeal form drifting closer, ghostlight catching faint against her pale outline. Tyler’s lips moved with hers, repeating her words with a grim, reluctant fidelity—like a heretic forced to preach someone else’s gospel.

Enid’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Even if that’s true,” she looked him dead in the eye, seething. “It doesn’t explain you.” Her claws flexed again, scraping Tyler’s arms where he held her pinned. “Why are you here at all? Why are you part of this? You and Wednesday are sworn enemies.”

Wednesday felt the tether surge—Tyler going off-script. She knew it before he opened his mouth, the electric tremor in the bond prickling like static under her skin.

He smirked, blood trickling down his chin, and met Enid’s blazing stare head-on. “Not anymore. We’re bonded now,” he said, his voice steady, almost smug. “She’s my master. Willingly.”

The color drained from Enid’s face. Her claws scraped uselessly against the bark, her breath catching as if the air itself had betrayed her. Shock widened her eyes, then gave way to furious denial, hotter and brighter than before. “No.” The word came broken at first, then stronger, louder, seething. “No, she wouldn’t—she would never do something that reckless.”

But her voice cracked on never.

And even as she hissed the denial, even as her claws trembled in rage, Wednesday knew some part of Enid saw it. She knew Wednesday well enough to recognize the truth woven in the madness. It was exactly the kind of reckless calculation, the perfect brand of doomed pragmatism, that Wednesday Addams thrived on.

“Ask Thing,” Tyler prompted, his tone goading.

The disembodied hand lurked at the edge of the clearing, having scuttled out of harm’s way once claws and Hyde-strength began to fly. Now he lingered over Wednesday’s corpse, fingers splayed against her throat as if checking once more for a pulse he already knew wasn’t there. Slowly, almost reluctantly, Thing turned toward Enid. His fingers moved in quick, sharp gestures.

Enid’s face paled as she read the motions, her breath catching.

Wednesday remembered—of course she did. Weeks back, she had buried herself in research about obscure rituals, the old blood rites that spoke of bonds between monsters and masters. Thing had been drawn into her research at the beginning, fetching books from the restricted parts of the school library. Enid had learned of it too, distantly, rolling her eyes at what she’d called another one of Wednesday’s “doom projects.” Neither had taken it seriously. Both had assumed she’d grown bored of the idea when she stopped mentioning it.

Fools. They should have known Wednesday never abandoned a project until the corpse was cold.

Thing’s last gesture sealed the matter.

Enid blinked, her fury dimmed only by shock, her claws trembling midair. “No,” she whispered, but her denial sounded thinner than before.

“We’re bonded,” Tyler continued, too smug for Wednesday’s liking. He tilted his head, blood dripping from his chin, his eyes cutting sharp to Enid. “Been going on for weeks now. Sad that she didn’t tell you about it — but we have a bond that lets me see her spirit. She’s here now, yapping in my ear not to gut you open. You’re lucky for that.”

The tether flared in Wednesday’s chest, her incorporeal form sharpening in irritation, curling like smoke around the bond. “Stop preening like a carrion bird,” she cut in, her voice sliding through Tyler’s mind. “Your delivery is grotesquely smug. It undermines the severity of the situation.”

Tyler’s smirk twitched, more amused than deterred at her irritation with his rendering of the facts.

Enid blinked, confusion flickering across her face at the sudden shift in his expression. “What?” she demanded, her gaze darting between him and the empty air.

“She’s correcting me,” Tyler muttered. It was taut, and almost begrudging. “Apparently I’m being too— confrontational.”

Wednesday’s incorporeal eyes narrowed. “Restraint is not your strong suit, but you will practice it regardless. Especially here.”

Enid’s lips peeled back, fangs bared, fury scorching every line of her face. “Prove it,” she spat. “Tell me something only Wednesday would know.”

The tether burned hot in Wednesday’s chest. Her incorporeal form went still, jaw tightening. To arm Tyler with a secret was intolerable. To bare something private to Enid through his mouth was almost worse. But there was no path forward that didn’t spill blood—one way or another. So she chose carefully. Words sharpened to surgical precision, she pressed them through the tether. Tyler’s expression faltered. His smirk wavered. He looked almost sick with disbelief.

But the bond compelled him, and at last, he forced the words out:

“She said,” his voice caught, and he cleared his throat, scowling at the absurdity of what he was about to say. “She said that the yellow-haired doll she gave you at the start of the semester—the one you pretend to like—actually belonged to a serial killer. It was made with real human hair. Likely the hair from one of his victims.”

Enid froze, eyes-widening.

“She gave it to you because it reminded her of you,” Tyler added, every word like a stone dropping into the silence. “She didn’t want you to freak out about its— origins.”

Enid blinked once. Then twice. Her claws wavered mid-air.

“What the actual fuck?” she exclaimed, horrified, her voice pitching sharp.

“I really did give you that doll as a sign of affection,” Wednesday said evenly, her incorporeal voice cutting into the silence, matter-of-fact and unyielding. “I didn’t see the need to suffer through your dramatics if you knew it came from the Kansas City Scalpel Killer.”

But even Tyler looked weirded out by that.

Enid’s claws lowered, shaking now, her body trembling as the rage bled out into something raw and bewildered. “That—” Her voice cracked, barely above a whisper. “That’s so insane, and so Wednesday— that I actually think I believe it, but I have no way to prove if it’s true either. It could be a serial killer’s doll, or not.”

Tyler blinked, incredulous. “How the hell was I supposed to know she gave you a weirdo doll?”

Enid shrugged, stubborn. “I don’t know. You’re crazy obsessed with Wednesday. That’s what stalkers do.”

Tyler’s lip curled in irritation. “So what would prove it then?”

Enid’s claws flexed back into place, her words biting like glass. “Tell me something only she shared with me. Something private. Something just between us.”

The tether flared hot against Wednesday’s incorporeal chest. She stilled, her expression hard, eyes narrowing as she combed through memory after memory. Each secret was a weapon, each word an opening she could never close again. Finally, she found it. The memory scraped up from her throat like it had been dug out of a grave.

“Nero,” Wednesday said.

Tyler’s brow furrowed. “What?”

“Nero,” Wednesday repeated, pressing it into him through the tether like a command.

Tyler’s gaze flicked back to Enid, confusion sharp on his face. “She only said one thing: Nero. No context.”

Enid froze. The name struck her as familiar, her breath shuddering, her eyes widening with recognition. Nero. Wednesday’s pet scorpion. The only living creature she had ever truly doted on, slaughtered brutally in front of her when she was a child. Enid knew the story because Wednesday had shared it in one of her rare unguarded moments, late at night, in the hush of their dorm room. It was the last time Wednesday had cried as a child, a memory that had carved her into stone. Wednesday had never spoken Nero’s name to anyone else. Only Enid.

Enid’s claws faltered, curling back into trembling hands. Her chest rose and fell too quickly, as though she’d been struck. Her eyes darted to the faint shimmer of ghostlight where Wednesday hovered, flickering, incorporeal, and unseen by all but Tyler.

The silence stretched brittle as glass.

Enid’s claws finally curled back, half-formed, trembling as Tyler let go and she pulled her hands against her chest. Her eyes burned, wet but fierce, and her throat worked around words. “Okay,” she whispered, faintly, drained. “I believe you.” Her gaze snapped back to Tyler, sharp as a blade. “But don’t think that means I trust you. I never will.”

A pause.

Progress.

Tyler stepped back, releasing her entirely. Enid’s claws retracted slightly, though her posture was still bristling. Her eyes, still wet with tears, locked on Tyler with venom, then Wednesday’s fallen body. “So she’s really here. Really talking to you.”

“She is,” he said flatly, no antagonism this time, just grim weight. “I hear every word.”

Enid exhaled sharply, the sound breaking like a sob she refused to give voice to. Her gaze on Wednesday’s corpse lingered, and her lips thinned into something halfway between relief and fresh fury. “You should’ve told me, Wednesday,” Enid whispered to the air, voice cracked. “You should’ve trusted me.”

Wednesday’s incorporeal form didn’t move, but the tether hummed with her response, unspoken but heavy: trust is not something I scatter like breadcrumbs, even for those I love.

Enid seemed to feel it anyway. Her shoulders slumped, her claws fully retreating, leaving her trembling but listening now. Thing came to approach all of them in the shared solemnity of the moment. And in the clearing, beneath Rosaline’s tombstone, the four of them stood bound in reluctant and newformed alliance—two clawed enemies forced into a truce, one dismembered hand, and one dead girl with only hours left to claw her way back to the living.

A crack of branches. Voices. Too close, faint through the trees — campus wardens, or worse, police from Jericho.

Enid panicked, claws shooting back into half-form. “They’ll find us!” she hissed. “They’ll see her body—”

Tyler lunged forward, attempting to scoop Wednesday’s corpse into his arms. “Then we take her—”

“No,” Wednesday snapped, her incorporeal form blazing with sudden fury. “Leave me. If you carry the body, they’ll call it murder and drag you both to a cell before dawn.”

Tyler froze, jaw tight, eyes burning as if the order gutted him. “She’s telling us to leave her body behind," he told the others.

“You’ll do exactly as I say,” Wednesday hissed. “Run.”

Thing tapped wildly in protest, but even he seemed to know she was right. Through the tether, her voice was a blade in Tyler’s mind: Obey. He flinched as if struck, then cursed low under his breath. With one last glare at her incorporeal form, he dropped her body back against the grass, gentler than his fury suggested, and spun toward the tree line. Enid stumbled after him, still glancing back, tears streaking down her cheeks. Thing leapt from Wednesday’s dead chest and scrambled up onto Enid’s shoulder.

And then they were gone, running.

It was Enid who broke the silence first on their long trudge back through the woods toward Tyler’s hideout cabin. The forest was thick with shadows, branches clawing at their sleeves and ankles, the air cool and damp with the onset of evening. Wednesday had been using the time to weigh her options with clinical precision, but Enid’s voice sliced across her calculations—sharp, but weary.

“The reason I even found you out there—wasn’t luck.” Her words came clipped, each one laced with exhaustion and a twinge of accusation. “Thing saw you go down to the cemetery. He’d been following you all morning, Wednesday. When you collapsed, he came to me. So yeah, if you’re wondering why I came running—”

Thing, perched on her shoulder, tapped sharply against her jacket in confirmation.

Wednesday inclined her incorporeal head in acknowledgment, her tone cool and reluctant. “Efficient as always.”

Tyler repeated her words aloud with a clipped edge, though faithfully enough.

The walk stretched on. The hush of the woods seemed to press closer with every step, broken only by the scuff of boots and the low thrum of the tether like the heartbeat that no longer beat under Wednesday’s skin. By the time they emerged into the clearing, the sun was already sliding lower on the horizon, bleeding orange and violet across the sky.

The sagging roof of the cabin caught the dying light, the crude patchwork of Tyler’s repairs. From the shadows, Elvis bounded out, ears flapping as he barreled toward his master. The scenthound skidded to a halt, nose twitching hard as he bypassed Wednesday entirely. He pressed instead against Tyler’s legs, tail wagging with frantic devotion. Tyler bent low, feeding him scraps from his pocket, one hand buried deep in the dog’s ears. His expression softened in that instant—an ease that didn’t often belong to him.

The dog, to no one’s surprise, didn’t bristle at Enid’s werewolf scent. He padded over and sniffed curiously, then sat at her feet, tail thudding on the earth. Enid’s face broke briefly into something warmer, her neon features brightened by the simple loyalty of a dog. She crouched, scratching him behind the ears. “Well, at least someone here likes me,” she murmured, cooing despite herself.

Inside, the cabin was quiet and dim until Thing found a lantern and lit it. The air smelled of woodsmoke, iron, and damp fur, a heaviness that clung to the tongue. Enid wrinkled her nose but held her tongue, opting instead to flop into a rickety chair that groaned under her weight. Tyler tossed his jacket aside, muttering under his breath as he adjusted the lantern wick, the tether still vibrating faintly between them all with a neverending current of concern and frustration. Wednesday hovered near the far wall. The atmosphere was tight, close, every breath sharp with unspoken tension.

It was Wednesday who began, her tone clipped, precise. “Weems found me.”

When Tyler translated, Enid blinked, frowning. “What—like Principal Weems? She’s dead.”

“She is,” Tyler said, translating in a bewildered tone as Wednesday explained. “And she’s acting as Wednesday’s— spirit guide? At least for now.”

Wednesday’s voice cut like a scalpel. “Rosaline Rotwood’s enchantment is cruel. It’s bound to secrets. My secrets. The spell won’t release me until I unravel the innermost truths I’ve hoarded.”

Enid’s brows knit together. “So you just— tell secrets until it decides you’ve bled enough?”

“Presumably.” Matter-of-fact, Wednesday decided to deliver her first incision. “Enid, I had a vision. Of your death.” The tether pulsed, and Tyler hesitated, but repeated the words exactly, his voice cutting into the quiet like a verdict. “You were torn apart by crows, but that threat is gone. Judy Stonehearst—the Avian behind it—is already dead.”

The brightness of Enid’s widening eyes flickered with uncertainty. Her lips thinned, then pursed into a brittle line. “Oh, great. Thanks for telling me now, after I apparently survived it.” She huffed sharply, sinking back into the chair with her arms crossed, the legs creaking under her shifting weight. “But fine. You’re not the only one with secrets.”

Tyler cocked his head, curiosity despite himself sharpening in his gaze.

Enid’s claws pricked faintly, tips scratching the wood of the chair as she admitted, low and tight: “Capri thinks I might be an alpha. A real one. Which… would explain the more-than-just-claws in broad daylight back there.” She turned away, her voice cracking on the edges of the words. Her neon hair caught the sunlight glow as she turned, eyes fixed somewhere on the floor. “Alphas are supposed to be strong, the fiercest of wolves, leaders. But they end up alone. Always. And I—” Her breath shivered, and the words seemed to taste bitter as she spoke them, her gaze darting away. “I don’t want that.”

Wednesday’s incorporeal form drew closer. Her eyes, unreadable but heavy, fixed on Enid. “Then don’t,” Wednesday said, cool as glass. “There’s little you can’t do, except perhaps for mastering the art of camouflage. You’re the most socially active person I know, Enid. People won’t abandon you. They flock to you like socialite vultures. It’s annoying to witness."

Enid blinked at Tyler’s translation, startled, her breath catching audibly. She stared into somewhere to the left of where the faint shimmer where Wednesday’s body emanated, unable to actually see her. For a suspended beat, the sharp edge between them — those that had been erected for some time now — seemed to soften, turned almost fragile. “That’s—” Enid’s expression curved into something caught between a smile and a shrug. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

Tyler muttered something under his breath about low bars, but one glance at Enid’s venomous glare shut him up with gratifying speed.

The silence that followed was different this time. Not brittle, not jagged—simply weighted, like the first stone laid in the foundation of something new. Enid’s hand brushed nervously across the edge of her chair, but steadier now. “Fine. I’m on board. Team Save Wednesday.” She glanced upward, sudden eagerness breaking through her irritation. “So— did it work? Spilling that secret?”

Tyler turned to Wednesday, who only gave him a look. He shook his head, translating flatly. “No. Spell’s still got her.”

“Then it’s my mother,” Wednesday concluded, tone final. “The family secrets. That’s where this ends.”

“We have to go to Wednesday’s family,” Tyler said.

Enid groaned, pinching the bridge of her nose as though the determination had finally cracked something in her skull. “Fine. I can— try to explain this to them. Wednesday’s mom terrifies the shit out of me—she’d make most things that go bump in the night wet themselves—but at least she’s into the whole dead-seance aesthetic. I can smooth the ground for you.” She grimaced. “I’m sure by now they know about Wednesday’s body.” Her gaze flicked to Thing. “I’m gonna need your help to explain. I’ll tell them not to panic. To— wait for Wednesday after dark?”

Wednesday inclined her head, expression cold as marble. “Very well. I’ll attend, and secrets will be pried loose. If my impending death isn’t enough to loosen my parents’ tongues, then Tyler can fetch the instruments. A red-hot poker, a pair of rusted shears—whatever proves most persuasive. Pain is a universal language.”

Enid’s eyes widened when Tyler more or less translated that. “Yeah, sure,” she eeked out, disturbed. Then she glanced at Tyler, baring her teeth in something halfway between an emerging smirk and a threat. “And you can meet the Addams family. I’m sure they’ll just love the psycho who’s tried to kill their daughter more times than I can count.”

“You can’t count to two?” Tyler flexed.

Enid stuck her middle finger up at him. “I need to get back to campus anyway,” she continued, rising up, “make sure no one gets suspicious since there’s a dead body, and all. God, why is it always dead bodies with you?”

Wednesday turned her gaze to her. “And leave me your phone.”

Enid balked when Tyler repeated the request to her. “What? Absolutely not. I’m not giving him my phone!”

“You can call me from Agnes’s cell with updates,” Wednesday explained, with Tyler echoing everything. “But I need a line to you if something happens.”

“So I’ll have to fill in Agnes about everything, too?” Enid muttered, put upon. “Ugh. Well, I guess it’s like gossip, but I don’t know what’s going to be more surprising. That you’re dead or that you have a boyfriend.”

Wednesday froze, horrified by the pronouncement and the designation of her relationship with Tyler as something a pedestrian might use, but then also sensed another concern. Updating Agnes on everything wasn’t entirely necessary — at least those details that pertained to her bond with Tyler.

Wednesday sent a sideways glance at Tyler, and he seemed to pick up on the thought through the tether. He also seemed to have a horrible poker face.

“Wait,” Enid screeched, reading the look. “Agnes knew? You told Agnes before me?”

“Told is generous,” Wednesday said. “She’s admittedly skilled at stalking.”

Tyler made a face as he said to Enid, “Apparently she stalked Wednesday and got the information that way.”

“Unbelievable,” Enid muttered, wounded again. “I’m the best friend and I’m the last to know about anything.”

“The phone,” Tyler pressed, unsympathetic.

Enid glared, looking like they’d asked for her firstborn. She narrowed her eyes, hesitating, teeth gritted, but pulled her phone from her jacket reluctantly. “Fine. But—” she shoved it into Tyler’s hand with a warning, “—a lot of that is password protected.” Enid didn’t see Wednesday’s incorporeal raised eyebrow. She already knew Enid’s every password. “If you so much as open my socials, I’ll claw your eyes out.”

Tyler rolled his eyes. “As if I care enough to bother.”

Enid arched a brow, scoffing. “Please. Like you weren’t stalking my accounts for any glimpse of Wednesday.”

“Yeah, well.” His lip curled, sardonic, and through the tether Wednesday felt his annoyance. “Then it won’t come as a surprise that every time I tried to kill you, I was bored out of my skull. It was never about you.”

“Ditto,” Enid shot back instantly. “Let’s go, Thing,” she muttered, and the hand climbed onto her shoulder, fingers curling against her collar. With one last look at the cabin, bidding Wednesday a short farewell in an aimless direction, they left.

The door closed behind her, leaving Tyler and Wednesday alone.

Wednesday’s lips thinned as she met his stare.“Was the hostility towards Enid entirely necessary?”

He pushed off the wall, lips pressed firmly into a thin line. “What? I was just telling the truth,” Tyler shot back. He dragged a sleeve across his chin, smearing blood instead of cleaning it. “Every time I went for her throat, it was because of you—because provoking you,” his expression curved, jagged and dark, “—was the only thing that made things interesting.”

Something hot and unwelcome pulsed against her chest, making her body stir with an appetite she despised. He was telling the truth—and worse, she responded to it. Her body ached with awareness she had no use for. She hated him for it. She hated herself more.

“You were willing to use her life as leverage,” Wednesday said. “That is not devotion, Tyler. I already have Agnes if I require a pitiful stalker.”

“Should I fetch her? See if she can help you claw your way out of this mess? Oh wait—even the invisible girl can’t see you. That’s irony. Which leaves you with only one option, Wednesday.”

Her jaw clenched. She refused to give him the satisfaction of an answer, but silence was an answer — and they both knew it.

“You need me,” Tyler said, his voice quieter now.

She stood in perfect stillness, hands flat at her sides, spine unyielding as iron. Yet the words coiled around her ribs, serpentine and suffocating, sour in their venom because they were true. She should have despised the reality of it—her visions, her fate, chained to him by circumstance and the bond. It was complicated for a million different reasons. Even now, even through the tether, Wednesday felt details about his body without even the need to look at him: raw scratches raking his arms, bruises like storm clouds across his ribs, his knuckles split open from his clash with Enid. He dismissed them with that irritating flicker of bravado, but she was aware of them in a way that went past the surface level attention and buried itself several layers below it.

And she did not despise it as much as she should have. That unsettled her most of all.

Tyler didn’t move at first, but the tether betrayed him. Wednesday felt it before she saw it—the surge, the restless heat spiking down their bond like a current too wild to leash. His hand twitched at his side, then rose deliberately, reaching for her incorporeal form.

“Pointless,” she murmured, though her voice wasn’t as steady as she would’ve liked. “You’ll only pass through again.”

“Doesn’t mean I won’t try.”

And then his palm cut through her chest, passing like smoke—but the tether jolted. A shock tore through her, something electric, intimate, as though for the briefest moment she felt the ghost of his touch on her sternum. A phantom hand against the seat of her unbeating heart. Her composure cracked for a fraction of a breath, her lips parting.

Tyler saw it. His jaw clenched in a small tick of victory. “So you do feel me.”

“You are mistaking static discharge for intimacy. A dog’s shock collar gives the same reaction.” Outwardly, she only skewered him further with a look. “I patch you together, and you return to me mangled the next day. I refuse to waste my efforts on tending to you again.”

He stared at her, silent. They both knew her hands would pass through him now, her ghost-form denied even the bitter satisfaction of mere touch. It wasn’t like her previous experience with the tether. She supposed, as a ghost, there were different operative parameters.

“You’re bleeding all over the floor,” she said instead. “Fix it.”

“I don’t care about that. What are we going to do about you?”

“I will solve my condition,” she replied, cold. “In the meantime, tend to Enid’s handiwork. She wasn’t even fully wolfed out and you look like roadkill.”

“That’s because somebody didn’t let me shift into Hyde form.”

“Yes, and consider it a standing order. You’re not to harm or threaten any of my friends or family.”

Except maybe Pugsley — she thought, but didn’t say. But only a little.

Jaw clenched, Tyler glared back. “Thanks, but I’m not an idiot. I don’t need to be told that.”

There were many responses Wednesday could have said to that. None of them were pleasant.

Even as he fetched the med-kit again, even as he took off his shirt, his hands were aggressive and his movements jerky, hardly methodical as he put cotton to wound, alcohol to cleanse, bandage to bind — there was a restless state to him. Now, without anyone else as an audience, she felt the full rush of his emotions over the tether. He felt—volitile, almost unhinged and unglued, put together like a poorly constructed puppet. He didn’t even hiss when the antiseptic burned, because his focus wasn’t on his injuries at all.

His eyes stayed on her, fixed and desperate, his voice raw. “How are we going to fix this?”

“Apparently, by unraveling secrets,” Wednesday replied, jaw clenched.

He gave a short bitter laugh, tearing open a roll of gauze with his teeth and wrapping his forearm in brusque, practiced pulls. “Then you’re staying dead. If your life depends on opening up, we may as well start carving your headstone.”

“Do not underestimate me,” she snapped. “I’m not your concern. Worry about your own senseless intuition.”

His eyes lifted — dark, exhausted. “Everything about you is my concern.”

The cabin breathed with silence, his words echoing too close.

For a long stretched moment, there was nothing but the ragged sound of his breath before he resumed his work, tending to his various wounds. Wednesday did not move, but the bond burned with the truth: inside him warred Hyde-born devotion tangled with something human. Concern. Terror. Real. Tyler would bleed himself dry without hesitation, and none of it would matter to him compared to the risk of her staying dead. She felt it. His grief still leftover from the moment he’d found her unbreathing body, the weight of that startled moment still hung heavy and suffocating over him; it was layered with the Hyde’s compulsive need to anchor himself to her, to his master, but it was so much worse for Tyler’s cloying sentimentality.

“You display poor devotion and worse judgment,” she bit out.

“No,” he said sharply. His face cracked open, anger bleeding through the grief. “You don’t get to brush this off. You’re dead, Wednesday. You’ll stay dead if you keep pretending you can cheat your way through this curse. If you don’t—if you don’t tell the truth, open up, sacrifice—then you stay dead. Forever.”

The tether throbbed, carrying the raw edge of his fear, his obsession. Some of it was the Hyde and its slavish devotion, but beneath that — she was beginning to distinguish between the two easier, what was Tyler’s real voice, his true fears.

Wednesday’s lips pressed thin. The thought of being forced to reveal herself—her secrets —was almost worse than death itself. But the curse demanded sacrifice.

He returned to winding the gauze around his ribs, his hands shaking now more from agitation than pain. “I know you. You think you’re invincible. That you can glare this curse into submission. But what if you lose? For real? I can’t—” His voice strangled, choked. “I can’t lose you because of your goddamn stubbornness.”

She should have mocked him. Laughed at his sentiment, cut it to ribbons. But the bond betrayed her again—the way his chest ached with the pulse of his grief, the shadow of his devotion wrapping around her ribs like a vice. Wednesday watched as he used tape to close off the bandage with rough movement where hers would have been clinical and methodical. Her face was a mask, but inside, the pull of his emotions brushed too close. She had felt people’s fear of her all her life—but to feel someone fear for her was a rare, unsettling dissonance.

“My survival is not yours to manage,” she said, voice flat — but smaller.

His pause was incredulous. “Not mine to manage? If something happens to you, Wednesday, it kills me too. You don’t get that, do you?”

It was a hard fact to dismiss. He’d been lucky to find a new master after killing Thornhill, but it took a longer moment for Wednesday to realize that wasn’t what he meant.

He meant the admission with more— sentiment.

She glanced away. With a jaw clenched hard enough to ache, she decided to cut the silence with an alternative incision. “The vision last night,” Wednesday admitted, finally. “I saw your grave.” The tether went still. She forced her voice steady, each word a scalpel slicing into open air. “Next to your parents. Your name carved in stone. And your voice in the dark, accusing me. Telling me it was my fault that you died.”

For a heartbeat, everything stopped.

No mocking retort. No restless pulse along the tether. Just silence, heavy as soil heaped onto a coffin.

Then it hit—the tether flaring so violently it was like a struck chord refusing to die. His emotions crashed into her: not fear—never fear for himself—but rage, raw defiance, and beneath it something darker still, frantic, the Hyde wildly desperate. Without her own body to contain herself, she was flooded with the volatile emotions of his. Tyler as she’d come to know him was always a geyser of conflicting emotions. Nothing was surface level with him. He felt deeply, and chaotically. This was no different.

His laugh broke through, brittle as glass. “So that’s it? That’s why you’ve been running from me? Because of a tombstone in one of your creepy visions?”

Her eyes narrowed. “You think death is a joke?”

“Funny, coming from the literal dead girl in the room,” he snapped. “You’re the one always sermonizing about rot and ruin, how everything ends in suffering. Maybe this proves you right.”

She knew what this was — male bravado, empty as anything else driven by testosterone. He wanted her to see him unbroken. But underneath, she felt it: the frantic, hammering pulse he couldn’t hide, the admission that death shook him to the bone.

“You’re rattled,” she said flatly.

“Maybe, but I guess it’s nice to know you care. That it made you scared enough to run. Even if the knowledge comes at the expense of my own impending doom.”

Her nails dug crescents into her palms, refusing to show the flicker of truth in his words. “If you die, it will be because you’re reckless, short-sighted, and incapable of obeying.”

His humorless laugh cut the air. “And there’s the Wednesday I know. Cold as ice. Almost went soft there for a second.”

Her gaze cut into him, sharp as the guillotine she wished she had. “Perish the thought.”

Wednesday tilted her head as she stared at him, caught on the sight of his lips. She should stop this. She didn’t need further distractions. Time was of the essence. But his heart hammered—too hard, too fast, responding to her like he always had. He leaned closer, as if gravity itself demanded it. For the first time, the tether blurred their edges, bleeding one into the other. For a heartbeat, she swore his hand ghosted against her jaw, almost real.

Then Wednesday snapped herself back, severing the moment.

Her voice was ice again. “Enough. We don’t have time for this.”

She walked away.

Time passed, the lanterns burned hotter, and Wednesday’s incorporeal form sat with unbroken stillness in the corner of Tyler’s cabin while her mind played its usual game of strategy. The board was set. Tonight she would pry her family’s secrets open with exacting precision, extracting what she needed about Aunt Ophelia. It was Wednesday’s secrets that would free herself from this ghostly imprisonment, but her mother didn’t know that. It was an opportunity to leverage the trick to get answers.

Her thoughts were cut short when the silence snapped—Tyler’s borrowed phone buzzing sharp against the table. Enid’s voice spilled out, harried, tinny with bad reception. “Hello, you there? Okay—listen, I don’t have much time. The school’s on total lockdown. Sheriff Santiago has the place locked tight, and she’s working with Principal Dort. No one in, no one out.”

Tyler swore low under his breath, but Wednesday only cocked her head, having expected that.

“What are they saying about Wednesday’s death?” Tyler asked.

“Well, everyone’s— devastated,” Enid admitted, heavy. “The school’s— in mourning. The whole quad feels like a funeral.”

Wednesday’s lips curved faintly, predatory. “I’ve always wanted to see my own funeral. Consider me intrigued."

Enid’s voice spiked with further exasperation. “Yeah, and there’s one big problem—the cops already took Wednesday’s body. Hauled it to the Jericho morgue. They’re talking about an autopsy.”

The alarm spiked between Wednesday and Tyler—cold realization slicing clean. Wednesday’s composure cracked, if only for a flicker. “An autopsy,” she repeated. “How careless of me not to anticipate that.”

“If they cut you open, you’re not coming back!” Enid snapped, over the phone. “How are you going to— resurrect, or whatever, if your organs are sitting in jars of formaldehyde?"

Technically, the organs were usually returned to the body after an autopsy. Sealed in plastic bags, placed back inside the chest and abdominal cavities, and sewn up. But that was neither here nor there.

“We need to prevent that,” Tyler declared, needlessly.

Wednesday's chin lifted, something hungry flashing across her face. “We steal my body back,” she said, her tone cool, decisive, wicked. She looked almost gleeful, her incorporeal form shimmering brighter for an instant. “A heist. Of my own corpse. A prospect perhaps interesting enough to justify my temporary demise.”

Tyler sent her a sharp exacerbated glare. “As much as breaking into the morgue with you sounds like fun, we have to lay low.”

On the phone, Enid groaned, long and loud. “Oh my god. Of course you’d be thrilled by this. You two are actually freaks. But don’t worry about it. Agnes and I are already on corpse duty. We’ll get it back. Bianca is helping, too.”

“Bianca?” Tyler’s head snapped toward the phone, incredulity flashing. “Tell me you didn’t start telling half the school about everything that’s going down.”

“Look, hyde-boy,” Enid snapped, her tone like claws, “a siren has more use than you in this current situation, so back off. I don’t need to run my plays by you for approval.”

Tyler’s jaw flexed, biting back whatever retort lingered on his tongue. The tether pulsed with his annoyance, sharp and hot.

“Enough,” Wednesday interrupted. These two bickering at each other was enough to give her non-corporeal brain a migraine. “Just tell Enid to get my corpse back to me before dawn.”

Tyler translated, but the plan was already taking shape in her head. A body to retrieve. A spell to unravel. A family to confront. And the clock was bleeding down to dawn.

The campus had changed under lockdown. Patrol lights cut through the darkness, blue and white beams sweeping over stone walls and tree trunks. The sheriff’s department had cordoned off the grounds, their boots and radios a constant intrusion on Nevermore’s natural gloom. That didn’t stop Wednesday and Tyler from cutting through the garden paths, slipping past hedges. From the quad, the sharp sound of a radio exchange carried—fragments of words about “securing the perimeter” and “the body at the morgue.” Wednesday’s jaw tightened, but she pressed forward.

Wednesday and Tyler moved through it like shadows. He kept close—too close for her taste—but his Hyde senses made him irritatingly useful. “Try to keep up, master,” he murmured under his breath.

“If you call me that again, I’ll see if the Hyde form is flammable,” she hissed back.

The Gardener’s Cottage emerged, with her family waiting inside.

Tyler tensed beside her, jaw rigid. “You’re sure about this? I doubt anyone who raised you qualifies as the forgiving type. How do I know I won’t get a shotgun to the head walking through those doors?”

Wednesday’s voice was calm, steady. “Please. My father would never do anything so unoriginal. Besides, we’re not here for forgiveness. We’re here for answers.” She allowed herself one shred of comfort to throw him: “And it doesn’t matter what they think of you, Tyler. I don’t answer to my parents.”

The door creaked open before he could raise a hand. Gomez filled the frame—broad shoulders, dark eyes shadowed by worry, and one gleaming knife still clutched in his hand. Tyler instinctively reeled back. Then Morticia appeared at his side, a pale column of poise and menace. Her lips curved with restraint, but her eyes narrowed at Tyler. Then she glanced at the space beside him—her Sight catching the shimmer of her daughter’s incorporeal form.

Morticia’s eyes widened, composure faltering. “Wednesday,” she breathed. “So it is true. I almost didn’t believe Enid.”

“Come in, come in,” Gomez urged, voice rich and heavy with relief.

Tyler crossed the threshold warily, like a man entering a lion’s den. He flicked his gaze to Wednesday as if begging for silent cues, but she was fixed on her mother. Morticia’s gaze looked glassy, as though she had been crying, though Wednesday distrusted the act. Morticia never wore a single emotion without a second one concealed beneath it. Inside, the family tableau assembled itself: Pugsley slouched near the hearth, chewing on something that might once have been alive; Grandmama hunched over a bottle of port until she spotted Wednesday and cackled warmly; Thing drummed his fingers on the mantelpiece; even Lurch lingered at the back, an unmoving sentinel.

Wednesday stepped forward, her incorporeal form seen only by a few. The tether hummed taut as Tyler followed.

She wasted no words. “We need to talk. About secrets. About Aunt Ophelia.”

Morticia’s eyes flickered—the faintest crack in her composure. Grandmama’s hand froze mid-pour.

“First,” Morticia said, heavy and deliberate, “let us make this easier on those without the Sight.”

Tyler frowned, confused, but Wednesday gestured sharply for him to step back. Her mother moved with practiced grace: drawing a chalk circle, sprinkling bone ash and nightshade petals, laying the cracked silver mirror on a black lace cloth. A single drop of her blood darkened its fracture before she breathed across it like glass frosting with mist. Gomez, beaming through grief, draped the silver heirloom chain around it, tethering Wednesday’s spirit to this plane of existence.

As Morticia worked, Pugsley sidled toward Tyler, eyes gleaming. “So you’re the Hyde?” His tone wavered between awe and curiosity. “Funny. I thought you’d be taller.”

Wednesday ignored him.

The seance wound on, candle flames shuddering, shadows crawling up the walls.

At last, her form sharpened for all to see.

“Mi corazoncito,” Gomez breathed, tears thick in his voice. “You’ve come back. We were so worried.”

“Some of us are jealous,” Pugsley muttered.

“I assume Enid has already given you the details,” Wednesday said.

Morticia threw a glare across the room at her own mother. “Yes. You followed the foolish advice of the old and the damned.”

“Careful,” Grandmama drawled, her voice jagged. “I’ll tolerate one barb. The next will cost you.”

They were like a pair of serpents coiled and ready to strike against one another. Wednesday would have been entertained to sit and just watch had it been any other night, but she had precious few hours left before sunrise. The circle glowed faintly around Wednesday, her incorporeal form flickering in and out of solidity as her family stared.

“I need answers,” Wednesday said. Her tone sharp, calm but flensed of impatience. “Secrets. About Aunt Ophelia.”

Morticia’s lips curved, but her eyes slipped to the side—a dodge. “Darling, the past is littered with skeletons best left in their graves.”

“Then exhume them,” Wednesday replied. “The curse I’m under demands secrets. If I keep mine, I remain dead. So, by simple extension, if you hoard yours— my demise is on your hands.”

Gomez winced as though she’d struck him across the chest. “Mi pequeña víbora,” he murmured, voice thick with grief. “Do not twist your own blood into ransom.”

But Grandmama only let out a cackle, teeth flashing like ivory knives. “Oh, I do like her style. Emotional blackmail.”

“There’s nothing emotional about it,” Wednesday said flatly. “It’s just blackmail.”

Grandmama gave a wheezing chuckle of approval.

At her side, Tyler shifted uneasily, his voice low enough to almost escape her mother’s earshot. “Wednesday. The curse—it’s your secrets, not theirs.”

She turned her head just enough to catch him in her peripheral. Her glare was so sharp it could have flayed flesh. He shut up instantly and sank back into his chair, subdued.

Wednesday angled her chin, sovereign and unyielding. “So. Confess your sins.”

A silence fell, heavy, webbed with tension. Morticia and Gomez exchanged one of their long, wordless glances, a thousand memories strung between them like barbed wire. Morticia’s exhale was slow, inevitable. “Your aunt Ophelia,” she began, the name weighted, “suffered. In her school years, she loved a boy. Isaac—” her glance shifted, away, a flutter of eyelashes, “Isaac Night. A tragedy struck, and he died.”

She let the sentence wither, unfinished, leaving the silence to pulse with what she would not say.

“His name,” Wednesday’s voice was blade-thin, her obsidian gaze pinning her mother. “You hesitated on it.”

Gomez’s jaw clenched tight.

Morticia’s eyes flickered, deliberate, surprising, toward Tyler—sharp enough to slice.

Wednesday caught the exchange like a hawk catching the twitch of prey. “What?”

Gomez’s shoulders sagged, heavy with reluctant truth. “Isaac Night was your uncle,” he confessed to Tyler, voice carved from stone. “The brother of your mother, Francoise.”

Tyler froze where he sat, the color draining from his face. His breath hitched, as if the revelation had knocked the wind from his chest.

Morticia pressed on, her tone a silk thread stretched taut. “Ophelia and Isaac were consumed by one another. Mad, obsessive, inseparable. They would vanish into the catacombs beneath Nevermore for days, returning with eyes too bright, hands entwined as if bound. Their devotion was feverish—beautiful, and deeply dangerous.” Her mouth tightened, but she went on. “They were reckless. Romantic in ways that scorched instead of warmed. He was a Night, she a Frump—” she looked at Tyler and Wednesday as she said this. “It should have balanced. But together, they burned each other down.”

“Is it possible,” her grandmother cut in, looking at Tyler like he was a bug, “that history is repeating itself again? How is it that you could see my granddaughter in her spirit form?” Disdain dripped off her voice like candlewax. “You don’t have an ounce of the sight in you, boy.”

Tyler shifted, opened his mouth — but Wednesday cut in, “None of that matters right now. Continue with the story.”

Gomez closed his eyes, took a breath as if picturing decades past. “Isaac and your aunt carried on as though the world did not exist. Moonlit vows made in blood, swearing they would rather be buried alive together than live apart.” His voice roughened. “And in the end, perhaps they were granted their wish. We do not know.”

Wednesday’s face was carved from granite. “So Isaac died. How?”

“Tragic accident,” Morticia explained, curtly. “Isaac was known for his experiments. One of them went— badly.” Morticia inclined her head, regal and mournful. “His death unmoored Ophelia. Madness seized her. She was sent to Willow Hill afterwards. When she escaped, she vanished and we never saw her again.”

The tale ended there, too neat, clipped clean of the jagged edges that still bled grief in their eyes.

But Wednesday narrowed her gaze, contempt dripping from her voice. “That’s the fairy tale you chose for yourselves. A story fit for headstones and shallow graves. But I know the truth.”

The room went still—Pugsley paused mid-chew, Grandmama arched a brow, Gomez stiffened, and even Morticia’s poise cracked the faintest degree.

Wednesday’s incorporeal form flickered against the seance glow as she leaned forward, voice flat, merciless. “Your version buries the bones. Mine digs them up. I found a file at Judy Stonehearst’s house. Ophelia’s file. Patient 1938. She wasn’t lost. She was imprisoned at Willow Hill for nearly two decades in secret, subject to Augustus Stonehearst’s experiments on Outcasts. Judy inherited the work after he went mad.”

Silence detonated through the cottage. It crawled into every corner, smothering the warmth of the fire. The revelation hung like smoke, acrid and heavy. Grandmama breathed heavily like a viper hissing. The smirk that usually laced her mouth faltered into a grim line, the lines around her eyes deepening. Morticia’s poise cracked further upon the pronouncement, her hands tightening at her sides, the silk of her composure shredding thread by thread.

“And I saw her,” Wednesday said. “I freed her. On the night of the outbreak, I saw her vanish from the building.”

Her grandmother’s lips parted, opening her mouth to say something, but it was Morticia who broke it—voice sharp, trembling with fury not at her daughter, but at herself. “All this time, she was alive? And imprisoned in that madhouse?”

There was no mincing the words. “Yes,” Wednesday answered.

The air in the cottage was thick enough to choke on.

Morticia swayed slightly, one elegant hand pressing to her temple, as though the weight of decades had finally dropped onto her at once. Her grief was a quiet, unyielding thing, the kind that hollowed her from the inside out. For all her composure, her shoulders bent just faintly, and her eyes—wide and glistening—betrayed a rare fracture in her flawless armor.

Grandmama said nothing for a long moment. She lowered the bottle of port, her knobby fingers trembling once before tightening. “I told her,” she murmured, voice uncharacteristically hoarse, “that her passion would destroy her. I laughed at her madness. I thought it was— romantic folly. And when she vanished, I let myself believe it was better she was gone.” Her sharp eyes flicked to Wednesday, and for once they weren’t mocking, but brimming with guilt. “I should have looked harder.”

The admission was rare, raw—a jagged wound pried open.

“Wednesday, you should never have ended up entangled in our mess,” Morticia said finally, her voice sharpening as she turned back to her daughter. It was her refuge: guilt over grief. “I meant to save you from this madness.”

Wednesday tilted her head. “And yet here I am.”

The tether flared. Tyler winced, his breath catching as though her words yanked at his ribs from the inside.

Morticia’s gaze cut to him, cold and assessing, slicing him open with a look. It lingered—too long, too knowing. “I suspected,” she said, low and dangerous. “You forged a bond with him.” Her voice dropped to a hiss, silk wound tight with steel. “I warned you against dabbling in the arts of such things, Wednesday. I told you not to pursue the rituals in those books. I told you not to bind. And yet here you are.” She pressed closer, her shadow engulfing the silvered mirror anchoring Wednesday’s ghost. “This is not just a bond. It is servitude. It is corruption. It stains the master as much as the servant. And once forged, it cannot be undone.”

Morticia’s words lingered like smoke: once forged, it cannot be undone. Tyler’s shoulders stiffened, his eyes darting to Wednesday, but she gave him nothing—no acknowledgement, no defense. Her silence was a shield, her stillness a rebuke.

Grandmama snorted, disappointment lacing her gravelly tone. “You’ve snared yourself in a lover’s leash, child. Just like your mother. Just like your aunt. Is this your legacy? Another Frump woman undone by her own dimwitted heart?”

Tyler bristled, looking anywhere but at them. The words “lover’s leash” seemed to scorch him worse than any wound Enid’s claws had left.

Wednesday glared. “How convenient for you to posture as a prophet of restraint, Grandmama, when Rosaline Rotwood herself confided in me about your youthful indiscretion. Your very public collapse over a huckster in your school years.”

Grandmama’s smirk faltered, just for a breath, her wrinkled hands tightening on her port bottle.

“You have no room,” Wednesday pressed, merciless, “to scold me for entanglement when you were undone by the first charming fraud who paid you courtship. At least my tether binds a monster with teeth. Yours bound you to a con artist with cheap lines and sticky fingers.”

The silence that followed was tense, vibrating with the shock of the blow.

Gomez shifted uncomfortably, torn between pride at his daughter’s steel and the pain in his wife’s eyes. Morticia’s composure, always immaculate, trembled on the edge of fracture—grief for her sister, anger at her daughter, fury at herself. Tyler, mortified, sat rigid, embarrassment painting his face in a dull, furious flush. Every word carved into him, but he did not defend himself. Not against Morticia’s accusations, nor against Grandmama’s disdain. Perhaps he thought himself already condemned in their eyes.

The fire snapped in the hearth, a sudden crack that startled Pugsley into a jolt.

Morticia’s gaze lingered on Wednesday, but when it shifted, it struck Tyler like a blade. Cold. Measuring. Knowing. “You reinforced this bond,” she said slowly, voice heavy as a tolling bell. “I see a tether, Wednesday. Not just a leash. You went further.”

Tyler’s jaw tightened. His cheeks flushed hot, and he dragged his eyes to the floorboards, as though they might swallow him whole.

Yet Wednesday, imperious as ever, did not flinch. “Yes. Tyler and I are tethered. It is grotesque, binding, and inescapable.” Her voice flattened to iron. “And I will not waste time on regret.”

Morticia’s grief hardened into anger, her voice cool and precise. “I warned you, Wednesday. I told you those rituals would corrupt. That intimacy twisted into servitude becomes complicated beyond your wildest dreams. And yet you carved the rite into your own flesh.” Her hand cut toward Tyler, elegant and condemning. “Into his.”

“Morticia,” Gomez murmured, low and uncertain, as if torn between defending his daughter or his wife’s judgment.

Wednesday tilted her head, her incorporeal glow brightening with the movement. Her tone was calm, merciless. “Yes. I bound him. Hyde to master. Flesh to spirit. I did not stumble into it, nor was I tricked. It was deliberate.”

Tyler flinched at her bluntness, his ears reddening, mortification burning down his throat.

Grandmama’s chuckle was like gravel rolling in a crypt. “So much for the promise of the future. You’re ensnared already, girl. Just like your aunt with her Isaac, just like your mother with your fool of a father.” Her eyes glinted. “The Frump women always think themselves the spider—never realizing when they’ve crawled into the web in secrecy just to wither.”

The insult hovered, daring to wound.

Wednesday’s lips curved the faintest degree. “Secrets,” she said softly. “They’re so much more satisfying once they’re dragged into the light.”

And Wednesday—she stood up and marched to the door, incorporeal and unyielding in the seance glow, her tether blazing hot against her chest, refusing to flinch. Only Tyler followed her out the door. The silence cracked on, heavy with everything that had been unleashed — dismay, guilt, grief, judgment, fear — all left behind her. Because Wednesday was unyielding. Her secrets were dragged out into the open. Their secrets had followed. And with sunrise looming, one question remained—whether this bloodletting of truth would be enough to save her life.

“That was absolutely mortifying,” Tyler declared, afterwards. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look your parents in the eye ever again.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Wednesday dismissed. “If I die, you won’t have to deal with the possibility."

“Wednesday,” he snapped, unamused.

It wouldn’t be long now for the sky to pale with the thin bruised colors of dawn. Tyler and Wednesday had slipped away from the Gardener’s Cottage easily, the Sherriff’s men all buffoons. The seance glow had faded behind them, leaving only the raw sting of words unburied and truths dragged into the light. They walked in taut silence, with Tyler’s fists shoved into his pockets, his jaw clenched. Embarrassment clung to him like smoke; he had faced her family’s stares, their disdain, Morticia’s razor-sharp judgments, Grandmama’s taunts. And still, he’d stayed and stuck to Wednesday's side. It spoke of something made of sterner stuff. Not many could survive the Addam’s family. Wednesday’s incorporeal form flickered beside him, her black silhouette shimmering faintly in the night. He couldn’t look at her for long—through the tether she felt his fear spike, every glance a reminder of how little time they had. Yet he forced himself to straighten, to breathe evenly, to be there. He needed to be here — for her.

When they stopped, it was with a grim question hanging between them.

“Do you think it’s broken?” Tyler asked at last, voice rough. “The curse? All those secrets— it should’ve worked, right?”

Wednesday studied her hands, translucent as smoke. “Clearly not. Despite all our revelations, I remain outside my body. Still under Rotwood’s trick.”

The air cracked open with the sudden screech of tires. A car—rusting, borrowed, unmistakably stolen—swung to a stop before them. The driver’s window rolled down and Enid leaned out, smug, eyes gleaming. “You’re welcome. Took some persuasion to get the keys and your body.”

The persuasion clearly came from Bianca, who climbed out of the shotgun seat. The back door opened and Agnes tumbled out, too, face flushed with urgency. And then Wednesday’s gaze sharpened. In the back seat, pale as marble in the dawn light, lay her own corpse. The stolen body. Her body.

They clustered together, a makeshift cabal around the car.

Enid’s eyes went wide the moment she saw Wednesday’s flickering ghost standing beside Tyler. “You— I can see you.”

“As can I,” Bianca said, folding her arms. “I thought only Hyde-boy over there had that privilege.”

Apparently, she’d been read in on everything.

Wednesday’s tone was cool, clinical. “My mother’s seance anchored me to this plane of existence. Its effect has— lingered. Apparently, I’m visible to all of you now.”

Enid’s face lit up despite the grimness of the situation. “That’s huge! So, does that mean you broke the curse?”

“No,” Wednesday said flatly. “I confessed all of my family’s secrets. They confessed theirs. We unearthed the truth of Aunt Ophelia. And yet—” She gestured to her body in the car. “—I am still outside myself. The trick is not sated.”

Enid’s expression tightened. She looked from the corpse to the ghost, then stepped forward and clenched her jaw. “Then we’re missing something,” she determined. Before Wednesday could protest, Enid gestured to pull her aside, away from the others, and Wednesday reluctantly followed. Enid lowered her voice but not her resolve. “It’s not about them, Wednesday. It’s about you.”

Wednesday’s eyes narrowed. “My secrets have already been aired. My visions, my tether, my—”

“No.” Enid cut her off. Her voice was sharp in its certainty. “Look, you know I hate Tyler Galpin, right? Like — really truly loathe his guts. This isn’t an endorsement or anything, but you gotta see it, right? It’s not about visions or curses or your family’s endless skeletons. It’s about you. Your innermost secret. The one you’d rather die — literally — than admit. And what scares the formidable Wednesday Addams more than anything? Feelings.”

Wednesday’s lips pressed into a razor-thin line.

Enid’s gaze softened, but she didn’t relent. “I was there, remember? Beside you through all of last year. I saw how you were— smitten with the barista boy from Jericho, the normie. Don’t try to deny it! You liked Tyler. Really liked him. For reasons none of us could figure out.”

A muscle twitched in Wednesday’s jaw, the only break in her otherwise marble façade.

“And then,” Enid continued, her tone dropping lower, gentler, “your heart got broken. Because that boy—the one you let yourself care for—was a Hyde. He was working with Thornhill. I get it, Wednesday. Trust issues the size of the iceberg that sank the Titanic. Who wouldn’t have them? But this—” she gestured to the ghostly shimmer of her friend, “—this is it. Your life is literally on the line. You can’t keep hiding behind contempt.”

Wednesday’s eyes glittered, black glass and fury, but Enid didn’t waver.

“You need to admit it,” Enid said, steady as stone. “Admit your innermost secret—that you care about him. That you might even—ugh, love him. That’s the truth the curse wants.”

The tether pulsed hot at Wednesday’s chest, tightening like a noose, as though daring her to deny it.

Her voice came out low, cutting, meant to flay: “You mistake curiosity for affection, Enid. Proximity for sentiment. I don’t care for Tyler. Not in that way.”

But the tether throbbed again, sharper now—anger, longing, grief tangled together. Not hers. His. Tyler, only a few feet away, had heard enough to sense what was being said. The bond betrayed her, pulsing like a vein under assault.

Enid leaned closer, her voice softening to a whisper that still cut with truth. “You can lie to me, Weds. You can even lie to him. But you can’t lie to yourself. Not anymore. That’s what the curse is waiting for. You don’t have to say it to him right now. Just admit it. Admit it to yourself.”

Wednesday’s throat tightened, her body flickering faintly as if the seance anchor strained against her denial. Her instinct was to scoff, to slice Enid’s sentiment to ribbons, to prove she was untouched. But the tether seared hotter, the ache in her chest unbearable—because Enid was right.

Her innermost secret was not her visions. Not her family’s history. Not Ophelia.

It was Tyler.

And if she did not spit it out, dawn might take her with it.

The tether burned hot against Wednesday’s chest, its pulse so fierce she could almost hear it. Enid’s words hung between them, undeniable, and the silence that followed was sharp. Tyler shifted a few feet away, vibrating with restrained energy, eyes flicking between the two of them. He had caught enough. The tether carried the echoes of their conversation straight into him, betraying every word Wednesday wanted buried.

He finally walked towards Wednesday, just as Enid walked away.

His throat worked once, painfully. “That’s— what this is about?” His voice was rough, low, uncertain. “Enid’s trying to make you say—” He broke off, the words sticking, something too earnest rising in his face.

Wednesday turned. “Eavesdropping is hardly a noble trait.”

He barked out a short, humorless laugh, but it cracked halfway through. “I didn’t need to eavesdrop.” His fists were clenched at his sides. “I feel it. Every time you deny it, every time you twist away.”

Wednesday’s expression didn’t shift, but Enid’s words hung in the air like a blade against Wednesday’s throat, hot and insistent, pressing into her incorporeal windpipe until she could hardly breathe. Her instinct was to resist—to bite, to lash, to deny—but beneath it, a deeper truth roiled. A truth she had buried under contempt and fury, under years of discipline and disdain.

Her eyes shut, tight, as if against execution.

It was now or never, literally life and death.

And in the dark of her own mind, she let it unfold. The tether burned, and for once she didn’t fight it. She let it sear through her chest, rooting out what she had buried beneath denial. The truth was hideous in its simplicity. She had always cared for him. From the very beginning—when he was just the boy behind the counter, the so-called “normie” with steady hands and kind eyes—something in her had been drawn to him. She had liked him, been attracted to him, trusted him. Against her better judgment. Against her discipline. Against everything she told herself she was.

And because she had liked him, the betrayal had cut too deep. Thornhill’s reveal, the Hyde’s violence—it had gutted her, not because she hadn’t expected betrayal from the world, but because she hadn’t expected him. If she hadn’t cared, she could have catalogued it, dissected it, moved on. But she had cared, and it wounded far more than she had expected.

She told herself later that binding herself to him had been practical, utilitarian. A means to control him, to keep him on a leash, to turn a weakness into a weapon. She had recited that logic like scripture, convincing herself it was strategy.

But it was a lie.

The truth was that she had bound herself to him because she couldn’t bear to let him go. Because the like she had once buried was not snuffed out by betrayal—it had calcified, hard and fast, in the marrow of her bones. And ever since that night, ever since the ritual stitched itself into both of them, the feeling had only grown, swelling into something harder, heavier, impossible to excise. The tether bound them, tighter and tighter.

She loved him.

She didn’t say it out loud. It wasn’t for anyone else to hear, not even Tyler himself. She admitted it, just to herself. The words itself felt venomous in her mind, but no less true for it. She loved him, and it disgusted her. She loved him, and it terrified her. She loved him, and it made sense of everything—her rage, her tether, her refusal to let him drift away, her anger when he got too near. It was her innermost secret. The one she would have died with rather than speak aloud. But now, with the curse clawing at her and the dawn pressing near, she let herself know it fully.

And that was, apparently, enough.

The trick shuddered, then released, a searing wave of heat that rippled through her form. Her incorporeal body spasmed, flickered, and then pulled—dragged—toward the car where her corpse lay waiting. The glow of the seance circle burned in her mind’s eye as her spirit slammed back into flesh. Her eyes flew open. Real eyes. Breathing, blinking, aching eyes. Her lungs filled, sharp and sweet with dawn air. Her fingers twitched against the leather seat.

She was alive again.

Gasps broke around her—Enid’s squeal of joy, Bianca’s sharp intake, Agnes’s whisper of awe.

Tyler had stepped back, his face pale, his fists tight at his sides. He had heard enough—not the words, not the full confession, but the weight of it. The way the tether had flared. The way she had folded for a moment, surrendering to something she may never name aloud. Disappointment flickered in his eyes—that he had not heard her say it. That the words had not been his to claim. But layered beneath was something steadier, something almost like peace. Because she had admitted it to herself, and that was enough for him—for now.

Wednesday sat up slowly, her dark hair falling across her shoulders, her gaze cutting across them all with icy composure, as if she had not just been dragged through death and forced to confess the most damning secret of her life.

Tyler exhaled, a shaky laugh slipping out, low and bitter-sweet. “Guess it worked.”

His composure cracked, but he straightened anyway, trying to look unshaken. She could feel his thoughts like the taste of her own. He could wait. He had to. Now that she was alive again, they had time. Wednesday stared, unblinking, giving him nothing but the faint flicker of uncharacteristic softness in her returned gaze. The tether hummed faintly in her chest—hot, undeniable, alive.

They had time.

Chapter Text

The woods were hushed in the pale wash of the sun rising. Wednesday walked in silence beside Tyler, her boots crunching against the dew-bitten earth. She had left Enid, Bianca, and Agnes behind to manage her family. The details of her inevitable “resurrection” would need to be sorted out, and she would face the authorities in her own time. For now, she had decided— rebelliously—that she had earned a day off from the pains of mortality. Even if she had only recently acquired it back.

Tyler kept a steady pace beside her, still raw from everything revealed in the dawn. He glanced at her more than once, though he said nothing. There was something vulnerable in him now, some new nuance or restraint. Perhaps it was relief, perhaps exhaustion, but the edges of their sharp exchanges had dulled. For now, there was silence and Wednesday surprisingly found it was the comfortable kind.

The cabin appeared between trees. Elvis bounded out from the porch, tail whipping back and forth like a weapon. The dog’s enthusiasm was indiscriminate—leaping on Tyler first, then circling Wednesday with snuffling joy. Wednesday froze, as she always did when confronted with displays of loyalty she hadn’t earned. But when Elvis nosed at her hand, she allowed herself the smallest concession: a brush of her fingers against his fur. It was warm and grounding.

“You are less irritating than your master,” she announced flatly.

Elvis’s tail wagged harder, which Tyler found deeply amusing. “A lot of people could say that about me, too,” he taunted.

Wednesday rolled her eyes.

Inside, the cabin was dim and quiet. Tyler sank into one chair, and Wednesday went to the opposite window and stood staring out. For a while, neither spoke. It was strange, this silence. Not the brittle tension that had defined them lately, not the charged air of challenge and provocation. This silence was… softer. Companionable.

Tyler leaned back, studying her without pressing. “You okay?” he murmured at last, as though testing the words. “You just went through a lot. Literal life and death.”

Wednesday regarded him coolly, but her voice lacked its usual bite. “So it seems.”

The tether between them hummed faintly, but not with the feverish pull it once had. Something had shifted. The storm had passed, at least for now, leaving a quieter gravity in its wake.

“You don’t have to say anything,” Tyler added, eyes cast toward his dog instead of her. “I just— I’m glad you’re okay. I’m glad you’re here when—”

Wednesday tilted her head, a sliver of curiosity slipping through her composure.

His mouth curved, not in mockery but in something dangerously close to warmth. “That you chose to come back here. With me.”

For once, she did not slice him down.

And for the first time in days, Wednesday allowed herself to rest, to sit on the floor over the blanket that served as a makeshift bed for him during the cold nights. The cabin settled into its familiar hush—the faint groan of old wood, the crackle of the fire pit once he got it going, Elvis’s steady breathing curled at their feet. Tyler got out the old smoked moose meat, and together they nibbled on the pieces for breakfast.

Tyler leaned back in his chair, arms folded, eyes on her. “Sorry about the lack of anything else to eat.”

She nearly snorted. “My favorite dish is roadkill pot roast. This moose is a delicacy by Addam’s standards.”

“You know, that’s— disturbing.”

Wednesday turned her head slowly toward him, expression sharpened to a point. “So are you. That’s why it works.”

He huffed out a laugh, quiet, genuine. “You’re not even trying to deny it anymore — that we work.”

“I deny plenty of things,” she said, smoothing an invisible crease in her sleeve. “I simply prefer accuracy to wasted energy. You’re insufferable, and I tolerate you. It’s a functional arrangement.”

“Functional,” he echoed, shaking his head. “That’s one way to describe being cursed and tethered together.”

“I do nothing against my will. To imply otherwise is an insult to my free will.”

Tyler smirked, but it was gentler than his usual edge. “Still. You’re here. You could’ve stayed with your friends. With your family. But you came back to this dump. With me.”

Elvis stirred, pressing his head against Wednesday’s shin. She stiffened, then allowed the contact, her hand lowering to scratch behind his ear. “Your cabin is preferable to my family’s emotional theatrics. And your dog has a healthier sense of boundaries than most humans I’ve met.”

“High praise,” Tyler murmured, watching her with something close to sentimental drivel.

They sat in stillness, the weight of the prior day’s events pressing between her shoulder blades, threatening to puncture skin and lungs, but she let the quiet stretch between them instead.

It was almost reminiscent of their earliest exchanges—back when he’d been nothing more than the boy behind the counter, before betrayal and curses and bonds. Back when she had not yet admitted, even to herself, what he meant to her. That she still cared for him was knowledge that could not be undone, a disease released from Pandora’s box that would never be forced back inside. She had tried to smother it with disdain, to dress it in the black funeral garb of contempt, to bury it beneath cruelty and barbs—but it persisted. Her like had hardened into something fiercer, faster, more insidious. Love. A word she loathed. A word she may never admit aloud.

And yet, he seemed to sense it. The way his eyes slid over her face, the way his posture had shifted from defiant to steady, the way he did not press her with questions he knew she wouldn’t answer. He still knew.

Maybe that was enough.

Maybe that would save her the awful ordeal of ever having to say it.

The silence lingered between them, heavy and fragile at once. Wednesday didn’t disrupt it—for the first time in longer than she could admit, she let the silence between them stay warm instead of cold.

When Tyler finally shifted to the floor beside her, it was as if steeling himself against some invisible rejection, a meeting of a threshold that would not allow him to pass through. He lowered one hand from his knee until it settled upon hers, the warmth of his skin bleeding across the space between them, through her tights, to her cold skin. For a moment, she didn’t move. Didn’t blink. The old Wednesday would have snapped his hand away, carved him with a remark sharp enough to scar, anything to preserve the cold distance.

Her fingers twitched, the faintest shift, and before she could settle herself on one course of action, he leaned in, crowded her. His eyes flicked to her lip as he descended. She let him breach and close the distance and the kiss, when it came, was soft—so soft it startled her. A slow, careful slide of lips, hesitant as though the moment might shatter if he pressed too harshly, too quick, pressed his advantage until it slipped from his fingers.

Déjà vu cut through her like a knife.

She remembered their first kiss at the Weathervane: the precarious edge of it, her own mind screaming in protest even as her body betrayed her, pulling him closer. She was never the girl that did breathless kisses, coffee dates, or picnics in the park — he had taken her to the brink of each and every hard limit. She had convinced herself she’d been wrong to want it, to want him, wrong to care. And then seconds later calamity had struck—the vision that had torn everything apart, the revelation of what he was, and what this all meant. Her trust had shattered in her hands, glass slicing open her palms.

This kiss carried the same weight, the same impossible precariousness—but there was no calamity waiting on the other side. No terrible vision slamming her skull against the truth of betrayal. Only warmth. Only him. Her eyes fluttered shut despite herself. For once, there was no blade hidden behind the tenderness. No trap lying wait in the softness.

When they parted, it was slight, a breath of space, his forehead brushing against hers. His eyes searched hers, uncertain, raw, but she did not seek to snuff out the vulnerable moment. For Wednesday Addams, that spoke louder than any confession.

And Tyler Galpin, her once sworn enemy, knew it.

She moved. Her knees fell over his hips, sliding into his lap with the heels of her feet tucked under her as she settled into the seat of him. Her hands slid to his shoulders, up his neck, catching on the curls of his hair which she used to tilt his head back. The groan that slipped from his lips rang through the air at the rough yank, low and gutteral, drowning out any rational thought she might have had in that moment. Her tongue darted out to taste the sweat on the column of his throat, keeping his head tipped back enough to give her better access. The slide of her tongue up a wide margin of his skin had him groaning all over again, heavier.

“Dreamed of you,” he confessed. “Every night we were apart.” His mouth pressed against her cheek, prattling to her a confession she already knew, sounding strangely drunk on the taste of her. “So fucking tired of waking up and not finding you there.”

“I’m here now,” she posed to him, and shamelessly licked another line up his throat.

Her hands drew between them, blindly going for his zipper. Tyler drew back, his hands joining the mission to get them undressed, his zipper undone while he let her pull out his hardening cock.

“You smell—” he groaned.

“What?” she wondered, sniffing herself. “Like death?”

Much to her consternation, she didn’t smell much of the morgue on her, nor any remnants of other lingering signs of death. Her body probably hadn’t been there long enough to subsume the pleasant smell of cadavers.

He huffed a laugh and shook his head. “No, you smell—” he hesitated, locking eyes with her, like he wasn’t sure how she’d take his confession “You smell like me — like you’re mine.”

She paused. Others had already commented upon this, that her smell had changed. Enid, even her mother. It was perhaps a mark of their bond, some heightened pheromone that betrayed the secrecy of their bond. It wasn’t just sex — or maybe it was. Some acrid scent of her arousal mixing with his, the scent hitting his hindbrain like a ton of bricks, making him think she was marked as his. She couldn’t imagine all the ways the Hyde in him picked up the various subtleties of her. The monster’s possessive and animalistic nature spoke in a different language entirely than her own tongue.

Still, she couldn't help but tease him. “You might be imagining things.”

“Really?” he whispered. His hand left her hips, trailing heat down and across her stomach, until finally his fingers pressed against her clothed cunt, cupping her through the thin fabric of her tights. “Tell me I’m wrong then,” he murmured, sliding his fingers under the waistband of her tights, her underwear, finding the wet center of her. “Tell me this isn’t for me?”

His nose softly nuzzled against her neck as she gasped. Because — she did feel what he claimed to feel through the tether—that declarative upsurge of possession, feeling her iron-willed restraint fraying in a base call-and-response, the slow leak of emotion she thought long buried. He was tracing lines she had sworn were invisible, pulling truths out of her like splinters she’d worked so hard to hide under layers of callus.

“It’s alright,” he murmured, pressing the pad of his thumb against her clit, slow tortuous circles. “If you’re mine, I’m yours too. Your boyfriend, your monster — whatever word fits your mood.”

She pulled back, warning. “You’re not my boyfriend.”

“Your monster, then?” he said around a grin.

She liked that much better, panting out her agreement with a groan when she lost the ability to speak momentarily, thought fleeing her — because he had chosen that precise moment to press one long finger into her. She jolted in his lap. His hands had always been so much larger than hers, a span of his palm could spread across more than the width of half her back easily. One of his fingers felt like two of her own, and she struggled to take himside, the slide of him as he thrust in and out of her almost too much, too much, before he was already pushing a second finger to join in the mayhem. The burn of it was delicious, had Wednesday slamming her eyes shut, the falter of her hips as she attempted to ride his fingers.

“Look at you, Wednesday,” he rasped, too eagerly, then pressed his thumb into her clit so firmly she moaned. “Look at you using whatever you can of my body to get you off. And you like that, don’t you? Using my fingers, my mouth — my cock. What do you like most—”

She clamped a hand over his mouth so he couldn’t talk any further perversity, before the filth would do her in. Swaying her hips over his thrusting fingers to ride her through the building pleasure inside of her.

She was already on the cusp of it when she felt his thumb jolt her across the finish line, the pad of it pressing meanly into her clit at the perfect precipice point. The orgasm slammed into her while she rode his fingers, slouching against his form so heavily she was thankful she didn’t topple both of them over.

Even after that, she hardly felt fully in control of herself. He had one hand planted behind him to keep them propped up, but he was staring at her like she was some kind of gift to him — for him alone. She didn’t know what to say to the reverent look, and decided actions spoke louder than words as she stripped herself bare, pulling off his lap only long enough to get naked. He watched her with too much fixation, hard enough that she had to send him scrambling to get naked himself with a command careening into him through the tether: get undressed. Then it was a mad dash to see who could get out of their clothes faster.

When they came together again, it was joining of their bodies that felt different from every other time they’d fucked. Their bodies fit like pieces of a puzzle slotting together, rougher, slower, but less of a feral desire than before. Somehow more, too— something else, layered and heavier, miles beneath the surface, a possessive coupling. She felt her emotions bleed out like it’d sprung from a punctured vein.

Through the tether, she felt him in a thousand and one ways. He could feel the delicate bones of her hand shifting beneath her skin as her fingers started to circle her clit. When he inhaled deeply, the smell of her wet cunt filled his senses. He felt her frenzy of emotions, everything that should have been locked up too tight and pushed down and away. He felt it, and she hated that she could feel everything in him, too. Emotions too harsh for the light of the day.

After he made her come a second time, he pushed her to the floor and took her from behind again, except this time it wasn’t on all fours and taken like an animal. He spread her out on the blanket, laid behind until she felt his chest line up with every notch of her spine, felt his legs entangle hers. The slide of him into her from behind wasn’t as aggressive from his angle, not a pounding that rendered her speechless, but it still felt like too much. His hands snaked around her chest, cupping her breasts, tweaking a nipple — and she could feel his breath grunting and groaning in her ear with each thrust.

It was delicious, and too much. Too intimate.

Too— something she did not have the words for.

She didn’t even have to look at him, and she felt too seen.

The final time she came, he joined her — while her entire body seized, toes curling, thighs shaking, an orgasm ricocheting through her body like a possession. Tyler drove her through it with delicious strokes, fucking into her clenching cunt with a quicker pace just at the end, hips stuttering until he came inside her with a flood of warmth.

It should have been too much.

But it was afterwards, when Tyler drew her against him and pulled the threadbare blanket around her shoulders, that every part of Wednesday should have rebelled. She wasn’t a girl who liked comfort—it smothered, it confined, it softened the edges she preferred to keep honed. Comfort was only ever a comparison to being trapped, and Wednesday Addams did not tolerate cages.

And yet—she didn’t move.

Where she was cold and clammy, like stone left in the rain, Tyler was heat: sweat-damp skin, a pulse that thrummed against her temple, the slow rise and fall of a chest that hadn’t yet stopped being a furnace. His warmth seeped into her, unwelcome and undeniable, and the tether hummed like it knew she was betraying herself by allowing it.

She told herself she stayed still only because it was practical. Moving would have disturbed the quiet. Moving would have given Tyler some illusion of victory, and she would never grant him that satisfaction.

But the truth was more appalling. She didn’t know why she liked it so much.

The weight of his arm pinning her against him, the heat of his skin, the brush of his breath against her hair—it was unlike anything she’d ever allowed herself to want. She’d grown up wrapped in shadows, used to silence and solitude, sharpened by detachment. Softness was foreign, almost obscene. And yet, here she was, not resisting. Tyler didn’t press. He didn’t whisper platitudes, didn’t force conversation into the quiet. He simply held her, as though this had always been inevitable, as though she had always belonged here, caught between his warmth and the scratch of a blanket, with daylight leaking in through the gaps in the shutters.

Wednesday Addams was never the girl who did breathless kisses, coffee dates, or picnics in the park. She wasn’t built for the kind of adolescent softness the rest of Nevermore’s students lived for. And yet, somehow, even before she had recognized the monster in him that had called to her darker parts, Tyler had dragged her to the brink of every hard limit she had set for herself. A breathless kiss in the Weatherwane, a coffee bearing her the message of a happy birthday, a picnic in a crypt. The boy with curls and dark eyes had pushed her into places she had sworn she would never step—sentiment, affection, want.

Her fingers twitched. She smoothed her expression back into marble. But she knew. She knew, now, that Pandora’s box she had kept shut was flung wide open, and that the sickness inside—affection, attachment, love—would never go back in.

It struck her like another curse: perhaps she didn’t hate comfort.

Perhaps she only hated the idea of needing it.

Wednesday woke to the sudden press of a hand over her mouth. Her eyes flew open, already sharpened to knives, until she saw Tyler’s face hovering inches above hers. His expression was grim, alert.

“Shhh,” he breathed, voice low. “Someone’s outside.”

She pushed his hand away and rose without argument. In silence, they dressed—Wednesday in her uniform-dark attire, Tyler pulling on his pants and boots with quick efficiency. The air in the cabin was taut, Elvis already pacing by the door, hackles stiff. They slipped outside into the weak light of sunset.

At the edge of the clearing, Thing waved them over with frantic gestures, his fingers chopping through the air, perched precariously on a fencepost as though standing guard. And beyond him—tall, pale, an obsidian silhouette framed by the thinning trees—stood Morticia Addams.

Wednesday’s spine stiffened, bracing for yet another confrontation. Tyler lingered behind, wary, his eyes flicking between them.

Morticia raised a hand in quiet greeting, her expression carefully composed. “I’m not here for another fight, my dear,” she said. Her voice carried a softness, but Wednesday knew softness was a weapon in her mother’s arsenal.

“Then why are you here?” Wednesday asked, her tone flat, her stance wary.

Morticia’s lips curved faintly, though her eyes betrayed the truth: shadows clung there, heavy with worry. “After you left, your father reminded me that perhaps I was… overly harsh.” She paused, as if the words themselves were reluctant to leave her tongue. “The bond you forged with Tyler—” Her gaze flicked deliberately past Wednesday, catching Tyler in its pale snare. “Gomez and I bound ourselves in no less dangerous ways when we were scarcely older than you.”

Wednesday’s pulse tightened, her jaw clenching. She did not trust the overture; her mother had always worn two faces, one polished for the world and one hidden in shadow. But something in her poise now—an unpracticed weight, an honesty that slipped past the lacquer—made it seem genuine. Morticia Addams, who never faltered, appeared willing, for once, to concede ground.

“I don’t need your approval,” Wednesday said coolly, her chin a perfect blade’s angle.

“I am not offering approval,” Morticia replied, silk over steel. “I am offering sanctuary.” She folded her hands in front of her, the very picture of grace and menace interwoven. “Bring him to the Gardener’s Cottage. The old hidden seance chamber is secure and private. He—and his little dog—may stay there. Closer to you at Nevermore. With food, with running water, and most important of all, with shelter and safety. Better than this—” her eyes swept the moss-eaten roof and rotting porch, nose upturned, “—hovel.”

Wednesday’s chin lifted higher, unimpressed. “He doesn’t require charity.”

“No,” Morticia agreed at once, her tone soft. “But he requires protection. And if he does not come under my wing, then I cannot shield you. You may be content with this arrangement, but the sheriff still hunts him. For murder. For his escape from Willow Hill. It is only a matter of time before their search leads here.”

Wednesday’s eyes narrowed to obsidian slits. “So it’s blackmail.”

Morticia’s lips curved, dark amusement flickering at the corners like candle smoke. “Call it what you like. It is effective. And effectiveness, my dear, is a trait you claim to admire.”

The silence stretched long enough for Elvis to growl low in his chest, ears twitching at the weight of unspoken threats.

Wednesday studied her mother, unblinking, her face a mask. The trap Morticia had sprung was elegant. Wicked. And entirely effective.

She turned just enough to catch Tyler’s glance. His eyes, wary and resigned, met hers. He shifted his shoulders in a helpless shrug, the gesture tight, his lips pressing into a thin line. It was as though he were offering the choice to her, knowing full well it was both a courtesy and a curse. If they didn’t agree, Wednesday had a fleeting thought that her parents might be tempted to turn Tyler over to the authorities. But it would be a betrayal of the Outcast creed—Addamses did not side with sheriffs, nor with laws meant to cage their kind. But even without that threat looming, she knew there were a thousand other ways Tyler’s precarious existence could collapse.

The sheriff’s men would eventually trace their path through the woods. A hunter could stumble upon his tracks. A neighbor might notice smoke from his chimney. The world was full of eyes, and Tyler was alone in it. Out here, he was exposed. A fugitive in a collapsing cabin, a boy and his dog living in a forest full of predators. It was unsustainable.

And beyond the logic of survival, there was the truth she would not name aloud: keeping him closer was—safer. For her. For him. For both of them. To protect him was also to contain him. She could not deny the practicality of knowing exactly where he was, rather than trusting him to lurk in the shadows of the forest like a loose knife waiting to cut in unexpected places. Better to keep him within reach, where she could see him, measure him, restrain him if necessary. Control was a comfort, and Wednesday Addams was nothing if not a creature who sought mastery over the uncontrollable.

But the tether whispered the other half of the truth. Even despite the awkwardness—no, the embarrasment—of living under the same roof as her family, Tyler would accept it. The shame of Morticia’s “sanctuary,” the looming eyes of Gomez, even the potential of being subject to more of Grandmama’s inevitable barbs—he would endure it all if it meant proximity to Wednesday. She didn’t need him to say it aloud; she felt it. The tether bled it straight into her veins: the ache, the insistence, the restless pull that gnawed at him when she was out of reach. The Hyde in him hated distance almost as much as the man in him did.

It was a truth both unsettling and undeniable. His obsession was not simply monstrous compulsion—it was human longing twisted through with animal hunger. And what unnerved her most was that she could feel how little he distinguished between the two.

Closer was always better. Closer was what he wanted.

And Wednesday, who prided herself on merciless clarity, had to admit—to herself, if no one else—that closer was what she wanted, too. It made sense. It was ruthless. It was practical.

It was the best choice.

“Very well,” Wednesday said at last. “We agree.”

Morticia inclined her head, regal and victorious, yet careful not to gloat. “Wise.”

Behind her, Tyler muttered something under his breath—resentful, low. Elvis barked once, sharp and uneasy, as though underscoring his master’s discontent. Wednesday ignored them both. She had expected nothing less from her mother. And though she would never say it aloud, part of her—cold, precise, and honest—admired the wicked symmetry of it. Because beneath all of Morticia’s poise and threats, Wednesday recognized something that chilled and strangely comforted her: the hand of a woman who would drag anyone, even her daughter, into the pit if that was what survival required.

“There’s also the matter of your resurrection,” Morticia said, her tone a silken thread, taut with implication.

Wednesday’s lips curved—almost a smile, which on her face was a little frightening to most people. “I’ve already figured out how to handle that.”

Her mother tilted her head, intrigued.

“There is a toxin,” Wednesday explained, her tone precise, each word clipped. “It mimics death down to the shallow pulse and cessation of breath. Rare, but effective. Thornhill cultivated it in her garden—Aconitum tenebris, a strain bred from wolfsbane. I recovered a sample weeks ago.”

Morticia’s eyes gleamed with instant recognition, her poise tightening with a dark satisfaction. “Ah. I remember that particular bloom. Its petals are exquisite. Velvety, the color of midnight. Deadly and alluring.”

Wednesday inclined her head once. “I’ll claim I ingested it as part of an experiment. One that went temporarily astray. An effective enough cover to excuse my absence, presumed death, and eventful return.”

Morticia’s expression warmed, a rare flicker of maternal pride hidden beneath her stillness. “Plausible. And suitably dramatic. You’ll gain a reputation, my dear, having risen from the dead.”

Wednesday’s gaze sharpened, the faintest gleam in her eyes. “Sadly, I won’t be the first Addams to do so. But the precedent only serves to reinforce the legacy. Maybe I’ll even ask Sheriff Santiago to forgo an explanation to the public.”

Tyler stepped down from the cabin. “You rising from the dead might raise questions, Wednesday.”

“All the better to cultivate fear,” Wednesday explained, flatly. “My enemies will think twice before raising a hand if they believe Wednesday Addams does not bow, even for death. They will imagine my corpse clawing its way out of the grave, and it will keep them awake at night.”

“Right,” Tyler said, almost sighing. “Of course.”

The Sheriff’s Department smelled of burnt coffee and stale paper, the kind of mundane air that never suited Wednesday Addams. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, and the clatter of computers mixed with the weary shuffle of boots across linoleum.

Then the front doors creaked open.

Wednesday Addams entered, dark and deliberate, her steps echoing. She looked no different than before her “death”—pale, precise, eyes like polished obsidian—and yet her very presence dragged a hush across the room. One deputy froze halfway through filing a report, his mouth falling open. Another dropped his mug, ceramic shattering across the tile. Heads turned, whispers hissed, and in seconds, the entire department stared at her like they were seeing a revenant crawl out of a grave.

Wednesday clasped her hands neatly behind her back. Her voice cut the silence, cool and flat: “It seems the rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.”

One of the young officers made a strangled noise in his throat, went white as chalk, and collapsed in a dead faint.

For Wednesday Addams, it was better than the sounds of applause.

Chapter Text

It had only been three days since Wednesday Addams had walked back into Nevermore’s halls, alive and ominious, but she felt the slow crawl of that time in a manner that was best befitting slow torture.

Despite her perfectly reasonable explanation for her resurrection, the children at school were still in a tither over it. Students whispered in corridors, peered over textbooks in the library, and even the siren gossip chains had taken to trading ever more absurd versions of her return—some swore she’d clawed her way out of her coffin, others that she’d been embalmed and escaped mid-autopsy. The rumors had initially lifted Wednesday’s spirit, but the more the insufferable fawning and questions prolonged, the more Wednesday felt her short supply of patience run out.

She had handled the fawning in her usual fashion. To the wide-eyed freshman who asked if she’d seen the light, she replied: “Yes, I sought it only to snuff it out.” To the cluster of werewolves who cornered her in the quad, begging for details, she simply said: “If you don’t leave me alone, I’ll drag you into the grave with me next time.” That worked remarkably well, especially when Enid hinted at the fact that she probably wasn’t joking.

At least the inane chatter about her brush with death was beginning to be drowned out by something else: the Gala at the end of the week. Dresses, masks, elaborate arrivals—it all infected the student body like a plague of moths swarming candlelight. Wednesday detested the talk, but it was preferable to the alternative of people dissecting her private resurrection.

Meanwhile, Tyler had been relocated—hidden, as Morticia put it—to the Gardener’s Cottage. His new home: the old seance chamber below, a chamber meant for quiet rituals and secrets, not for housing a restless fugitive Hyde. Through the tether, Wednesday could feel his irritation like a constant low growl. He was cramped, confined, itching for movement. Hungry for her proximity in a way both man and monster hated to be denied. For all intents and purposes, her parents were treating him surprisingly well—though he muttered about their oddities, their unflinching affection for each other, and the horror of the chamber’s location.

The seance chamber, it turned out, was far too close to Morticia and Gomez’s bedroom. “Do you have any idea what it’s like,” he hissed over the tether, “to try to sleep while your parents are—your parents, Wednesday—doing things I can’t even say out loud! I’ve heard— noises, Wednesday. Screams I can never unhear.”

She, of course, expressed no sympathy. “Consider it a character-building exercise.”

“At least your dad was cool enough to buy me noise-cancelling headphones to muffle the nightmare of living with them.”

Wednesday snorted, perversely amused even as she felt a trickle of empathy.

Morticia, on the other hand, had made her own observations that dulled the sharp edge of Wednesday’s humor. With that smooth poise of hers, she remarked that — once she had gotten over the surprise of their bond — Morticia was glad to see a softer, more romantic side of her daughter emerge; even if it was subtle, even if Wednesday scowled every time she suggested it. Still, her mother’s tone always turned appropriately grave when she added: “You’ve courted this monster too quickly, my little viper. Tied yourself to his fate too firmly.”

Wednesday bristled at the observation every time. Her mother always saw too much, and Wednesday hated nothing more than being observed.

And yet, she could not declare that Morticia was entirely wrong with her assessment.

They had moved quickly, entering into this bond. Every day they discovered a new facet of it, another complication. Though they spoke constantly through the tether, it wasn’t the same as being in physical proximity. She had learned to touch him even when incorporeal—he had not. His concerted efforts met only with repeated failure, and she could feel the mounting frustration every time his hand passed straight through her, every time he longed for more.

Today, the halls of Nevermore were quieter than usual—those inane Gala discussions momentarily hushed with the weight of her passing shadow. Wednesday strode through them with her usual clipped grace until Agnes appeared beside her, silent and solemn, appearing out of thin air, carrying two worn folders in her arms. Wednesday knew what they were — she’d sent Agnes to fetch them from the Nevermore student archives.

“One file for your Aunt Ophelia,” Agnes said, her pale eyes flickering to Wednesday. “The other for Isaac Night.”

Wednesday dismissed Agnes with a curt nod.

But at the mere flicker of her thoughts turning toward his uncle, it was as if Tyler himself had been summoned. His incorporeal presence bled in at her back, quiet and obtrusive all at once, a shadow that carried weight out of all proportion to the attention she ought to afford him. He slipped into her thoughts like smoke under a locked door, impossible to bar. He hadn’t been shy about his intruding presence, either.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t the only one going through withdrawals. Even bound by the tether, absence gnawed. Despite Tyler lingering close by at the Gardener’s Cottage—safe under her parents’ questionable hospitality—she hadn’t seen him in days. Not truly. Her hours were consumed by Enid’s ceaseless chatter, by coursework that required her attention, and by the constant, suffocating surveillance of students and faculty alike as Nevermore still buzzed and whispered over her resurrection. Every hallway she walked felt like a stage, her every step dissected by hungry eyes.

And in the middle of it all, his absence pricked sharper than it should have. The tether bridged the gap, yes, but it wasn’t the same. Words shared across incorporeal lines lacked the friction, the pulse, the nearness of skin and heat. It left her restless. As much as she despised the idea, she missed him—missed the way his presence filled space, the way his gaze pinned her like a blade through an insect, the way his hand hovered always too close to her own.

Now, when his presence brushed a ghostly touch against her spine through the tether, it landed like the weight of a confession she hadn’t made. Not aloud. Not even fully to herself.

She opened the files right there against the window ledge, the light cutting across her sharp profile. Together, tethered, she and Tyler poured over the documents. The documents left absent the details she already knew — that her aunt and his uncle were both hopelessly in love, both destroyed by it. The parallel was uncomfortably neat. Wednesday felt curiosity worming into her chest—curiosity and something colder: the whisper of concern. Was she hurtling toward an echo of Ophelia and Isaac’s tragedy, replaying it with Tyler at her side? Wednesday refused to believe that the hands of fate had any true control over her, but the parallels were too high for even Wednesday to ignore entirely.

Despite all the secrets unraveled during her brief “death,” Wednesday trusted nothing if not the fact that the Addam’s Family always had more secrets. There were always more skeletons. And she confirmed it the moment she saw Isaac’s file. The official record listed him only as missing. Not dead, as her father had represented. Missing. And Isaac’s star mentor? Augustus Stonehearst. The same man whose daughter, Judy, had carried on his grotesque experiments on Ophelia Frump.

Wednesday’s fingers drummed the edge of the folder, eyes narrowed.

Ophelia’s file yielded less. A record of her visions worsening, each one like shards driven deeper until madness swallowed her whole. The pages made it clear if succinct: her breakdown followed Isaac’s disappearance. She was committed to Willow Hill. The only thing that was truly surprising about the file was a single notation. Ophelia’s roommate in Puck Hall: Gabrielle Barclay. A siren, none other than Bianca’s mother.

Her pulse sharpened. The tether flared with Tyler’s confusion at her epiphany. And then—

A sudden black void.

The world tipped sideways, edges of everything smearing like watercolor left in the rain. Wednesday clutched at the edge of her bunk until the mattress dug into her palms and the room stopped spinning. A dull drum of a headache throbbed behind her eyes; bright points of light crawled across the ceiling when she blinked too fast. When clarity finally snapped back into place, the sun had long since bowed out—evening had settled in, bruised and quiet.

Tyler’s incorporeal form hovered at the foot of the bed, edges flickering through the tether. “Easy,” he said, voice low and frayed. “Easy.”

She was in her dormitory, one hand splayed across her mattress like a black spider. The window was a dark slash; the hallway beyond it hummed faintly with distant laughter and the odd scrape of late students. Tyler knelt beside her, hands clenched at his sides—wanting to close the distance, to touch her, but his torment persisted as he had yet to master the task. The urge in him was visible: a tautness in his shoulders, a heat that passed through the bond like animal pheromones.

“What—” She tried to say; the world leaned, a slow list to the left.

“You went after Bianca.” His eyes were dark, hard with something like guilt and budding anger, as his gaze sharpened on him with the memory of what he’d seen. “You pressed her about her mother and she didn’t want to talk. She hit you with her siren gift, Wednesday. Made you forget. I’m guessing she wiped the last few hours clean?”

“How do you know?” Her voice sounded too stiff in the room.

“I was watching through the tether.” He didn’t bother with softness. “I saw it all. You asked questions, she got hostile—then her voice. Whammied – or sirened, whatever you call it.”

His jaw worked; the tether hummed like a plucked wire. He was angry. Angry he hadn’t been able to protect her.

Wednesday couldn’t focus on that. His words sank like stones in the pit of her stomach. Heat flared up her neck—not the physical blaze Tyler felt, but a cold, furious ignition behind her ribs.

She looked across the dorm room to Enid’s colorful half, finding her bed empty, only belatedly remembering that her roommate was no longer spending her nights at Ophelia Hall. Now, because of Enid’s potential designation as an Alpha, she spent the evenings camped out in the lupin cages on the east grounds. The room had been strangely quiet in Enid’s absence, but for the moment Wednesday was thankful she didn’t have Enid’s questions compounding on top of her own.

“I respect Bianca’ skill,” Wednesday said, each word measured with a hard-edge calm, though fury threaded through the admission. “She’s— become an ally recently. That does not excuse assault.” Her hands curled at her side until the knuckles whitened. “Using her power on me—on my mind—will not go unanswered.”

Tyler’s mouth tightened. “There’s more,” he said. He exhaled, hard. “Before that—earlier today—you cornered Ajax. You worked him over. He cracked under your— ah, resourceful methods of interrogation.” Tyler’s voice dropped. “He told you Bianca’s been hiding her mother here at Nevermore. In the burned wing. Gabrielle escaped that Morning Song cult. Bianca’s been keeping her stashed away here while the heat dies down.”

The room tilted again, not from vertigo this time but from the sudden, cruel neatness of it all. Wednesday’s hands tightened further. The burned wing—secrets behind walls that had already been reduced to ash in Thornhill’s attack last year — she looked to Tyler and felt the thinnest flinch as she recalled the events. Wednesday didn’t focus on that. There was no use crying over spilled blood.

But a cult’s refugee hidden under the school’s nose was an interesting complication.

“It may be time to turn up the flames,” she announced, darkly.

She rose, a dark, purposeful motion—then the tether yanked and Tyler’s voice, urgent, checked her.

“Wait.” He sounded stern, steady, which irritated her just as everybody always irritated her when they tried to slow her down. “As much as I love seeing your homicidal tendencies come out to play, we need a plan. Wait until nightfall, at least, so I can back you up in person.”

Wednesday’s mouth twisted. “Why would I do that? Through the tether, you’re immune to Bianca’s gifts. In person, you’re another patsy.”

“In person, I can protect you,” he countered heatedly. “I can intercept. I can—” He swallowed. “If she lashes out again, I can be there. Not just a useless voice in your head.”

She studied the air where his form hovered, felt the undercurrent of something animal and impatient in him—the Hyde and the man braided together. In the tether she’d felt every tiny hunger, every restless itch, and she knew how the distance gnawed at him. She also knew Bianca’s siren trick could wipe minds like someone's hand wiped chalk from a board; being physically present mattered.

“As the Hyde?” she asked, the sarcasm brittle. “You want the Hyde to stand between a siren and me?”

“As the Hyde if I must,” Tyler admitted. “But as me, first. I can keep the Hyde from doing anything— too loud.”

Her shoulders rose, a small incredulous denial. Tyler’s thinking was infuriatingly corrupt, driven by his innate and instinctual desire to protect her so fiercely that it overruled logic. He could not protect her in person against a siren’s call. There was a moment—thin and fragile—where something almost like grief brushed through the tether, quick and cold. She didn’t return it with any melodrama. Instead she thought of the cold, efficient plan she preferred to implement.

The missing hours she’d lost gnawed at Wednesday—the vulnerability of blankness where memory should be—a personal insult. Curiosity was a poisonous thing she hadn’t allowed herself to indulge much when it came to Bianca’s mother; now it buzzed under her skin, relentlessly.

“We need to know what Gabrielle knows about Ophelia,” she said, voice flat, then softer, a confession she hated to make even to him: “—and about Morning Song.”

Tyler’s tether thrummed agreement. “We wait. Nightfall, after curfew hours have the place locked tight. I’ll come find you. I’ll—” his voice snagged, vulnerable for half a breath, then tightened—“I’ll do whatever it takes.”

“You will only come so far with me,” Wednesday warned. “You’ll wait nearby while I speak to Bianca’s mother. We’ll go to the burned wing, and you will be present for that conversation only through the tether, but nearby enough that you may act if necessary. And if Bianca or her mother tries to erase my mind again—this time I will not be so placid.”

Tyler’s jaw tightened. “Good. In a few hours.”

She stood a long moment, feeling the aftershock of the siren’s interference ripple through her: the ache at the back of her skull, the raw tenderness of time lost, the cold certainty that someone here—someone she was considering more and more an ally —had chosen secrecy over alliance. It annoyed Wednesday to the marrow. She had been made to forget, temporarily, like someone sanded off the most recent scratches in a ledger. That humiliation burned.

“Where is Thing?” she demanded, suddenly.

She needed her right hand. When she walked across to his little apartment, she found a flyer sprawled on the table nearby. “Some of Your Parts” support group, a meeting in session for the same night. It seems Thing was otherwise preoccupied. Disappointing. She could have used his skills to find the other secret chamber that housed Gabrielle Barclay, but she had enough hints to get her started.

“Very well,” she said at last. “Prepare yourself. Bring those noise-cancelling headphones my father gave you. It’ll help block the siren’s call.”

He hesitated, then something almost tender—almost ridiculous—slipped through the tether, as if he were offering support and armor. “I’ll be ready.”

Wednesday did not say “thank you.” She didn’t need to. The tether hummed, a line of electricity between them. In the dark of that shared connection, she felt less alone—and strangely, for the first time in days, not quite so brittle. When she left to fetch a black jacket from her trunk—practical, no frippery—she threw one last look out the window at the lengthening shadows. Night would be their ally. And secrets, she thought with a cold little thrill, would be their prey.

The woods at night were heavy with thick silence, the moon pale as bone above the spires of Nevermore. Wednesday stepped through the shadows.

A flicker stirred at her shoulder—the tether alerting her—then Tyler emerged from it in real life, flesh and bone, his face taut with tension. She only had a beat to get a glimpse of him, dressed all in black, all new clothes provided to him by the Addams. Before she could appreciate the make and fit of them, he’d crossed the space between them in three long strides and kissed her like he hadn’t seen her in months, not days, certainly not hours.

It wasn’t so much a kiss as a feverish claim, an urgent demanding bid to take over her entire focus and blot out everything else. His fingers gripped her throat and tilted her chin up, his interlopping tongue pushing past the barriers of her lips with knowing damning authority; it was the kind of move that threatened her airways in several different manners — if he moved with the wrong pressure, fingers wrapped around her throat, her mouth preoccupied with his. It sent blood rushing to her cheeks. A devotional devouring. Fierce, unguarded, as though every hour apart had gnawed at him like persistent unchecked hunger.

Before she was even quite aware of it, he had her pinned up against a tree, his thigh slotted deliciously between hers, a sudden urgent pressure that spiked with sin and awareness.

Wednesday tried to quell the suddenness of his urgent need, the overwhelming heat—then the tether betrayed her again, her body yielding before her mind could catch up. Her pulse thrummed traitorously. Her hands curled into his shirt before she remembered herself, before she broke the kiss with a sharp breath.

“This is neither the time nor the place,” she said, flat, though her voice came quieter and breathier than she intended.

Tyler’s lips curved, though his eyes were stormy. “I know. But I had to.”

The truth was, she’d wanted it too. The weight of his proximity felt almost unbearable now, her attraction to him sharper with the clarity. But there were answers to exhume, and distractions—even ones that made her heart stumble—had to be put to death.

Together they slipped through the shattered halls of the burned wing. The air smelled of soot and mildew, walls blackened with scars still young enough for them to remember keenly. Jagged beams jutted like bones piercing decaying skin, and every step crunched brittle ash underfoot. Wednesday’s gaze lingered on the charred ceilings, the collapsed rafters, the ruin. Tyler had helped Thornhill wreck this place, she thought, cold and cutting. He had been her hand, her monster, when Nevermore had nearly fallen. The fire, the smoke, the destruction—it was his mark on this scorched school.

She turned her head just enough to glimpse him walking a pace behind, silent. His outline was a darker shadow in the fire-scarred wing, his expression carved into something she couldn’t quite read. How did he feel, moving again through this graveyard of his own creation? The tether pulsed with the steady beat of his presence, but it did not give her guilt, not tonight. Had he learned to bury it so deep even she couldn’t feel it? Or was he holding it all back, keeping the Hyde’s shame and rage behind a clenched jaw?

She cut to the marrow instead. “You’re staying at the Gardener’s Cottage now. Thornhill’s old cottage.”

The name made him flinch. He tried to hide it, but she saw. “You always call her Thornhill. Even though you know that wasn’t her real name.”

“To address her as Laurel Gates affords her a respect I do not wish to bestow,” Wednesday declared. “Let her be remembered for the lie.”

He grunted. “Wish it was that easy for me.” His voice dipped lower, ragged. “It—it doesn’t matter, the cottage. I didn’t see her there much. She kept meetings with me in town. But—” His throat closed on the word. “There were things left behind. Notebooks, plans. In boxes your parents set aside. Your mom actually caught me going through them.”

Wednesday paused mid-stride. “And?”

“She advised me that some wounds were better left closed.” He poorly attempted to mimic Morticia’s calm cadence, but it came out bitter. “That picking at them only makes the rot spread. Something about a festering wound never dies. I don’t know. Your mom is a different sort of intense than you, but I can see the relationship.”

Wednesday was almost insulted. And though she would never admit it aloud, she found herself oddly soothed by the thought of her mother noticing Tyler’s pain enough to intervene. Her parents’ form of care was peculiar, wrapped in shadows and sharpened with knives, but it was real. Concern in the Addams family was not cooed; it was wielded. She had never been good at receiving it—but tonight, she felt the faintest curl of gratitude.

Still, she knew Thornhill—Laurel Gates—had left Tyler with wounds no cottage, no advice, no Addams reassurance could cauterize. She had been the worst kind of master: cloying, controlling, a grotesque parody of a mother. And Tyler, abandoned by his father and haunted by the ghost of a mother he barely remembered, had been ripe for the chains she fastened around him.

“You’d tell me, wouldn’t you,” Wednesday asked quietly, “if staying there proved intolerable?”

His lips parted, then tightened. “It’s not that bad. It’s just— there’s baggage. And I—” He exhaled sharply, severing the thought before it broke him open.

But the tether told her everything. Fear. Resentment. The wound of a servant who had killed his master, but still carried the weight of the collar around his neck.

For once, Wednesday slowed. Her hand fell against his, precise, deliberate. Pale fingers curled over his knuckles, cool where he burned hot. It wasn’t comfort—she had no use for such frivolity. It was a promise. Silent, binding. I will never be like her. I will never hold you with a chain. His breath stuttered out, something in his shoulders loosening as though he’d set down half a century of weight. Through the tether, his turmoil dimmed—not gone, but eased by a fraction.

She withdrew her hand as abruptly as she’d placed it, before sentiment could linger. Her dark eyes caught the wall ahead—an old portrait, half-charred, clinging stubbornly to plaster. The frame’s hinges were not purely ornamental, and there were signs of recent movement, the ash displaced. Wednesday pressed her fingers against the scorched edge. It groaned like something long forgotten and swung outward, revealing a narrow passage cut deep into stone.

“The hideout,” Tyler breathed.

Wednesday turned toward him. “Stay here.”

The tether thrummed as though recoiling, and he bit out. “I don’t like this.”

“Regardless, you will stay.” She drew herself up, all firm authority. “You’ll accompany me through the tether. If there is real trouble, you can come in person, headphones on — but only when you can assure yourself safety from any siren’s command. But until then—you stay back. Unseen. Bianca and her mother won’t harm me.”

“You don’t know that,” he said, voice low, edged.

“I do,” she replied. “Bianca’s secrecy is an act of desperation, not violence. She’s protecting something. And I mean to know what.”

The tether stretched taut between them, vibrating with his eagerness to intervene, his fury at standing still. But at last he gave a short, jagged nod, though it felt like breaking bone. Even as she turned away, she felt him coil tighter. Tyler’s jaw clenched, the tether carrying the echo of the grind of his teeth, the restless coil of his shoulders. The Hyde in him stirred like something chained too long, prowling, pressing against its cage. His presence through the tether pulsed hot and sharp, like claws dragging against the inside of her ribs.

It struck her then: part of his barely contained frustration wasn’t merely about her. It wasn’t even just the bond. It was the confinement. He had been too long caged, too long forced to muzzle the darker half of himself. For a creature like the Hyde, denial was not discipline—it was starvation. He was restless not just because she was walking into danger, but because some primal part of him longed to be unleashed. And Wednesday, who understood monsters better than she understood people, recognized the cruelty of it. She was not so naïve as to believe she could excise that part of him. Nor was she so hypocritical as to demand it. Hyde and Tyler were indivisible; to deny one was to mutilate the other.

She realized with clinical precision that she would have to find a remedy. A way to let the beast breathe without letting it consume itself. She was not so cruel a master as to starve her monster. Her lips pressed into a line, her thoughts scalpel-sharp. She would not allow Laurel Gates’ mistake to become hers. Tyler was hers, tethered by choice and circumstance both—and she would see that all of him, man and monster alike, was kept alive.

The narrow passage exhaled stale air as Wednesday slipped inside. The stone corridor was tight, forcing her shoulders inward. The tether hummed behind her, Tyler’s watchful presence pressing close though his body remained beyond the portrait. Her boots struck stone, measured and deliberate, until the passage opened into a dim chamber. Lantern-light flickered against soot-stained walls. At its center sat Gabrielle Barclay, her beauty aged into something brittle, haunted. Beside her stood Bianca—chin high, arms folded.

“Wednesday,” Bianca hissed, turning sharply. “You shouldn’t be here.”

Wednesday’s gaze was flat. “And yet I am.” She stepped closer. “Your siren tricks were wasted effort. Try it again, and it will be equally useless.”

Bianca’s jaw tightened, confusion warred with distrust, but she seemed to realize there was no point in further obfuscation. She gave a reluctant nod, stepping aside to reveal her mother more fully. “Fine. You caught me. She’s been here. I’ve been keeping her safe from the fallout. You’ve read the papers. I don’t need to tell you that Morning Song tore itself apart, and if anyone knew she was free—”

“I don’t care about that,” Wednesday cut in.

Bianca’s chin trembled; a tremor of fear ran through her frame so small and human that Wednesday tried to catalog it with the same clinical interest she reserved for autopsies, but there was something too noxious about the fear. It struck Wednesday in a surprisingly soft place, her underbelly, where she took umbrage against anyone that took advantage of outcasts and their kind.

Her gaze pivoted to Gabrielle. “Tell me about my Aunt Ophelia.”

Gabrielle’s head snapped up as if struck. For a second she looked young again, the youthful beauty that the records hinted at—wide-eyed and unmoored. Then her shoulders curled inward, protectively, as though bracing for something to pull her apart.

“Ophelia?” Gabrielle echoed, voice small. “Ophelia Frump?”

Wednesday nodded once. “You were roommates before she was committed to Willow Hill.”

Gabrielle flinched so hard the lantern light trembled against her cheek. Silence hung between them—thick, accusing. Then the guilt broke out of her like a fever. “She was a—good friend,” she muttered, as if the adjective could steady her.

Wednesday’s eyes pinched, cold and relentless. “I’ve dug up graves and pried at long-buried things. I will do worse to get at the truth.” The threat sat flat and clinical in the air; there was no performative cruelty here, only a promise of consequence. “Tell me what happened to my aunt.”

Gabrielle closed her mouth, pressed her palms together against her knees, and tried to hide behind practiced calm. “I don’t—there’s nothing—”

“Don’t preen for me,” Wednesday snapped.

“Okay, that’s enough,” Bianca tried to step in.

Wednesday’s tone bent towards her. “Her hands are trembling. Her pupils are singing hymns. She has the look of someone arguing with their own conscience—and it is clearly losing.”

Bianca could deny none of this, though it was clear her confusion warred with her desire to defend her mother against everything. Wednesday’s words exposed Gabrielle’s attempt to deflect even more. Gabrielle’s grip went so tight her knuckles turned white. She let out a small, frustrated sound and finally, as though surrendering to a tide, she whispered truths long buried.

“All my sins appear to be catching up to me at once,” Gabrielle said.

“Then,” Wednesday pressed, “Confess.”

“I was forced,” she said at last, the words thin and ragged. “Ophelia—she had a vision. Of Morning Song. Of what it would become. She saw the leader. She saw the chains they meant to put on Outcasts. She said—she said the cult would bind people with terror.” Her voice hitched; she swallowed. “He made me use my voice against her. I sang. I soothed. I silenced her.” Tears pricked the corners of her eyes; they were not theatrical, only earnest, tidal grief. “She tried to warn them, and instead—because of me—she was broken. After her boyfriend disappeared, the rest was easy. They had reasons. They said it was for the good of everyone if she just went away.”

Bianca’s face went raw, disbelief and revulsion warring there. “You—you did what?” Her mouth pressed into a thin line as if to staunch the horror.

Gabrielle’s fingers twisted. “I had no choice. I was too young. He coerced me—threats, promises. He made me believe I was protecting the future.” Her stare dropped to the floor, all the old shame pressing small and sharp in her chest. Then she looked up at Wednesday, and the remorse was a live thing. “I’m sorry. You have no idea how sorry. Ophelia had been— she’d been a good friend to me.”

Wednesday leaned the tiniest degree forward, the motion minimal but all appetite. “Who forced you?” she asked, voice smooth and cold.

Bianca’s jaw hardened, as she answered for her mother. “My stepfather, Gideon Sterling.” The name fell like lead. She turned towards her mother, confused. “But I thought you didn’t meet him until years later?”

Gabrielle’s face went ashen; she shook her head in a small, frantic negation. “That — Gideon was later. He pushed. He convinced many of the cause— but he wasn’t the architect. Morning Song is older—darker—than Gideon.”

The chamber narrowed with the weight of the confession. The idea of a hidden hand—someone capable of coercing a young siren to turn her song into a weapon against a friend—shifted the whole angle of the story from small-town maleficence to deliberate, patient corruption. A mastermind—someone older than the cult’s visible faces—loomed in the corners of their talk, a puppeteer whose strings had been pulled through too many lives.

Gabrielle swallowed, sounded younger than Wednesday had expected. “There was someone else. Someone who had power beyond the established parish head—” Gabrielle’s eyes found Wednesday’s. “You have to understand, I never wanted to hurt anyone.”

“Clearly, that didn’t stop you,” Wednesday returned, flatly.

Gabrielle flinched and fell silent.

It would have been easy to despise her—after all, Gabrielle had been the hand that pushed Ophelia Frump into madness, the voice that had smoothed her warnings into whispers and delivered her into Willow Hill. But things were not that straightforward. Ophelia had been failed by many more than one individual — more than one Frump woman, too. To lay the blame entirely at Gabrielle’s feet was equally an injustice. Besides, Wednesday saw no cruelty in Gabrielle’s face, she only saw weakness in her trembling frame. She saw a woman carved hollow by her own decisions, haunted by decades of silence and complicity. It was a pitiful sight. Gabrielle had been a weapon forced into use before she’d even understood the blood she was drawing.

And in her own way, Wednesday understood that kind of violation because she’d been forced to confront it — with Tyler. To be made into someone’s instrument, someone’s pawn, to have your will bent until it was indistinguishable from obedience. She had seen Tyler’s shackles.

She did not forgive Gabrielle. Forgiveness was a luxury Wednesday never indulged. But she did pity her.

“Names,” Wednesday demanded, soft as a verdict. “And dates. How exactly they coerced you. Each lie feeds a larger one, and I intend to trace them all back to the throat.”

Wednesday had a throat to slit.

Gabrielle nodded, crumpled and grateful to be absolved by action more than forgiveness. Bianca looked torn apart by it all, her hands clenched at her sides, an animal primed to guard. And Tyler’s tether tightened—a taut line of promise and threat braided together. Before Wednesday could press the blade deeper, the tether jolted hot—Tyler’s panic. Then the portrait door creaked open, and Tyler stepped in, flesh and blood, a pair of clunky headphones clamped tight over his ears.

“Someone’s coming,” he said, urgent. “Through the halls. Close.”

Bianca cursed under her breath, snapping to her mother’s side. Gabrielle clutched her daughter’s hand, fear stark in her eyes.

“We’ll meet again,” Wednesday said, voice flat, commanding. She turned her obsidian gaze on Bianca. “If you want help—if you want your mother safe—you’ll have to trust me. Secrets are corpses, Bianca. They rot faster than you think.”

Bianca’s lips pressed thin, but she gave the faintest nod. “Later,” she whispered.

They disbanded quickly. Bianca pulled Gabrielle deeper into the hideout’s shadows. Tyler touched Wednesday’s shoulder, solid and grounding, and the tether hummed sharp with his need to keep her moving. Together they slipped back through the charred passage, vanishing into the dark before the intruder arrived.

While Wednesday used the stairs, Tyler had to scale up the stone wall of Ophelia Hall to gain entry. His body moved with the economy of a predator—fluid, silent, lethal. Fingers dug into the carved stone; boots found footholds in narrow cracks. Within moments, he’d hauled himself up by the window ledge until he swung over with barely a sound. Wednesday was already waiting, her dormitory cast in low light, watching him as he reached her window, pried open the black-painted frame, and entered.

Most people were distracted by the cacophony of colors and distractions in Enid's half of the room. Tyler barely flickered a glance in that direction. Instead, his eyes flicked over her side of the room, taking it in—the groaning shelf of books on the wall, the neat rows of labeled specimen jars, the cello standing sentinel in the corner.

He smirked faintly, then flopped heavily onto her bed, perching at the edge of the quilt like he owned the space.

“Comfortable?” Wednesday asked coolly, unimpressed.

Tyler leaned back on his elbows, gaze hot, predatory. “Not yet,” he drawled. “Getting there.”

She arched a brow as he reached for her, the gesture deliberate. She didn’t resist when he tugged her closer, her boots clicking against the floor until she stood at the edge of the bed, framed neatly by the cage of his knees. The tether thrummed—alive, insistent—with his intent, his hunger. It poured through her like a second pulse, relentless. He radiated impatience and desire, the heat of it spilling into her bones with far more potency than she deemed acceptable. Teenage boys had never been a vice of hers; their sweat-slick desperation was beneath her notice. And yet Tyler Galpin, absurdly, remained her lone Achilles’ heel. A flaw in her design.

Tyler’s eyes narrowed, darkly amused, as if feeling a whisper of her thoughts.

Still, she allowed it. Allowed him to close the breath of space between them. His mouth found hers with a rough eagerness, a press that burned with the charge of days denied. Fever-hot lips claimed her cool stillness, testing the edges of her restraint. His hand curled firm at her hip, claiming a hold before she had time to marshal protest. The tether flared. Desire throbbed from him into her bloodstream, carried like venom. Wednesday’s own body betrayed her in kind—the subtle, traitorous tilt forward, the way her fingers twitched as though itching to seize his jaw, to drag him closer still.

It was maddening, this imbalance. That her willpower—the one fortress no curse, no cult, no mortal enemy had ever breached—should fray beneath the simple press of his lips.

She let him feel her answer, let him imagine he was devouring her protests—yet she did not pull away.

And then—tap-tap-tap.

Thing scuttled up onto the desk, perching like an uninvited babysitter.

Tyler groaned into her mouth, dragging a hand down his face with exasperation. “Seriously?”

Even Wednesday’s composure slipped. Her lips quirked the faintest fraction downward—the Addams equivalent of a scowl. “Your timing is abysmal,” she told the hand.

Thing, predictably, ignored her, fingers gesturing with the confidence of one who’d interrupted far worse. Given he had been with Morticia and Gomez through their adolescent years in Nevermore, Wednesday was certain of that. Thing gestured insistently toward the small table in the corner, and Wednesday finally realized what had him in a tizzy. Upon it sat a vase of black roses, their petals velvet-dark, and a folded note propped beneath them.

“You have a secret admirer?” Tyler muttered, his tone laced with an edge. He was trying for sarcasm, but the tether betrayed him—a quick stab of real jealousy, sharp as a knife, that made Wednesday want to roll her eyes. “Dead flowers suit you better anyway,” he muttered, under his breath.

Wednesday rose and crossed the room, her pale fingers reaching for the roses, already suspecting. “If this is some boy’s pitiful attempt to invite me to the Gala—” she fumed, tone ominous enough that Tyler flashed her a pleased look.

Thing scuttled forward and pressed the note into her hand, and the moment her skin brushed both the crisp paper and the hand’s cool fingers, the world ripped sideways—

It wasn’t a vision so much as a storm. A litany, a flood, a kaleidoscope of memories not her own and futures that hadn’t yet happened. Wednesday gasped, spine arching as images detonated across her mind. Ophelia Frump. Young, hair spilling loose, laughter spilling even freer, her hand twined with Isaac Night’s in the gardens of Nevermore. The vision crackled with color, with heat, with the fever of young love that cared for nothing else but itself—reckless, consuming, alive. Then—Ophelia again. Older. Gaunter. Her face carved with the scars of Willow Hill, but her eyes lit still with the embers of that same fire. She clutched Isaac against her as though the world could not prise them apart.

And Isaac— gray-skinned. Lips tinged blue. His body animated but not fully alive. A zombie.

Slurp.

He was John Doe from Willow Hill; the corpse beneath the Skull Tree all along. The vision fractured—Isaac clawing his way out from beneath the roots of the old gnarled tree, mud clinging to his hands, his dead eyes rolling open. He had been buried decades ago beneath Nevermore, forgotten, only to rise again.

Now reunited, Ophelia and Isaac were feral in their devotion. Bonnie and Clyde, but stitched together with rot and ruin. Their love burned as brightly as ever, only sharpened into something carnivorous and infinitely more dangerous.

Wednesday saw Isaac tear open skulls, gnash and swallow brains, desperate to piece himself back into wholeness.

She saw Ophelia’s fury turn red and wild as she stabbed Judy Stonehearst over and over, shrieking with the release of twenty years of captivity and pain. Blood stained her aunt’s face as she ransacked Judy’s belongings until her fingers closed on something small—precious. A necklace. A talisman. Obsidian, carved into a pendant shaped like an O. Even in the dream, Wednesday’s own fingers clenched instinctively over her own necklace, the one Morticia had given her, said to symbolize their bond. She knew it instantly—Aztec obsidian. A sight-talisman. A tool of power, of vision. Ophelia had one, too. It had been her weapon, her anchor, all along. One she had reclaimed from Judy Stonehearst after her murder.

Then—the vision soured and descended further into madness. The air thickened, choking.

The future.

Ophelia and Isaac stood over a corpse.

Tyler’s corpse.

His chest unmoving. His body slack in the dirt. Isaac’s undead eyes shifted, glinting with something almost regretful, almost annoyed at the necessity. Then his cold hand pulled Ophelia away from the body, guiding her as though their love demanded no pause, no hesitation. The implication was clear. Brutal. Tyler was fated to die at their hands.

The vision ripped her back into herself. Wednesday’s knees had already buckled, her body recovering from the last of her seizures, and black tears had painted down her cheeks in hot trails. She would have collapsed to the floor if not for Tyler. He’d caught her—he always caught her—his arms firm around her trembling frame, his voice frantic with questions, with fear, with her name.

But her gaze had already dropped to the roses. Black, their petals dry, curling. The folded note burned in her palm like a brand.

Her fingers shook as she unfolded it. The script curled elegantly across the page:

To my avenging little angel:
be seeing you soon.
—O & I.

Chapter Text

The air in the room thickened, heavy with the aftertaste of Wednesday’s confession.

She had delivered the vision’s details with the same clinical sharpness she wielded dissecting a cadaver—each fact placed with exacting precision, each syllable scrubbed free of indulgence. And yet, the tremor in her hand as she spoke betrayed her. She had steadied it with sheer force of will, but Tyler had noticed. He always seemed to notice, a facet she would have pinned upon the tether if he hadn’t always demonstrated an unsettling ability to read her even through her carefully constructed facades from the first day they met.

The image of his corpse lingered in her mind’s eye like smoke that refused to disperse. She had seen him sprawled in the dirt, her aunt and his uncle standing over him as if fate had always intended it so.

She steadied herself on the edge of the desk and forced the quaver out of her voice.

“Thing,” she said. Her fingers twitched toward him, and the loyal hand scrambled closer, fingers splayed in readiness. “Go to my mother. Tell her everything—about the roses, the note,” her words thinned, her tongue dragging reluctantly across them. “What I saw. About Tyler and his uncle. About Aunt Ophelia.”

Thing hesitated, tapping twice on her wrist as though in protest, still worried about the after effects of her visions, but now was no time to linger over petty concerns.

Wednesday’s dark eyes snapped toward him. “Do as I say.” A pause, and then she admitted, quieter, “Do you not think that Mother would prefer to know about her sister immediately?”

It was heavy handed manipulation, but it worked. That convinced him, finally. When Thing scuttled away, the room sank into quiet again. Wednesday swiped at her face, but Tyler had already done the work, his thumb brushing away the black streaks while she’d still been reeling. She hated the tenderness of it, and yet—she didn’t. Not entirely.

Now, standing across from her, Tyler had his arms folded over his chest, saying nothing of the revelations. He loomed tall and rigid, every line of him stiff with the effort of control, the tether humming with feelings he couldn’t disguise.

“It’s getting worse,” he told her. “The toll these visions are taking on your body. This time you were out for nearly ten minutes.”

She said nothing to this. There was nothing to say. It was true. Her body felt significantly worse after each and every successive vision. Nevertheless, her face wore its mask—indifference, smoothed over into something meant to look unshaken—but she was aware her fists were clenched so tight the blood had been wrung from her knuckles.

When his gaze finally caught hers, it lasted only a heartbeat, but the bond made it thunder through her veins. His fear flared hot, jagged—not only for his own doomed end but sharper still for her, for the cost each vision wrought from her body. His mouth curved with that familiar concerned expression, the ghost of kismet understanding that had once charmed her at a coffee counter, but Wednesday saw the cracks.

He went quiet for a long moment, then he reached for her, pulling her closer. “I won’t let it happen,” he muttered finally, low and sharp. “I don’t care if he’s my uncle. I’ll kill him before he touches me. Before he touches you.”

She did not soften or sharpen, but she didn’t turn away either. Her eyes held his, unblinking, dissecting. “I need to clean up,” she muttered at last, moving toward the adjoining bathroom, as though sheer ritual could scrub away the vision’s aftertaste.

Tyler followed.

She half-expected his usual sharp hunger, the magnetic pull that simmered always between them—but what came was gentler at first. When she started the shower, he moved behind her until she turned toward him. Tyler’s hands were steady, almost too steady, as he undressed her. As though he’d forced every ounce of his usual appetite into restraint.

“That’s not necessary,” she murmured, her voice even, her gaze unblinking as she stripped herself naked with the same efficiency as she always did.

He took his cue from her and began to disrobe himself. He discarded his jeans as she pulled off hers. The buttons she’d undone weren’t preludes to passion, but a clean efficiency, something to anchor restless fingers that didn’t know how else to move. When the last of their clothes fell away, he guided her beneath the spray with a touch so light it may as well have been spectral.

She hated that.

“Kiss me,” she told him, a clean simple command.

He obeyed without hesitation, and she noted with perverse satisfaction how quickly he accepted orders when there were ones he wanted to follow anyway. Their mouths met, deliberate and slow, her back pressed against the cold hinge of the glass door until she stepped underneath the spray of the shower and he pushed her further to the wall. The contrast was striking: the chill of tile against her spine, the molten heat of his body pressing forward, lips parting with hers in a rhythm not unlike music.

He anticipated her, moved in concert with her own movements, having learned her with unsettling accuracy. He may not have been a bona fide genius like his uncle, but he was a quick study.

Steam curled thickly through the bathroom, clinging to the glass and tiling, blurring the world into a haze. The water slicked his curls against his forehead, rolling in rivulets down the ridges of his body. Droplets traced along the sharp lines of his shoulders, cut clean over the broad plane of his chest, over the many scars that now littered it, and slid over the tight muscle of his abdomen and below.

Her hands knew the precise topography of instruments and weapons both —the span of octaves, the pitch of a scream, the leap of intervals, the heft of a well-balanced sword, the exact pressure needed to coax harmony out of ivory and string. But she could not figure out what made Tyler’s hand so singularly special, the feel of them different from everyone else's. The ridges of his knuckles, the faint curl of hair at the base of his fingers, the warmth radiating from him into her skin. Her hands were often cold bloodless things, but she not only allowed his warmth to seep into her palms, she savored it. Cataloging the small details about him in this moment as if it were a resource she could later extract and study.

His fingertips ghosted over her shoulders, sweeping away the streaks of black tears that the water hadn’t already claimed. She waited for him to lean in, to claim the heat he so often burned with—but instead his jaw clenched, his eyes storm-dark and reverent. Each movement was deliberate, as if she were something breakable. His hand lingered in her hair, careful as he rinsed, the tether a low thrum of his unease.

The visions frightened him more than he’d ever admit aloud.

Then, in a single bleeding second, the mood shifted. She felt his hand at her breasts, squeezing gently at first, then harshly enough to make her eyes fly up to meet him. “Tyler,” she called, pitched lower than her normal cadence.

His name said in that tone did something to him, propelling him into action. Pupils dilated, expression dark. He didn't bother with much preamble. Just slid down her body and pressed her thighs apart. Before she could say anything, she felt the first pass of his tongue. Her back hit the tiled wall with a muffled thump as he licked her clean open, circling her clit, sparking sensation through her with every sweep of his tongue.

She'd dreamed of this in their time apart, never quite fully confident if it were her dreams or his that she was feeling. Woken sticky between her legs, bursting with need, ghost touches lingering across her body.

But the dreams were a fraction of this.

The sight of him now—his wet curls, head bowed low between her thighs, his mouth closing in on where she was most sensitive, the planes of his face lit with feral reverence. His eyes, half-glazed and heavy with possession, flicked upward to her between licks, and the eye contact lanced through her like a knife.

He paid her groaning protests no mind, tongue laving against her clit eagerly. Wednesday’s knuckles whitened in his hair in an attempt to pull him away, her chest caving around a pitiful sound that she could hardly recognize from herself— but Tyler appeared devoid of mercy, bereft of appeasement. She felt the flush claw its way up her cheeks, foreign heat rising, cracking her composure, and she broke apart under his tongue in only a few minutes.

When she pulled away, gasping for air, he followed. “You’re fine, I’ve got you,” he shushed her.

She wondered if he thought by saying it, it would make it true. She didn’t feel fine. She felt unmoored in more ways than she could count. Pressed her forehead against his shoulder, saw how he had to hunch over to accommodate her because he was so much taller, felt him cup her face in both hands. He coaxed her out of her shell with muted little kisses and then a filthy tongue shoved down her throat.

Then, he took her against the tiled shower wall, and she felt the exact moment the Hyde took over.

Not physically, but mentally.

Her legs wrapped around his slim human waist, barely holding purchase, but it was the raw sensation of the Hyde’s hunger that she felt as he fucked her like he was suddenly angry about it. Greed leaked from his kisses like a spilled vein he could tear open with teeth, his kiss so messy she felt it glazed with a bit of primal madness. Teeth clacked against hers, not entirely a pleasing sensation, the lust in his beast’s belly rising to the surface. She felt flashes of it through the bond: the Hyde’s hunger, while his human hands wound around her hips and dug in, while he bent his legs to better angle his thrusts, a tongue shoving into her mouth so unceremoniously she could barely breathe.

There was no finesse at all. Straight to the point. An urgent rutting against a showered wall.

It was over quickly, maybe even too quickly. The urgent nature of it left little restraint, and even as he leaked down her thighs, even as the shower washed most of it away, she could feel Tyler returning to his full control.

The steam still clung to the glass when Tyler shut off the water. He reached for a towel, his hands careful, gentler than they had any right to be after that performance, drawing it over her shoulders and down her arms.

After she stepped out of the shower, Wednesday almost didn’t recognize the girl in the mirror — hair matted wet and disheveled, hips red from the grip that had been wrapped around them. She almost blushed from the sight, hoping to blame it on the exertion or the wet humid heat, the extenuating circumstance. Anything other than a base blush. Behind her, Tyler looked far too pleased by her surprise, his arm securing the towel around her ribs and the other forcing her to keep her eyes locked on their reflection. He only let go of her to tilt her chin upward, to claim her lips again in a kiss.

His chest rose and fell in an easy rhythm, steadied now after the storm, but there was something restless still in the way he looked back at her through the mirror. Not with hunger, not in this moment—but with something heavier, something that weighed against her ribs. As though standing there, drenched and raw before her, he needed proof. That she was alive, whole, undeniable his. The possession should have chafed, but she found she liked it perhaps all the more for its base instincts. For Wednesday, in all her discipline, could not deny the headiness of it. The sight of him—equally drenched, scarred, unflinching—was a reminder she hadn’t asked for, and couldn’t quite look away from — if she was his, he was most certainly hers.

When he draped the towel around her hair, rough curls falling over his brow as he leaned closer, she caught his expression— stripped bare of his usual bravado. It unnerved her more than any Hyde’s snarl ever had. The bond pulsed between them, a current of emotions that neither could hide from the other — fear and defiance, his vow to live pressed against her unspoken vow to keep him so. Neither gave it voice. Words weren’t necessary. The silence between them carried it better than speech ever could.

Afterwards, they collapsed onto her too small bed, the quilt drawn up around them, The dark wrapped around them, broken only by the faint glow from Enid’s fairy lights strung across the far side of the room.

She thought she would hate it, sharing her bed. He was all heat, searing, restless limbs; she was a shard of ice, cadaver-cold by nature, still and immobile. But when he pulled her against him, the contrast was not suffocating. It was grounding. His warmth sank into her bones, a steady hum against her perpetual chill, and she found herself yielding, just slightly, to the closeness.

The tether quieted for once, no jagged edges or gnawing hunger—just a weightless ease. Wednesday’s eyes stayed open in the dark for the longest time, fixed on the ceiling. She told herself she was cataloguing the sensation, nothing more.

But the truth coiled in her chest, undeniable: she did not hate it.

She did not hate the warmth.

The dawn light bled gray through the window when Wednesday stirred, the warmth of Tyler’s presence beside her already gone. A glance told her enough—he’d scaled down the tower before sunrise, leaving no trace except for the faint hum of the tether that still connected them. She straightened and rose just as the crystal ball on her desk pulsed faintly, its surface shimmering with Morticia’s pale reflection. Her mother’s face appeared, soft yet sharp, every inch the poised matriarch.

“Thing delivered the note,” Morticia said without preamble. The edge of her voice betrayed her urgency. “And told me of your— vision.”

Wednesday clasped her hands, her tone clipped. “You mean the vision where my aunt and her resurrected paramour stood over Tyler’s corpse? Yes, I assumed he would run tattling and you’d have some words about it.”

Nevermind that she had told Thing to tell her mother all the details.

Morticia’s eyes narrowed faintly, though she did not rise to the bait. “How are you feeling? Do you feel drained in the aftermath? Are the side effects of the visions increasing?”

“Nothing I cannot handle,” Wednesday dismissed.

“Careful, Wednesday. Your aunt pushed herself in much the same way and it cost her everything.”

“It cost her everything because no one listened to her,” Wednesday refuted. “I won’t allow the same to happen to me.”

Morticia paused. “Visions are notoriously unreliable, my little stormcloud. They cannot always be taken at face value. They twist, they exaggerate. Sometimes they outright conceal the truth. To act rashly upon them is folly.”

Wednesday’s gaze sharpened. “How amusing. After decades of negligence, now you attempt to protect your sister. Some might remark that this is the very definition of too little, too late.”

The barb landed. Morticia’s expression curdled, just slightly, the guilt flashing in her eyes before her composure reasserted itself. “Cruelty may be your armor, Wednesday, but even armor can rust.” Her voice softened, dangerous in its restraint. “I do not ask you to underestimate your aunt, nor to spare her. Only—show caution before judgment. Secrets can unravel the truth in ways even our abilities cannot predict.”

Wednesday leaned closer to the crystal, her face illuminated by its glow. Her tone was flat, merciless. “I show caution only when it serves me. And when it no longer does, judgment will be swift.”

Morticia studied her for a long moment, resigned. “Then take care that your judgment does not needlessly cause bloodshed, Wednesday. Despite your childhood dreams at Career Day, you are not an executioner.”

The light of the crystal dimmed, leaving only Wednesday’s reflection in its blackened glass. She stared at it for a beat longer, jaw clenched, before turning sharply away. She got up and readied in stiff silence, her fingers precise when she buttoned her uniform, her expression cool and composed despite the restless undertow that still tugged at her chest.

The door swung open, and Enid slipped in, flushed from the cold morning air, her hair a little mussed, her hoodie half-zipped. “Returned from the lupin cages again,” she sighed, tossing her bag onto her bed. “Another night, no transition. Thank God. I think I can maybe stop panicking about this whole alpha thing. I’m never going to lead the pack, and honestly? I’m okay with that.”

Wednesday gave her a brief, sidelong glance. “Congratulations. You’ve managed to fail at becoming an apex predator. A remarkable feat.”

Enid rolled her eyes, collapsing onto her bed. “And good morning to you, too.”

Wednesday turned back to the mirror, but her voice carried flatly across the room. “While you were fretting over whether you’d sprout dominance traits, I was receiving a death threat from beyond the grave.”

Enid sat up fast. “Wait—what?”

In clipped tones, Wednesday recounted the events of the night before: Bianca and her mother’s confession, the roses, the note in Ophelia’s hand, the visions of her aunt and Isaac Night, and the sight of Tyler’s corpse at their feet. She spoke with precision, but there was no mistaking the faint alarm that lingered beneath her words.

Enid’s eyes grew wider with each detail. “So— Tyler’s uncle, who’s been dead for decades, crawls back out as a zombie and immediately wants his nephew dead? That’s… weird? Beyond being next-level family dysfunction, it doesn’t make sense.”

“Agreed.” Wednesday’s voice was dry as bone. “And my aunt, reunited with her rotting beloved, now may gleefully aid him in murder and accessory. There are missing pieces to this decrepit picture.”

Enid chewed her lip, confusion clouding her face. “But why? Motive doesn’t vibe. I mean—if Isaac’s really his uncle, wouldn’t he want, I don’t know, to protect Tyler? Or at least leave him alone? Why go after him?”

Wednesday stilled, her fingers pausing at her collar. That was the very question she had been turning over and over in her mind since the vision released her. Her voice was low, measured. “I don’t have an answer. Yet.” She turned towards Enid, curious. “I’m surprised you care, though. You’ve made your feelings on the topic of Tyler clear.”

“That he’s a schizophrenic sociopath that isn’t worthy of your time or energy?” Enid bit out.

She met this with a cool, calculated assessment. “He meets neither of the clinical definitions of a schizophrenic or a sociopath,” Wednesday pointed out. “And much of what transpired in the prior year was beyond his control. You know he was groomed and controlled by Thornhill.”

Enid flinched, paling despite herself, all former bluster deflated with the reminder. “Yeah, okay.” She paused, then wagged an accusing finger. “But that doesn’t excuse the way he threw you out of a window and sent you into a two week coma!”

Wednesday permitted that, even if it had hardly merited much turmoil in the grand scheme of her own ethics. Most people didn’t operate on the same level of the Addam’s family when it came to mischief and murder attempts. “I’ve moved beyond that,” she told Enid, flatly.

“Yeah, and you may have, but it’s Best Friend Coding. I reserve the right to hold a grudge against him on your behalf until the end of time — or until he actually proves himself worthy of you. But like at this point that’ll require a miraculous feat.”

​​Wednesday paused, letting the thought root itself, a rare moment of allowance in her otherwise merciless mind. She understood it intimately—the strange alchemy of loyalty, where the wounds inflicted upon oneself could be endured with grim satisfaction, even cherished, but the slightest insult against someone she considered hers was intolerable.

Pugsley surfaced in her thoughts, her perennial experiment, her favorite subject of casual cruelty. He was hers to torment, to test, to sharpen her blades against. She had tied him to chairs, buried him alive, sent him sprinting down hallways pursued by torments of her own design—and all of it was done with the grim affection of an older sister who honed her craft through his suffering. But let another hand rise against him? That was sacrilege.

The swim team at Nancy Reagan High School had learned that lesson the hard way.

And so, in this moment, she permitted the thought: that holding onto a grudge for someone else’s sake was not only understandable — it was loyalty, in its most Addams form.

Enid was watching Wednesday, though, with that look of acute scrutiny. “I get it, though. He’s your boyfriend—”

“He is not,” Wednesday snapped.

She groaned. “Okay, fine — your significant other, or whatever. Tethered bond kinda makes it feel like you should have some label for him?”

“He is—” Wednesday declared, hesitating, “—my monster.”

Enid made a face. “Right. Anyway, he’s in your life. If he means that much to you, I guess that means— I can accept him, too.” She paused, thoughtful. “Capri said— she said I didn’t have to face this alpha business on my own. That my strength is in my pack. But the truth is… you are my pack, Wednesday.”

The words landed heavy, and irrefutably true.

She approached Enid. “I know you’re worried about the full moon. About turning into a wolf and staying that way if you do. You know if you do, you won’t be alone — I have no problem hunting you down to the ends of the Earth.”

“Promise?” Enid said, soft, smiling.

“Consider it an oath,” Wednesday returned.

The tether hummed faintly at her chest, Tyler’s distant presence in the back of her mind, curious about the fluctuating emotions he could feel arising within her. Enid had always inspired a singular curious blend of emotions Wednesday would rather not name, but she didn’t want Tyler to get any notions about her going soft. She closed her eyes for a beat, then snapped them open, dark and gleaming again.

That was when Principal Dort’s summons came, a sealed note slipped under her door.

By the time Wednesday had reached his office, she was already braced for tedium.

Inside, the air was thick with anticipation. Hester Frump sat in a high-backed chair, sharp-eyed and dressed in funeral black, her smile dry as dust. Morticia and Gomez flanked her, along with Pugsley.

“Ah, Wednesday,” Dort greeted, spreading his arms. “Just in time. I am pleased to announce a new partnership with the venerable Hester Frump, who has so generously agreed to invest in Nevermore’s future.”

Wednesday’s stare was cold, incredulous. “My grandmother would sooner exhume corpses for their jewelry than donate so much as a penny to this institution.”

Hester’s laugh was a low rasp. “You honor me, child. But perhaps you mistake my intent. This is no sentimental gift. It is a declaration. Since you seem determined to follow your mother’s footsteps—and your aunt’s, for that matter—” the binding yourself to monsters and obsessions went unsaid, but infinitely heard, “—I have concluded that no family heir is suitable to inherit my legacy. My investments will be in outcasts instead.”

Morticia’s lips pressed thin, but she held her poise. Gomez shifted uneasily.

Hester leaned back, smug. “Nevermore will change under my hand. Outcasts without true ability, like your father, will no longer have the privilege of entry. My funds will elevate only those of real talent.”

Wednesday’s silence was sharper than words. Inside, suspicion coiled cold and certain. Hester Frump, miser of misers, would never truly part with her wealth—not for spite, not for altruism. Not even as a threat against unwanted heirs. This was theater. A ploy — or something worse.

She turned on her heel and left without a word.

The halls of Nevermore were a hive of last-minute chaos before the Gala—fabric swatches flapping like wounded birds, girls squealing over imported Venetian lace, boys fumbling through rehearsed dancesteps. To Wednesday, it was background noise, meaningless. Her own steps were steady, deliberate, the calm before a storm.

From the shadows, Bianca stepped forward, her expression taut.

“Wednesday. We need to talk.”

Wednesday regarded her coolly. “If this is another insipid attempt to discuss feather trims, I’ll gladly impale myself on the nearest sharp object.”

Bianca’s jaw tightened. “This isn’t about the Gala. It’s about—” her voice dropped to a whisper, conspiratorial, “—my mother. About Dort.”

That earned Wednesday’s attention.

Bianca pulled her aside and leaned in, voice low. “He found us last night—me and my mom—in the burned wing. Only he isn’t who he says he is. When he took me back to his residence, I found my stepfather. Gideon Sterling.”

Wednesday’s brows arched, razor-sharp.

Bianca’s eyes burned, equal parts fury and raw fear. “Gideon wasn’t the mastermind. He was just the figurehead. Dort is the real one. The conman behind it all. He is the one who built Morning Song.”

For the first time since the visions, Wednesday stopped moving. Dort. The man who had smiled the politest smile while trying to fleece other people’s wallets.

He was the mastermind?

Bianca swallowed; the sound was thin. “Sterling threatened to expose him—threatened to take him down if he didn’t hand over money. He wanted out. He wanted to disappear.” She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again the terror was naked. “But Dort—” Her throat worked like someone trying to swallow a storm. “Dort burned him alive. With his powers. I saw it. I saw his body—bones charred in the fireplace.”

The confession landed with a heavy weight. For one breath the hallway felt as if it had been emptied of all but the two of them.

A bitter amusement flickered through Wednesday—if one could enjoy the illumination of an enemy’s face, she did. Dort was not the abstract banal evil of educational rot she had first imagined in him and subsequently dismissed as inconsequential; certainly, that had been by his design, and she had to hand it to him, the chameleon face he’d chosen to present to the world was effective. Underneath, he was something else. Another type of arrogance, a human cesspool of corruption and deceit. The figure who’d kept a public face neat and office-clean while his hands dipped into everything. He was the man who’d arranged the silencing of Aunt Ophelia, the man who’d profited from cultish fear and had the gall to put on charity afterward.

Now, at least, there was a face to pin the shadow on. He had hands she could bind, a mouth she could silence, a skin she could peel metaphorically (or literally) to expose the rot underneath.

That made him— manageable.

Wednesday’s eyes glinted; the light in them was not kindness. “It appears,” she murmured, small and precise, “that the puppet-master has finally shown his strings. I presume you or your mother also had something to do with my grandmother’s sudden generous thaw?”

Bianca’s head dropped; her shoulders folded with shame. “I had no choice. Dort had leverage. He promised safety if we cooperated. He said if we helped him secure Hester’s signature then my mother would be hidden, she’d be safe, and we could disappear when it was over. It’s a lie, of course, but I had no choice but to follow along.”

Wednesday cataloged the confession. Every nuance mattered: the way Bianca’s voice cracked when she said “no choice,” the quick, the stuttered blinking when she admitted complicity. Bianca’s guilt was loud enough to taste.

“He told me he’d take us away after the Gala,” she added, voice hoarse. “But he’s planning to steal Hester’s fortune first. Everything. He said once he had it, he’d disappear with my mother. Everyone else would be left to the aftermath.”

Wednesday let the words settle. The plan fit into a delicious, cruel symmetry: Dort, the man of public virtue, would pocket the miser’s fortune and run. A tidy, obscene ending for someone who called himself a moral guardian, a steward of children.

She felt the cold mechanics of strategy unfurl inside her mind—timing, motive, leverage. If Dort intended to move after the Gala, the Gala became both stage and trap. He’d be exposed in a dozen ways: dotted signatures, the presence of his mark, a riveted audience. He would need to be watched, prodded, and then ruined—publicly, personally, thoroughly. And if he had burned Gideon in his fireplace, he had shown impatience with loose ends; that arrogance could be used against him.

“You lied to save your mother,” Wednesday said finally, the words not quite accusation and not quite consolation. “Understandable. We all do stupid things for family.” She paused. “If Dort meant to spirit you away, then he is a poor strategist. He underestimates the people he uses. He underestimates how quickly his tracks can be followed.”

Bianca lifted her eyes—jaw clenched, defiant. “You’ve got a mind for destruction, Wednesday. I’ve never understood it, but I respect it. What do we do?”

Wednesday’s mouth flattened into a line that had ended many fates. “We turn his theatre into his funeral pyre.” Her voice carried no playful glee—this was cold arithmetic: timing, leverage, spectacle. “We attend the Gala. We let him collect what he thinks he’s earned. Then we expose him when he is most visible, and cut off his knees.”

“You mean cut him off at his knees?” Bianca blurted, tripping over the metaphor.

Wednesday shrugged, unimpressed. “That, too.”

“We can’t siren him,” she admitted. “He stole the coral pendant my stepfather used—the one that blocks our voice.”

“Then we remove the pendant,” Wednesday said simply, as if it were a trivial matter of rearranging chess pieces. Her mind was already parsing possibilities—distraction, diversion, a moment where Dort would be exposed without the coral’s dampening interference. She did not speak of specifics; she didn’t need to. The mechanics could be worked out later, in private, with the right hands and the right timing. Everyone could have a place, from pawn to queen.

Bianca’s jaw clenched. Hope and terror warred across her features. “And my mother?”

“You keep Gabrielle close,” Wednesday instructed, her tone flat and absolute. “Don’t let her wander. You watch Dort like a viper and you trust no reprieve he offers. I will ensure your mother’s hideout remains secret until we strike, and she moved to safety. When the moment comes, I will drag Dort out by his own lies and watch him unravel.”

Bianca let out a sound that might have been a laugh or a sigh; it was somewhere between relief and the exhausted surrender of someone who had borne too much. “You’ll do that? For us?”

“Consider it justice long denied,” Wednesday said, thinking of her aunt. Her voice made the word clinical and inevitable. “He committed a sin against my blood. This is reprisal.”

“I want in,” Bianca said, fierce now, the siren’s old fire returned. “However you plan his downfall, I need to be there to witness it firsthand. I’m tired of being a pawn. I’m tired of living in fear for my mother’s life and answering to greedy men who think they can make us sing on command.”

Wednesday studied her for a heartbeat—the raw edge to Bianca’s vow, the kind of hunger that could be burned into allyship. She respected it. The siren’s urge for vengeance was understandable; the wrongs done to Gabrielle and Bianca demanded a reckoning.

“Useful,” Wednesday said at last. “Watch Dort’s movements and report back to me.”

Bianca nodded, shoulders straightening with resolve. “I can do that.”

As Bianca slipped away—fate and fear braided into a new gait—Wednesday watched her go. The predatory satisfaction that rose in her was not pretty; it was a cold, private thing. Dort had a face now, the warm, arrogant face of a man who burned a rival in a fireplace and still smiled at charity galas. Dort had acted with impunity; Dort had underestimated how quickly a spider’s threads could be found and cut.

Wednesday’s mind, always working like a chamber of musical instruments moving in perfect concert, began to rearrange the notes to come: who would watch Dort at the gala, which of her aids would lift the pendent, who would secure Gabrielle’s safety, where his paperwork would be momentarily unguarded, what witnesses might be sown among the crowd. She thought about the coral pendant—how to isolate it, how to make the man who relied on it feel naked and small at the worst possible moment. She thought about Hester’s sudden generosity, about how to turn that into a smoking ruin for Dort. She felt the precise, clean thrill of purpose: an enemy named, a plan sketched in the margins of her mind, allies recruited who were dangerous in exactly the ways she required them to be. Each thought slotted into place.

While Bianca disappeared into the crowd, Wednesday’s expression smoothed back into the mask she wore as armor. Suddenly, everything about the masquerade ball was infinitely more interesting. She turned and walked away, every step measured, the Gala unfolding as her new stage.

And Wednesday Addams—patient, implacable, inevitable—would be there to make sure the curtain fell on Dort and no one else.

Arrangements were made.

The pieces laid across the board like sharpened instruments awaiting their use. While others might have thought only of music, lights, or masks, Wednesday knew the Gala was not a ball but a battlefield. And so she prepared for it as she would any campaign—methodically, ruthlessly, without sentiment.

Tyler leaned against the wall, watching her move papers with her cold precision. His tethered presence hummed with restlessness. “I like this side of you,” he admitted, half a grin curving his mouth. “But you gotta give me more to do than wait in the wings, if things go wrong.”

Her gaze snapped to him, sharp. “Have you forgotten that you’re public enemy number one?”

“Yeah, well,” he said, shrugging, eyes fixed on her. “I want to be your date for the evening.”

She stopped, the pen poised mid-air, and released a sigh so faint it was almost a hiss. “This, again.”

His eyes narrowed. “You look at the Gala like it’s a battlefield. Maybe it is. But battlefields still have partners. You don’t have to fight this one alone.”

Wednesday set the pen down with deliberate slowness, folding her hands atop the table. “I will not parade you into a room full of the sheriff’s men. Why not just present them with your throat to be slit?”

“I’m not asking you to parade me,” Tyler said, his voice low and steady. “I just don’t want to spend the night hiding in a closet while you take on all the risk.”

For a fleeting second, her eyes flicked to him—dark, unreadable, though the tether betrayed the flicker of what she would not speak aloud. And then, as always, she dismissed him with stark precision, standing, turning her back, her voice flat as marble.

“You’ll wait. You’ll watch. And if I command it, you’ll act. That is your role for the night.”

The tether thrummed between them—his frustration, his longing, his stubborn refusal to accept the limits she drew. But Wednesday ignored it, the way she ignored every ache of her own body after a vision: with sheer force of will.

When the night of the Gala came, the dress waited for her like an executioner’s hood, black silk and shadow, severe in its lines yet decadent in its detail. She stepped into it with the unhurried precision of one donning armor. The fabric clung to her frame, cool at first, then settling against her skin like a second self. Where others sought ornament, Wednesday sought intimidation; the gown whispered of knives hidden in velvet. The bodice was sharp, angular, laced to fit like a corset, cinched so perfectly that each breath felt calculated. The sleeves draped into gothic bell-cuts, sheer. The skirt fell in weighted folds, cascading like liquid night to brush the floor with menace, wide enough to conceal a half a dozen weapons underneath.

Makeup was not frivolity; it was a sharpened mask. Wednesday leaned into the mirror, pale features already sculpted like marble. She dusted her eyelids in shadow so dark it seemed carved from coal, a frame that sharpened her gaze into twin knives. Her lips, she painted the deep bruise of a blackened rose, not glossy, but matte.

Her hair was drawn back into twin thin braids, severe and precise, over her crown. Overatop was the veil she’d chosen for the masquerade — a sheer black veil, appropriate for funerals. Something a widow would wear. No loose strands, no softness. She looked at herself and saw not a girl, but a harbinger.

When she finished, she clasped her necklace—a slender chain, heavy with the obsidian talisman gifted to her by Morticia. It settled cold against her skin, the weight of legacy and sight pressing down. She let her fingertips linger at the pendant, recalling the vision of her aunt clutching a twin piece, drenched in blood.

For one moment she stood still, staring into her reflection.

Behind her darkened eyes, there was no hesitation.

The night rose with a chill, but Nevermore’s great hall was ablaze with light and shadow. The Venetian-Gothic theme unfurled like a fever dream: chandeliers dripping with black crystal, velvet curtains gathered in blood-red folds, candelabras painting gold across marble floors. Masks glittered everywhere, faces half-hidden, laughter sharpening into a chorus of nerves and vanity.

When Wednesday entered, alone, the murmurs rose like a tide. Whispers rippled through the crowd: the girl who had died and returned, walking like a revenant in silk and shadow. She had chosen solitude deliberately—Tyler could not be her date, and she would not insult herself with a stand-in. If she was to attend this masquerade, she would enter as she always had: untouchable. She moved like a blade through the crowd, her gown trailing silk, the obsidian brooch at her throat.

The orchestra swelled, strings and harpsichord weaving a baroque rhythm across the candlelit hall. Even Capri was relegated to wowing the audience on piano. Masks turned, gowns swirled, and in the midst of it Wednesday felt him before she saw him — Tyler. When she turned sharply towards the entrance, she found the doors opening again. Bianca Barclay swept inside in a gown of deep, iridescent blue silk, the bodice cut sleek to her frame, the skirt flaring into ripples that caught the light like midnight waves. She looked radiant, powerful—a siren who owned the room with each step. But it wasn’t Bianca who made Wednesday pause. It was the figure at her side.

Her date.

A man who stood tall, shoulders squared beneath the perfect tailoring of a black tuxedo. The suit fit him like it had been stitched over his skin—strong chest framed by a dark satin lapel, the crisp line of the shirt stark beneath, the tie knotted with ruthless precision. His hands, gloved in black leather, rested at his sides with a predator’s ease. And then the mask: carved from black lacquer, it covered his face completely, sweeping upward in sharp lines that echoed the Venetian style but darker, crueler. Intricate silver filigree traced across it like veins of frost, catching the light and disguising him entirely. Only his eyes and mouth remained visible through the mask slits— the glint of a recognizable shade of eyes, the curve of his lips, familiar in their faint, defiant tilt.

To everyone else, he was anonymous. To her, he was unmistakable — Tyler.

The tether hummed violently, her chest tightening with recognition. Admiration was not a thing she admitted, yet her gaze lingered—on the way the suit clung to his frame, on the severe beauty of the mask, on the arrogance of his entrance at Bianca’s arm. He knew she would see him. He had wanted her to. She schooled her face into icy neutrality, though her pulse betrayed her with a sharp skip. Attraction was an enemy she could not cut down with words, but it coiled within her all the same.

He looked at her directly, through the crowd. Though his face was hidden behind silver filigree and shadow, she felt the unrelenting focus of his eyes. It branded her skin from across the hall, tether humming taut with the weight of his presence. When he crossed the polished floor, she did not move—Addams composure was bred into her marrow—but her gaze darkened like storm clouds gathering.

“You look like you want to kill me,” he said low, leaning close enough that the curve of his mouth felt like a secret meant for her alone.

“That would attract attention," Wednesday returned, voice dry as winter frost. “Which I specifically told you we didn’t want you to do tonight.”

He leaned close enough that the silver filigree of his mask caught the light. “The tux? Courtesy of your family. Gomez went out of his way to make sure it fit. Said a man should never embarrass himself in front of his lady love.”

Her brows arched, disbelief sharp. “Well, I can appreciate the color.”

He looked down at her dress, a full lingering acknowledgement that the sentiment was returned in kind. “You look beautiful.”

She refused to be placated by such a simple compliment, even if it spread warmth in otherwise cold cheeks. “The simple promise of this gala really convinced the rest of my family that your attendance was permissible?”

His mouth curved. “If the Addamses approve, it’s hard to say no.”

“And Bianca?” she asked, gaze flicking deliberately to where the siren was being courted by admirers. “You’re her date?”

“Window dressing,” Tyler said simply. “I’m here for you. She was polite enough to accept my invitation when I explained my girlfriend wasn’t inviting me herself.”

A pause. “I’m not your girlfriend,” she protested.

“You’re my something,” he replied, low and unyielding. “I really didn’t want to get into a label debate with Bianca.”

“I didn’t know you and she were even on speaking terms.”

“There aren’t many who know I exist here,” he admitted with a shrug that barely disguised the coil of tension under his shoulders. “Besides your parents, I don’t have much company. Enid tolerates me out of loyalty to you, Agnes looks at me like I’m an experiment waiting to happen, and your brother—” He smirked, though it faltered. “He has a… fascination with Hydes that borders on unsettling.”

Her eyes narrowed. “So you struck up a friendship with Bianca Barclay of all people?”

He tilted his head, silver mask gleaming. “What can I say? Apparently surviving manipulative zealots leaves scars you can recognize in others. Turns out she and I have more in common than you’d think.”

She said nothing. Because the words she wanted to say were foreign on her tongue—too close to jealousy, too raw to admit. She could dismiss the idea as impractical, but the coil in her chest told her otherwise. Yet, he hadn’t spared his supposed “date” a single glance since he’d entered the room. All of him, every look, every breath, was angled toward Wednesday.

And she liked it. Liked it almost as much as she liked the cut of his suit, the way it sculpted him into something sharp, precise, undeniably marked in her color like he was hers.

He extended a hand, gloved fingers poised. “Dance with me.”

Wednesday’s eyes narrowed, dark kohl behind her lashes. “I should decline on principle.”

“But you won’t,” he said, quiet certainty anchoring the words.

For a long moment, she studied him, the steady line of his posture, the brazen calm, the tether humming with heat and intent. Then she lifted a single brow, her acceptance of his challenge hidden inside her disbelief, and set her cool fingers against his palm. The orchestra shifted into a stately waltz, strings and brass twining together like smoke, and the crowd parted just enough for him to claim her. His gloved fingers folded around her hand—warm, insistent—and his other settled at her waist with a reverence at odds with the sharpness of his mask.

Wednesday let him lead her into the tide of dancers, her spine straight, chin angled, the picture of Addams hauteur. Unlike their first dance together at the Rav’N, this was entirely formal. Not a mosh pit of teenage hormones dancing without rhythm or rhyme, but a gala aimed at their parent’s pockets. She had expected a stumble, some graceless falter. Instead, his steps matched the music as if he’d been born to it.

She felt it immediately: the training.

“Not bad,” she admitted, though her gaze betrayed something sharper than disapproval.

“Don’t sound so surprised,” he murmured, dipping her into a turn that brought them almost flush together before pulling her back upright. “Your father refused to let me make a fool of myself. Said it would be an insult to you.”

The tether sang between them, pulling taut, carrying the undercurrent of his satisfaction at every step well executed. She felt his pride ripple through it, tempered by the raw eagerness of wanting her eyes only on him.

“You’ve rehearsed for this,” she accused softly.

He smirked beneath the silver filigree. “For you? I’ll always go above and beyond.”

His hand was firm at her back, his lead sure without being overbearing. He had learned the etiquette of control without stifling her, a rare feat. He steered her through the figures—rise and fall, sway and spin—as though they had been doing this for years instead of minutes. In his hands, she was neither puppet nor pawn; she was a partner. Each turn swept her skirts into a dark bloom, each glide carried her as though the music itself bent to their pace. She felt it in the way his hand pressed firmly but not overpowering at her back, how his movements anticipated hers before she even chose them. Perhaps the tether helped to unify them in movement and intention. It was uncanny.

Around them, masks turned to watch. She was aware she had caught the gaze of her parents, pride and affection spilling unfiltered from their looks and sighs as they followed the two through the crowds. But in the world of shadow and strings, it was only the two of them—the revenant girl and the boy hidden in a mask, moving like a single, inevitable force. Every whisper was another opportunity for distraction. For exposure. It was dangerous, impractical. She should have pulled away. She should have cut him off with a word, a glance, a dismissal.

But when he drew her close for another turn, his hand steady, the tether alive with his focus on her and her alone, she found herself hesitating. Desire was distraction. But desire also sharpened her. It made her pulse quicken, made her mind parse every detail with unnerving clarity.

“Admit it,” he drawled, low. “Sometimes you like it when I disobey.”

She narrowed her eyes at him, but couldn’t entirely deny it. She hesitated, and then reached and touched the line of his jaw with light fingertips, underneath his mask. He went very still, not even seeming to breathe, as she traced the grain of his sharp chin; she found the solidity of him behind his disguise deeply grounding and pleasing.

People around them stared—curious, whispering. Who was the masked stranger who had captured Wednesday Addams’ hand? The tether hummed, alive with Tyler’s simmering satisfaction. He knew it too: they’d pulled focus. Her classmates—obsessed with romance, with gossip—were already spinning tales, their eyes darting between the masked suitor and her composed form. Wednesday felt the stir of annoyance. She had intended to arrive alone to avoid exactly this, but beneath it, buried deeper, there was something sharp and cold she refused to name—something perilously close to pride that he danced with her so well, so visibly.

Then the music drew to an end and cut off — to allow for some grand interruption.

A moment later, her grandmother made her grand entrance on the arm of Principal Dort. Whispers flickered through the crowd, rippling under the music. Wednesday’s gaze cut to Bianca across the floor. The siren’s posture was rigid, her mask hiding little of the tension that stiffened her shoulders. Their eyes met for an instant, and it was enough. Dort was moving into position.

At the edge of the floor, Principal Dort rose from his seat near the dais, his glass raised high — Wednesday’s grandmother sat at his side. His smile was all teeth, his voice silken and warm enough to draw eyes toward him. “Tonight,” he declared, “is more than a celebration. It is a new beginning—for Nevermore, for outcasts, for all of us. With generosity flowing, with old fortunes redirected, we stand on the cusp of a new age.”

Dort’s words still echoed—honeyed poison dripping into the air—when Wednesday’s attention shifted.

Her gaze caught them instantly, as if her visions had pulled them into being: a pair stepping into the ballroom as though it belonged to them. Their masks were elaborate, Venetian artistry wrought in black and silver, veiling but not concealing. Wednesday knew. Recognition was a blade in her chest. Her aunt Ophelia wore a white velvet dress cut like royalty, her neckline jeweled with obsidian that gleamed with occult fire. Her hair, streaked with silver, was piled high—untamed in a glorified way. Isaac, tall and lithe, moved at her side with an unsettling grace for a body that should have rotted in the ground. His mask was skeletal filigree, fitting for a corpse, his lips faintly painted pink like Ophelia’s lipstick had rubbed off on him. He was richly dressed, his black coat embroidered with white thread to reflect his date’s colors.

They looked like a king and queen of ruin.

Through the tether, Wednesday felt Tyler’s jolt before he masked it—sharp, searing recognition of his uncle.

The vision she had seen—his body at Isaac’s feet—flared through her like a phantom wound, but she did not falter. Her eyes narrowed, her pulse steady.

Of course they had come.

Of course they would not miss a theatre ripe for devastation. Ophelia’s gaze swept the crowd—and paused. Just for a heartbeat, it snagged on Wednesday. The smallest tilt of her head, acknowledgment— almost affection. Isaac’s hand closed over Ophelia’s gloved wrist, a lover’s claim, his lips curving into the faintest smirk. Dort was still speaking at the dais, blind to the storm that had just entered his carefully orchestrated spectacle. The rest of the school saw only two masked strangers, decadent guests.

But Wednesday knew.

They weren’t here to watch. They were here to wreck havoc.

“The spectacle,” she whispered, low enough for Tyler alone. “It seems we aren’t the only ones who came to burn Dort’s entire world down.”

Chapter Text

Wednesday stood as still as a statue at the edge of the ballroom, her eyes hooded with the black veil, her fingers clasped behind her back as if she were no more than a bored spectator. But the tether hummed—Tyler agitated just out of sight, restless, every sense sharpened.

From across the room, Ajax brushed a hand through his hair, deliberately messy, and gave the smallest nod. The signal. Gabrielle Barclay had been secured, spirited out of danger — just as Wednesday had planned. One piece of the board was removed from Dort’s reach.

Wednesday’s lips curved, but there was no time for any ghost of satisfaction. With Ophelia and Isaac in the picture, they were pieces on the board Wednesday could not predict and she needed Dort’s confession and public humiliation to be complete before there were any other possibilities for reprisals on behalf of decades past sins. 

Wednesday had been planning this to perfection, and she looked towards the stage. 

The orchestra shifted seamlessly into a lilting new number, some contemporary number. Enid took to the floor in a flash of silver silk — and her performance began. Not too long afterwards, Agnes appeared beside her—petite and precise, her emerald green gown in perfect concert. Together, the pair launched into a choreographed whirl that no one could have expected, not even Wednesday. It was admittedly a surprising duet, as Wednesday hadn’t realized that Enid and Agnes had become friends at some point, much less close enough to coordinate a dance like this — clearly, she had missed the signs. They were perfectly in sync. Synchronized spins, sharp footwork, a display of grace and chaos combined. Enid’s infectious brightness met Agnes’s eerie mimicry, the contradiction captivating. Gasps rippled through the crowd. Applause. Cheers. 

Even Dort, smug at his dais, leaned forward with a delighted laugh, utterly distracted by the spectacle. 

Wednesday almost wished she had the time and freedom to appreciate the dance, but her eyes were already elsewhere. Across the floor, two figures—Ophelia and Isaac—were no longer content to linger at the edges. Their steps were purposeful, weaving through the crowd until they reached the Addams family. Hester sat stiff and severe, her hands clenched over her cane — overcome with shock as the prodigal daughter had returned. Gomez, ever the gallant, had stepped in front of Morticia instinctively. Morticia herself was statuesque and frozen between grief and a startled daze, gaze sharpened as she faced her long-lost sister.

Even through masks, even across the entire length of the hall, Wednesday could see the tension crackle like firecrackers underfoot. Ophelia tilted her head, the gesture almost mocking, her eyes never leaving Morticia’s face. Isaac lingered at her shoulder, skeletal mask glinting faintly as his gaze swept over the family like prey, coming to land on Pugsley of all people; Slurp’s former friend.

Wednesday’s chest tightened—not fear, not hesitation, but something darker. A thread of inevitability. Family drama unfolding in a ballroom about to collapse.

But elsewhere, things were flowing perfectly to Wednesday’s grand designs.

Dort never noticed when Agnes slipped seamlessly from the duet—vanishing mid-spin, her body turning invisible. She drifted close, silent in the raucous audience, and with deft precision her fingers brushed the lapel of his coat. A glint of something that looked like a gold pocket watch to unassuming eyes, concealing the coral carved in spiraling ridges inside —the Corinthian charm that shielded him from sirens. It was lifted as easily as breath.

Soon after, Agnes’s hand materialized at Wednesday’s elbow, the air rippling as her body flickered back into sight. With a tilt of her chin, she pressed the Corinthian coral charm into Wednesday’s palm. Wednesday’s pale fingers closed around it, cool as a coffin lid, before Agnes vanished back toward the floor.

A moment later, the redhead reappeared, twirling once more into Enid’s arms. Their duet continued in a crescendo of applause, the crowd still enraptured by the seamless illusion of performance. The ballroom was aglow, breathless, and exactly distracted enough.

The stage was primed and set.

The tether pulsed. Tyler’s presence was taut, his Hyde prowling at the edges of restraint. Her voice slipped to him under the music, through the tether, flat and commanding: “Be ready. If chaos comes, you’ll need to become the monster.” She did not like the idea of exposing him to the audience, especially since she knew Sheriff Santiago’s men patrolled the halls, but there was little choice now given the added chaotic elements of her aunt and his uncle. 

There was a pause, a flicker of acknowledgment, then a low growl of assent over the tether. The Hyde lifting his head, even behind the whites of Tyler’s eyes, eager to comply with her every command. 

Once Enid and Agnes’ song ended, Wednesday stepped into position as orchestra leader.  

Wednesday tilted the coral pendant just enough for Bianca to see from across the floor. A flash of recognition passed between them, and Bianca’s eyes hardened with resolve. Then Bianca moved toward the stage with the grace of someone who’d rehearsed this moment in her mind a hundred times. When the music ebbed, she took the dais beside Dort.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Bianca announced, voice carrying, steady as stone. She made some introductory remarks as the student coordinator of the gala, welcoming everyone and inviting Principal Dort to share the stage with her. “And now—” her fingers brushed the pendant at her throat, removing it from its graceful place, the last obstacle to mute her powers, “—our principal would like to share with you exactly how this evening came to be.”

Her siren call rippled outward toward Dort—soft, irresistible, unavoidable.

Dort blinked, stiffened, and then—began to speak, nervous and laughing as he confessed it all. How he ordered Bianca to siren Morticia Addams into begging her mother for a donation. How, when that failed, he kidnapped Gabrielle Barclay to coerce her daughter into manipulating Hester Frump. How he succeeded. Gasps scattered through the audience, their murmurs rising like a tide.

He did not stop. “Gideon Sterling—my stooge, my figurehead at Morning Song—grew disobedient. He wanted his cut. He threatened to expose me. So I burned him alive.” He laughed. “He’s ashes in my fireplace right now.”

The room erupted into scandalous gasps. Chairs scraped back, voices sharpened in horror, a ripple of outrage cascading through the crowd.

But before he could stumble further into descent, another voice cut through.

“Tell them about me.”

A figure stepped onto the stage, her white gown like bridal lace. Ophelia Frump. Her presence drew the oxygen from the room. Isaac stood at her side, skeletal mask gleaming, his posture casual but his presence menacing.

Dort faltered. Confusion twisted into dawning horror and distant recognition. “You—”

Bianca’s siren voice lashed again, forcing him to continue his list of sins. “As a student,” Dort confessed, “I had the vision — Morning Song. My creation of devoted fools. But Ophelia saw it—she foresaw what I would become. I made Gabrielle Barclay silence her. I buried her truth in madness. I consigned her imprisonment to Willow Hill, where her visions were harvested like crops.”

“You filthy rat,” Ophelia’s voice rang through the ballroom, broken glass—low, serrated, cutting into every spine within earshot. She advanced, skirts whispering across the floor. “Decades of torment. Dreams turned to shackles,” she hissed, every word frayed. “And all the while, you fattened yourself on lies and piles of coin. Did you think vengeance would not one day claw its way back?”

Isaac’s hand slid along her arm, steady, grounding, his presence the black monster that stirred behind her rage. They looked like revenants risen together from the grave—beautiful and grotesque.

The Sheriff’s men finally snapped out of their stupor. Boots pounded against marble, their voices barking commands, guns raised. “Everyone stays where they are!” Santiago said. “Stay calm!”

But calm was a word without teeth here. It had no purchase in the storm.

Isaac lifted one long, scarred hand, and the air shuddered. Invisible force cracked outward like a whip. The officers stopped mid-motion, limbs locking with a grotesque snap. Guns rattled free from their hands, spinning across the floor. Their jaws worked, but their mouths produced only strangled sounds of panic.

The crowd screamed, pressing back, silk gowns and black suits crushed together in a tide of hysteria.

Dort’s body jerked upward, dragged like a marionette, his feet dangling above the stage. His face purpled with strain as his throat convulsed around a scream that never escaped. He writhed in his own noose of air. Ophelia leaned close, so near her jeweled mask nearly touched Dort’s sweat-slick face. 

Her voice was venom: “This theatre,” Ophelia whispered to Dort, “has always been a funeral pyre.”

Isaac’s fist closed.

The flames erupted not from his hands but from Dort’s own chest—his pyrokinetic power turned traitor. His body ignited from within, fire licking outward in vicious tongues. His spine arched, his jaw split in a silent shriek, until the blaze consumed him whole. The smell of burning flesh hit the air. His body sagged in the grip of Isaac’s telekinesis, curling in on itself until the blaze consumed him whole, until the ash fell loose, crumbling in showers onto the stage.

The audience howled, the shrieks of horror layered with the roar of fire, the scrape of heels as they surged back in chaos. Guests screamed and scrambled for the exits, gowns tangling in heels, masks dropping to the floor as bodies surged in every direction. 

In the madness, someone knocked into Hester Frump so solidly she hit the ground hard and lost consciousness. Pugsley was by her side in an instant, tending to his fallen grandmother.

Morticia and Gomez rose as one, and traded looks.

And through it all, Wednesday did not move.

Her black eyes gleamed with something unreadable—fascination, calculation, the sharp satisfaction of a knife finding its mark. Smoke twisted upward, black and curling, painting the chandeliers in dark curls of smoke. The plan had succeeded, yes. Dort was unmasked, undone, obliterated before the entire world. But not by her hand.

By Ophelia’s.

But it was Morticia who cut through the frenzy with chilling precision. Her black skirts sliced across the marble like a blade unsheathed. The two sisters came to face one another. The shrieks, the scraping of chairs, the shuffle of frantic feet all blurred into background noise; Wednesday’s eye followed her mother as she mounted the stage, straight toward the sister she’d lost like a severed limb. Ophelia was waiting for her, Isaac looming just behind her. They stopped just shy of touching, tension strung taut between the sisters like a drawn bow. 

“Stop this madness,” Morticia hissed, half a plea.  

Ophelia’s laughter was sharp enough to draw blood. “Don’t you dare pretend concern or outrage, sister. You betrayed me long before I ever dreamed of vengeance.”

Morticia faltered, a stab of grief and guilt stark against Ophelia’s fire. “It doesn’t have to be like this anymore. Our shattered bonds do not need to be affixed on the past.” Her tone was sharp as steel but trembled, laced with something far more fragile: a plea she hadn’t spoken in decades. “I will let it go, all of it. I don’t care that you betrayed me first,” she whispered, pained. “That you chose Isaac over me. I will not let the sins of the past dictate the future.”

Ophelia’s face twisted, grief and rage braided together. “I did not betray you. I chose Isaac over Gomez Addams.”

Wednesday knew immediately what the response to that would be — it was inevitable, for her mother had always reacted in the same feverish way whenever her father’s name was invoked. 

Morticia’s breath caught like a blade pressed to the throat. “And to me, he is my soul. We are one and the same.”

From across the crowd, Wednesday pushed forward, Tyler a dark shadow at her side. His mask glittered in the smoky light, and through the tether she could feel his readiness to break, to shift, to fight if her command so much as brushed his mind. But Wednesday did not speak yet. She watched. Calculated. Catalogued. In her mind, questions gnawed. What rift had split her mother and aunt so deeply that even decades later, upon their reunion, there was still no hint of forgiveness, no softness left between them? What wound could remain so raw that even here—amid smoke and fire, the corpse of a man still smoldering at their feet—they snapped like rabid beasts at one another?

Her dark eyes glittered as she studied them. She wanted the truth. And like every other secret clawed out from graves tonight, she would have it.

The air hung heavy with anticipation— the Sheriff’s men still remained frozen, statues locked mid-command, their rifles littering the floor where Isaac’s power had wrenched them from their hands. Shrieking guests had now abandoned the chaos through the ballroom doors, smoke from Dort’s incineration curling to stain the air. 

But then Isaac’s eyes locked onto Tyler. He stepped down from the stage, his gaze sharp, unblinking, fixed on his nephew. “Do you even know,” Isaac said, voice low, serrated, “who you’ve thrown your lot in with? Do you know what the Addams family really is? What they took from the Nights?”

Tyler’s brows knit, shoulders taut. He didn’t speak, confusion evident.

Isaac advanced another step, his words cutting like glass. “Your mother, Francoise Galpin. She was a Night before she met your father, long before she died. But do you know who really killed her? Gomez and Morticia Addams. That’s their legacy, boy. Blood on their hands. Blood that runs in your veins.”

The words hit like a blow. 

Wednesday felt it in the tether—the sudden, sharp spike of Tyler’s turmoil, the ache of disbelief colliding with fury.

“No!” Morticia’s voice lashed through the smoke, jagged with anguish. “That is not true. Isaac twists the truth as easily as he breathes. Tyler—don’t listen to him!”

Isaac’s gaze stayed on Tyler, steady. “Who will you believe? Them, or your own uncle?”

The question lingered in the charged air, sharp as a guillotine blade hovering. Tyler’s entire frame seemed caught beneath its weight—his jaw grinding, his fists clenched so tightly his knuckles bleached pale. Every flicker in his posture screamed of the fracture inside him: one pulled toward the uncle whose blood he shared, toward his mother’s name, invoked like a ghost. For a heartbeat, Wednesday saw the scale tip. She felt it through the tether, the dangerous sway of loyalty toward Isaac. It was a razor’s edge, the kind that carved apart veins.

But then—his gaze snapped to Wednesday. A single look.

The tether thrummed like struck iron, steady, searing, absolute. His choice crystallized in that instant. Not Isaac. Not Francoise’s memory. Not blood. Wednesday. The loyalty scorched through the bond, raw and undeniable. It wasn’t the subservience of a tethered servant obeying command—it was something far sharper, chosen freely, burning bright enough to sting her eyes. He shifted, deliberate, his body angling to hers as though the move itself declared the verdict. Her. Devotion freely given. 

Wednesday’s mask cracked—not shattered, but shifted. The smallest tilt of her mouth, the faintest flicker of her eyes betrayed the depth of the moment. Inside, she felt something jagged and startling: a flicker of warmth kindling a wildfire. The mention of Francoise still reverberated through his bones, unsettling in ways she could not fully unravel. Isaac’s accusation had burrowed deep. But Tyler’s choice—Tyler choosing her over the ghost of his mother, over his own kin—lodged itself deeper still.

Isaac’s pale face twisted, lips curling back in something too human and too monstrous: grief. “Your mother—my sister—died.” His voice boomed through the hall, sharp and ragged. “And you choose them?”

Beside him, Ophelia’s voice cracked like glass. “So predictable. The Addams poison runs deep. Even their enemies cannot resist binding themselves to their rot. You’ve shackled yourself, dear nephew-in-law, the same as my sister once did.” Her eyes slashed toward Morticia, seething. “History repeating itself. Frump, Night, Addams — there will be a reckoning.”

Tyler flinched at the invocation of Francoise, but his boots held steady against the marble. His fear was there, yes—jagged and raw—but it bent itself entirely toward protecting Wednesday. A truth she could no longer ignore: his devotion was a weapon, but one that bound her as surely as it bound him. To wield it meant owning its cost. To squander it meant breaking something irreplaceable.

She would not let it break. She would not let Tyler’s choice go unmet, unequalled.

Morticia’s voice cut through. “Ophelia—” but her sister’s glare was ominous. Morticia persisted, “Please, stop this. We do not need to continue this bleeding. Stem it. Take my hand again, sister. I promise you it does not have to be as it was before.”

A pause, as Ophelia’s eyes watered. “If only it were so simple,” she breathed out, taut.

The ballroom trembled with tension, and at the outskirts of it, Wednesday stood with Tyler at her side, his hand brushing against hers deliberately. Wednesday’s pulse was steady, her expression ironclad, but inside, her mind seethed with a single demand: truth. Not Ophelia or Isaac’s bitter narrative. Not Morticia’s defense sharpened by guilt. Not even Gomez’s careful silences. She wanted the real truth, unfiltered, undeniable—etched into her sight.

Her fingers twitched at her sides. She knew the risks; every vision left her more raw, more frayed at the edges. Each one stole something. But restraint had never been Wednesday’s valor. She stepped forward, eyes narrowing as she fixed on Isaac. She would see the past with her own eyes, if she forced it. Her visions hadn’t been cooperative in many months, but this was important. Too important. She would take the truth, no matter the cost.

Through the tether, Tyler felt it—her intent sparking like a match in the dark. Alarm flashed through him, rough and jagged, a sharp tug at her arm. “Don’t,” he hissed under his breath. “You don’t know what it’ll take from you this time—”

But it was too late.

Wednesday pulled free, stalked forward, and her hand shot out — her pale fingers seizing Isaac’s cold wrist as she forced her visions to dance to her will, forcing it with the same stubborn embrace that she had wielded before those awful black tears had ever marred her skin.

The world tilted, spun. 

Blackness clawed across her vision, dragging her under. She fell headlong down the rabbit hole of time, clawed into a night two decades dead—flames licking against dark branches. Moonlight cracked through the branches of the skull tree, its pale glow glinting against damp earth. The air was heavy, thick with tension. Wednesday gasped, the vision still tightening its jaws around her ribs, pulling her deeper, biting into her.

Tyler’s voice echoed faintly, raw and terrified, clawing after her through the tether: Come back to me.

But Wednesday saw her father, Gomez—young, dark curls plastered to his forehead with sweat, his hands trembling as he dug into the soil with frantic urgency. His shovel struck roots, stone. Beside him lay the limp body of Isaac Night, his face slack in death, his hand severed at the wrist, blood darkening the dirt. Morticia was there too, draped in black even then, her eyes burning but her face composed, a mask stretched too tight over grief.

“No one will know,” Gomez swore, his voice raw, desperate to soothe. His chest heaved as he shoved earth over Isaac’s pale corpse. “No one will ever find him here. Beneath the Skull Tree, he will stay.”

Morticia’s voice cracked, the sound low, trembling at the edges. “But it will still cost me Ophelia. She will never forgive this. Never forgive me.”

Gomez dropped the shovel, catching her hands with bloodied fingers, his touch trembling but firm. “You saved me, querida. He would have killed me. He chose his path.”

Morticia’s gaze flicked toward Isaac’s broken body, her lips curving in pain. “He only wanted to save his sister from her fate as a Hyde. Francoise—”

“He did not care if his experiment would kill me,” Gomez interrupted, voice hard. “He was willing to bleed me dry to save his sister. It was madness. You stopped him before it took me.”

Wednesday’s sight sharpened—the flash of the moment replaying like lightning. Isaac with his machine, clamped and draining Gomez’s body in some mad science, trying to draw out his power. Morticia’s blade flashing in the madness. The severed hand. The scream — Ophelia’s scream as she witnessed the entire chaotic night. Blood spraying as Morticia drove steel through Isaac’s chest.

The vision swelled with Ophelia’s cry in the distance—her shriek splitting the night. Wednesday turned her head and saw a further glimpse: Francoise, young and pale, passed out cold on the gurney in Iago Tower. Young Ophelia, hair wild, face pale, eyes wide with horror as she stumbled upon the corpse of her lover. Isaac’s body bleeding out, Morticia’s blade dripping red. Gomez nearly catatonic in the back. 

The vision threatened to drag Wednesday down like a tide, ripping her senses apart, flinging her into blood-soaked soil. Her knees threatened to buckle, her breath ragged, black tears cutting paths down her cheeks. Even in the vision, she felt it — the abuse her body took, the convulsions. Tyler’s voice, frantic through the tether. Come back to me. Come back. And still, even as she shuddered, the truth lingered like a threat that Wednesday reached for, etched far too deeply into her mind: Isaac had died by Morticia’s blade. Ophelia had watched, and her grief had bloomed into madness. Francoise remained a Hyde because of that night, and had died because of the failed experiment. 

The fracture between sisters, between families, had been carved beneath the skull tree.

Still trapped in the marrow of twenty years past, the storm raged above the skull tree, lightning cutting white scars across the night. Rain slicked the soil Gomez had just turned over Isaac’s corpse.

And then—everything froze.

The raindrops hung in the air like glass beads, lightning suspended mid-arc across the sky. Gomez’s shovel was raised mid-strike, locked in stillness. Isaac’s open dead eyes were statuesque. The only movement came from Morticia—young Morticia—her black skirts shifting with unnatural fluidity as she straightened, slowly, unnervingly, to look directly at Wednesday.

Wednesday’s incorporeal body stiffened. She was a spectator, an intruder at this moment—but Morticia’s eyes followed her all the same, as if drawing her gaze across decades. 

“And who,” young Morticia whispered, a demand of Wednesday, “are you?” 

Wednesday froze. This didn’t make sense. This was a vision of the past. It wasn’t real. Morticia wasn’t real. But somehow, it came to her with a certainty — through their parallel powers, a connection had been made. From past to present. From mother to daughter. Across time and space. It defied everything Wednesday knew of her gifts, because this was not like Goody Addam’s spirit who had known she was dead and centuries in the future when she communicated with Wednesday. 

This Morticia Addams was only seventeen years old, and looked utterly confused by Wednesday’s presence.

At first, Morticia’s tone was reverent, curious, as her eyes narrowed. “Are you a ghost? A spirit?”  

Wednesday held her ground, face blank, though her insides twisted. “Not a ghost. That is all you need to know.”

Morticia studied her, eyes narrowing as if peeling back layers of fog. “No,” she murmured, voice dropping into something heavier, older. “Not a ghost. From beyond. The future.” She inhaled sharply, her body swaying as if the connection cost her. “I can feel it—the tie, thin but there. You are— connected to me somehow.”

Wednesday’s jaw clenched. She had not expected this. She forced her voice flat, sharp as ice. “Then you already know why I am here. I seek truth. This night has wrought madness, with far repercussions."

Morticia’s lips pressed together, a flicker of grief and suspicion in her expression. “I owe you no answers.”

“You owe me much more than you know,” Wednesday warned.

They stared at each other, distrustful, at an impasse.

“Whoever you are, you dig too deeply,” Morticia warned. “I can see the drain in you. You’re abusing your gifts. You would not do this if you had an ounce of sense in you. Did no one ever warn you not to go too far?”

Wednesday kept her face blank. “My mother did, but she and I disagree on many things.”

“I can understand the fraught relationship between mother and daughter,” Morticia said, unaware of the thick irony. “But you’re playing with these dark omens like it's a child’s toy. You’ll be driven mad if you keep this up.”

Wednesday stepped closer, the frozen rain glinting like a shattered chandelier around them. “Then tell me, so this all serves some purpose. Why bury Isaac beneath the skull tree and doom your sister to madness?”

“I have done no such thing to my sister,” Morticia hissed, advancing. “She made her choice when she sided with Isaac’s heartless plan to kill my Gomez. And as for Isaac — we have no choice but to hide his body. Professor Stonehearst doesn’t want a scandal to arise. We’ve been blackmailed into a coverup.”

Wednesday’s chin lifted. Of course. Augustus Stonehearst wouldn’t have wanted any association with the death of his star pupil, even if his mad science had intrigued him. Better to bury the body and hide the truth.

But Morticia’s poise hardened, her wet black hair clinging to her pale face. “Some truths must stay in the grave. You dig too deep, girl. You think sight is a gift, but it is a devouring thing. I have seen it. Even now, I watch my sister fall into its jaws.” Her voice softened, for the briefest instant—a warning that sounded almost like a plea. “Be careful. You will follow her footsteps if you keep clawing.”

The ominous words were the last ones Wednesday heard. The connection pulsed, strained, and then it broke like a snapped wire. Wednesday’s body jerked violently. Pain shot down her spine, every limb stiff, locked in paralysis. Black tears spilled hot down her cheeks, the seizure-like grip of the vision still clinging to her bones. She forced breath through her lungs, fought to wrench her fingers into movement, to drag herself upright.

Around her, the Gala was in ruins. 

While Wednesday had been unearthing secrets of the past, the real world had moved along and descended into chaos. And in the center of the unfolding madness—Tyler. No longer the boy, no longer the tether’s steady warmth. The Hyde tore across the ballroom, monstrous and furious, claws swiping against Isaac’s telekinetic attacks. The floor splintered, the air hummed with Isaac’s invisible force as he flung tables and chairs like matchsticks. Ophelia’s scream carried across over the bedlam, warning, shrill.

Wednesday’s body trembled as she struggled to her knees. Her mother’s warning echoed still— if you keep clawing— 

Across the room, Isaac lifted one hand, and the invisible force of his telekinesis slammed into Tyler like a hurricane. The Hyde staggered back, claws gouging trenches into the marble. But Tyler lunged again. His claws caught a table mid-flight, snapping it in half, then hurled the jagged pieces back towards his uncle. Isaac’s hand flicked, and the splinters turned to dust before they reached him.

Isaac sneered, his pale face carved with disdain. “You are nothing but an echo of your mother’s curse,” he snarled. “Francoise bled for you?”

The Hyde roared in reply, hurtling forward, slamming into Isaac’s invisible wall.  

Wednesday tried to rise, but her body betrayed her. The vision’s aftershocks still gripped her, her limbs leaden, her muscles trembling in rebellion. Pain spidered up her spine, locking her shoulders, leaving her breath sharp and shallow. She pressed her palms to the floor, forcing herself upright inch by inch. Her legs threatened to give again. She had faced blades, bullies, monsters, curses before—never had her own body felt so much like an enemy.

And yet she kept her eyes locked on him.

Tyler in Hyde form, clawing against the invisible storm, muscles straining, every ounce of him burning with the effort of defiance. Through the tether she felt him—not words, not even thought, but raw intent. The bond pulsed like a drumbeat in her chest, both grounding and agonizing. He was fighting not just for himself, but for her, for her family—for the choice he had made minutes earlier when he had turned his back on Isaac, on Francoise’s memory, on his own blood. 

And Wednesday, paralyzed, weakened, could only watch.

Ophelia swept forward, catching Isaac by the arm, pulling him back with strength. “Enough,” she hissed, her voice echoing. “Not here. Not now.”

Isaac’s dead eyes burned hatred into Tyler, but he let her drag him back. The two slipped through a collapsing archway, vanishing into shadow as chaos sealed their escape.

The Hyde roared into the silence left behind, chest heaving, claws dripping with broken stone and blood, possibly some of his own. Victorious, but trembling. A gash ran down his side, hot crimson marking the Hyde’s monstrous frame. His breaths were ragged, but his stance was unyielding—an animal who had fought and lived to tell it.

Through the tether, Wednesday felt it: exhaustion, pain, defiance still burning like a live coal. Morticia caught her when Wednesday stumbled, rising from nearby, through debris, black skirts torn but composure unbroken. Gomez stumbled after her, blood at his temple, some sword still clutched though bent, though Wednesday knew not where he had drawn it from. 

Her father looked to the Hyde—looked to Tyler—and admiration overrode any other expression. “He saved me,” Gomez breathed, voice thick with gratitude. “The boy saved my life.”

Clearly, that had been something that had happened while Wednesday had been unconscious. 

Morticia said nothing, her gaze fixed on the shadows where her sister had vanished. But Wednesday saw it—the brief flicker of heartbreak in her mother’s eyes. 

And then—the stillness cracked. The Sheriff’s men, freed at last from Isaac’s telekinetic hold, staggered back into motion. Their eyes swept the hall, weapons raised, searching for enemies—and they landed on Tyler. The Hyde stood defiant, towering, a monster made flesh. He was breathing hard, bloodied, looming over the wreckage of death. To the men, there was no question who the danger was.

“Take him down!” Sheriff Santiago barked, rifle braced against her shoulder.

Wednesday’s body jolted forward, a cry tearing in her throat, but she had no strength left. Her legs buckled beneath her, her hands clawed the marble as the first tranquilizer dart hissed through the air and sank into Tyler’s shoulder. He snarled, staggered, tried to wrench it free. A second dart embedded in his side. A third in his leg. The Hyde fought, staggering forward, claws scraping marble in resistance. His roar shook the chandeliers, defiance thrumming through the tether as though he could will himself to remain upright for her. For her. But the animal tranquilizers were merciless. His body shuddered, limbs trembling, then collapsed under his weight with a thunderous crash.

The hall went silent but for the hiss of smoke and the faint sobbing of lingering onlookers — Enid and Agnes who were hiding, trembling, far from the stage; Bianca and Ajex on the other side, hiding behind overturned tables. Pugsley had protected his grandmother’s fallen body through the entire madness, and only now did Hester Frump finally stir awake with consciousness.  

With the help of her mother, Wednesday dragged herself to her knees, every nerve shrieking. Her dark eyes fixed on Tyler—her Hyde, her tether, her partner—now sprawled in defeat on the cold marble floor.

The Sheriff’s men swarmed, rifles trained, chains ready — they’d come prepared to capture a monster.

And Wednesday Addams knew with chilling certainty—this was the beginning of the end.

Chapter Text

Hours later, the debris of the Gala had been cleared into gaping silence. The velvet banners lay charred, the marble scarred, and the guests scattered to their respective holes of safety. Many of the Nevermore students hitched rides with their parents after hastily packing their belongings and leaving the academy grounds abruptly.

Yet, in the Addams’ cottage, there was no calm—only the kind of taut quiet that clung after catastrophe. Wednesday reclined against a fainting couch, pallid but unbowed. Her muscles tremored faintly, not from exhaustion alone but from something deeper, gnawing at marrow and mind alike. The tether to Tyler thrummed faintly, but with him unconscious and taken by the Sheriff’s men, it was like a heartbeat muffled by distance.

Morticia stood tall at the foot of the couch. “You should be in a hospital,” she said, tone cool but weighted. “These tremors are not something you can dismiss with will alone.”

Wednesday’s eyes, half-lidded but sharp, cut to her mother. “What doctor would you suggest, Mother? One with a prescription for exorcisms? A scalpel for visions?” Her voice was brittle but laced with its usual acid. “My ailment is not of the flesh. It’s a festering of the spirit. No leech or surgeon will excise it.”

Morticia’s composure broke. “Exactly so. I warned you, my little viper. You plunder visions as though they are yours to command, but the truth is otherwise—they command you. Do you think I did not watch my own sister unravel this way?”

Wednesday said nothing.

But the room chilled, as though the mere invocation of Ophelia’s name summoned a ghost. Morticia’s gaze drifted beyond the walls, to the memory of her sister’s youth. “It began just as it does with you. The visions came harder, sharper, stripping her from sleep, until she could not tell one world from the next. A whisper would make her flinch, a shadow would make her scream. In the descent of weeks, less than six months, her gift bled into madness. She could not see the difference between reality and the horrors her mind conjured.”

Wednesday sat in silence, her long fingers steepled. There was no tremor in her voice when she finally spoke, but the cut of it was dark. “And I suppose Dort and Gabrielle Barclay made matters worse.”

The recent confession still stung, only marginally allayed by the charred remains of Dort’s ashes which had been collected by the police as evidence of an ongoing investigation and threat.

“Yes,” Morticia admitted softly. “He played his games, wove his lies. They painted Ophelia as broken long before she truly was, perhaps even made me believe her madder than the truth.” Her gaze flicked back to her daughter, pale and trembling but unbroken. “But that does not change that now, my darling raven, I see the same danger rising swiftly in you. I will not lose another of my blood to this madness. I will not lose you.”

Before Wednesday could respond, the door burst open. Sheriff Santiago swept inside, and behind her came Gomez.

“I need to speak with your daughter,” the Sheriff declared, gaze finding Wednesday.

“You will speak with her in our presence,” Morticia said at once, her tone silken but firm.

Gomez adjusted his cufflinks with deliberate calm. “I must insist—no questioning without counsel present. I am her lawyer, after all. Surely you don’t intend to breach due process in your zeal?”

Sheriff Santiago’s eyes narrowed. “I have reason to believe your daughter has been aiding and abetting Tyler Galpin. An escaped convict spotted as her date at the Gala tonight.” Her jaw tightened, unimpressed. “They even danced together, according to multiple eye-witnesses. I could have her arrested right now.”

Wednesday sat upright on the couch, pale but unflinching. The room was still thick with tension when the door creaked open on its own. Wednesday turned, irritation poised sharp as a blade at another interruption—only for it to falter when she saw the shadow of Elvis trot in. The hound’s nails clicked against the tiled floor, his damp nose working the air until he fixed on her. Without hesitation, he trodded forward and pressed his weight against her legs, a low whine curling in his throat as though he’d been searching for Tyler and had found her instead.

“Is that—Elvis?” Santiago spoke, incredulous.

Of course. The former sheriff’s dog was known by the entire department.

Wednesday’s hand fell almost instinctively to the dog’s head. He leaned harder into her, refusing to budge, his amber eyes lifting to hers with something almost pleading. For the first time in hours, Wednesday let herself exhale. Elvis carried something of Tyler, his presence. It was as though a fragment of him had been smuggled to her, steadfast and loyal. The tether hummed faintly in the back of her mind, and she wondered if the beast felt it too.

She sank to a crouch, black gown skirts folding around her, and pressed her palm to Elvis’s chest. His heart thundered, strong and steady. Steadier than hers. ‘Pathetic,’ she thought to herself, though the barb had no venom. ‘I am reduced to taking comfort from a dog.’ Elvis thumped his tail once, as if unbothered by the insult, and shoved his head beneath her hand, demanding more. She let him. Because in truth, this was something of Tyler. And she would take it.

Santiago sighed, too mired by all the complications of the night that a stolen dog didn’t make the list of offenses. “Anyway,” she said, tightly, “As I was saying — Wednesday could be charged with aiding and abetting.”

Morticia and Gomez moved subtly, flanking Wednesday. “You might reconsider that,” Morticia said smoothly. “Only a few days ago, the Jericho Sheriff’s department presided over a fiasco so appalling it would have made a carnival blush. The supposed ‘homicide investigation’ of my daughter—who was, at the time, very much alive. Yet your men nearly performed an autopsy upon her.”

Santiago paled and flinched. “That was a mistake— the poison your child willingly ingested imitated death so well it fooled even the coroner.”

“My life would have been remedied had they proceeded with that autopsy,” Wednesday said, crisply playing her part. “You’d have killed me for certain. Imagine the headlines: Local Sheriff Oversees Premature Autopsy of Living Student. You’ve made such a deplorable start to your new appointment in only a few months, Sheriff Santiago. Unexplained phenomena on top of a growing pile of victims. You’ve made enough of an impression on the local dinner-table conversation already, don’t you think?”

Gomez smiled thinly, a showman at once. “And if we proceed forward with the lawsuit, we’ll be sure to list the Coroner’s Office as one of the parties, alongside the Sheriff’s Department. Truth be told, we hadn’t planned on a lawsuit. I find it ungainly. But if we did pursue one— I suspect the payout would bankrupt this entire town.”

Santiago’s cheeks burned red, as she eyed Wednesday’s parents. “Are you blackmailing me?”

Wednesday tilted her head, her expression as flat as a blade. “Hardly. This town’s Sheriff’s department has always trafficked in quid pro quo and cover-ups. You are merely following the ignoble tradition of your predecessors.”

The Sheriff’s fists clenched, but the fight bled out of her in the face of three unyielding Addams stares. At last, she growled, “Fine. I won’t press charges. Not against her. Not this time.” Her voice turned clipped, cold. “But hear me well: in the wake of Principal Dort’s death, Nevermore Academy is finished. Shut down. The children are already leaving. And I, for one, will not be sorry to see the Addams family follow.”

Gomez pressed a hand to his chest. “Parting is always such sweet sorrow, Sheriff. But you may find our roots harder to tear up than you imagine.”

Wednesday’s voice cut through the stillness, cold. “And what of Tyler?”

Sheriff Santiago shifted, the fight in her shoulders stiff but weary. “He’ll be returned to Willow Hill. The institution’s been reopened, finally. His old room still stands—revamped, reinforced.” She drew in a breath. “Dr. Fairburn’s back in control, now that her sabbatical is over. With Judy Stonehearst gone, the board thought it best she retake command.”

Wednesday’s face sharpened into something perilous. “Tyler is not a villain. He protected people at the Gala. Whenever he killed before, it was not by choice. It was for a master who controlled him. A master now dead.” Her tone darkened, low and final. “He was groomed. Controlled. He doesn’t deserve to be punished for what was done to him.”

The Sheriff’s expression softened, something almost human showing beneath the badge. “It’s not my choice, Wednesday. It’s out of my hands. I’ve always liked Tyler. He was—a good kid. A nice boy.” Her jaw flexed, and she looked away. “I take no pleasure in seeing him locked up.” Her gaze hardened again, but less from anger than resignation. “That’s why I used animal tranquilizers instead of shotguns to take him down. Everyone else wanted the Hyde brought down with lethal force, but I wasn’t about to turn his capture into an execution.” She sighed, the sound frayed at the edges. “But the truth is, he’s dangerous. Whether he wants to be or not. That’s something I can’t ignore.”

Then Santiago left, her sheriff’s boots clicking down the hall, leaving only her parents at Wednesday’s side.

Wednesday’s hands curled, the posture of control masking the storm within. Her pulse, normally steady as a metronome, carried a jagged edge. Tyler—back to Willow Hill. To confinement. To chains. Her jaw tightened. The image of him thrashing under tranquilizers returned to her, unwanted but sharp. The Hyde had fought not to destroy but to protect her and everyone else. He had stood against Isaac, against Ophelia. And for that, he was to be locked away again, as though he were nothing more than a mindless beast.

Her black eyes glittered with fury.

She replayed Morticia’s warnings in her mind about the price of visions, about Ophelia’s descent into madness. Perhaps that fate loomed for her, but what of it? To lose herself while Tyler rotted behind reinforced glass was intolerable. The Sheriff called it justice. Wednesday named it what it was: cowardice. Cowardice dressed as order, punishment masquerading as safety.

No. This was not Tyler’s end.

Wednesday Addams did not beg, did not plead—but she plotted. Already the threads of a plan began to weave: Willow Hill’s layout, its history of breaches, the staff. Dr. Fairburn’s return was an obstacle, but also a potential point of weakness. Even the most upright doctors had their vices. She would find them. She would exploit them. What unsettled her more than anything else was not the injustice itself, but what it revealed in her. The thought of Tyler chained, sedated, hollow-eyed—it made her chest constrict, her pulse sharpen. He was not merely a tether. Not merely a weapon or partner. He had chosen her over blood, over family.

And now she would choose him, no matter what it cost.

Tyler would not stay in Willow Hill. Not if Wednesday Addams had anything to say about it.

“My little venomous offspring,” Gomez began, his voice low and heavy with fatherly warmth. “I see that look in your eyes. I know it well. You’re already planning his escape.”

Wednesday tilted her head, unblinking. She did not bother to deny it.

Gomez stepped closer, crouching slightly so his broad, expressive face aligned with hers. “If you break him out, he’ll spend the rest of his life as prey. Running, hiding, hunted. Do you want that for him? Do you want that for yourself? You would never have peace.”

“I don’t require peace,” Wednesday replied, flatly.

Gomez pressed on, his words threaded with rare gravity. “The world will never give outcasts justice easily. But Tyler doesn’t have to stand before them defenseless. He won’t have some incompetent public defender this time.” His dark eyes glimmered, fierce. “He’ll have the backing of the Addams family.”

Morticia’s painted smile curved faintly, amused despite the heaviness in the air. “He’ll have Cousin Itt. You know that he’s a remarkable lawyer, Wednesday. Brilliant. He’s argued more cases defending outcasts than any other lawyer on this side of the Bermuda Triangle. Paranormal defendants, shifters, necromancers, even a banshee accused of inciting riots with her wails.”

Gomez’s chest swelled with pride. “No prosecutor has ever bested him. He’ll know how to argue Tyler’s case, how to turn what the world fears into a shield. We must let him try.”

Wednesday’s spine stayed straight, but the room pressed too close. Patience was not her art. Justice was not something she trusted in courtrooms or in paper law. The image of Tyler in chains, sedated, haunted her like a nail hammered under her fingernails.

Gomez softened. “Remember—Tyler avoided trial as an adult. The court agreed Laurel Gates was the true mastermind. Tyler was her weapon, her unwilling accomplice. He was a minor. Groomed. Unfree until he killed her. That argument can work again. Expanded. Strengthened.”

Wednesday’s voice, when it came, was cool, flat. “The justice system has never been just. Not for outcasts.”

Morticia and Gomez shared a long look before Morticia spoke. “On that, we agree. But rashness, darling, will undo you both. You must wait. For once in your life, restrain yourself.”

Wednesday’s black gaze burned with fury, but she did not immediately move. In the quiet, she felt her own heart beat harder than she wished to admit. Fear. The word itself felt alien on her tongue, but the sensation was worse—an uninvited parasite gnawing beneath her ribs. Wednesday Addams had spent her life walking hand-in-hand with blades and death, never once trembling at her own mortality. Her blood was cold, her pulse steady, her mind unshaken by threats. But this was different. Fear had not come for her. It had come for him.

For Tyler.

It rattled in her chest with every remembered echo of chains at Willow Hill. Every sterile corridor, every lock and key that had tried to smother him once before. She had relished it before, but now she hated the mere thought of it—hated the thought of his shoulders bowed under fluorescent lights, hated the way his heat would be leeched out by the damp of that place, hated the sterile reek of the chemical or the electroshock control they would use to make him docile. The Hyde was meant to rage, to breathe wild. He was not meant to be caged.

And yet— the weight of her parents’ voices lingered. Morticia’s quiet warnings, Gomez’s steady plea. They were not fools, nor cowards. The wisdom in their caution pressed against her rage like lead against fire. She wanted to tear open walls and pull him free that instant, but she understood—horribly, inconviently—that doing so would damn him to chains of another kind. A life hunted, a life in the shadows. Her black gaze drifted toward the window, expression calm, but her nails bit crescents into her palm behind her back. Fear had claws in her. Love had sharpened them. And though she loathed both, she would not turn away.

She would endure the poison of patience—for now. But every second Tyler spent in Willow Hill counted, and she would answer each second with retribution and vengeance.

“I promise nothing,” Wednesday said finally, her tone clipped, precise.

Morticia stood near the hearth, her silhouette tall, immaculate, as though she belonged more to portraiture than to the world of the living. “Very well, my darling.”

Wednesday did not circle the truth. She never did. She turned towards her mother. “I saw it,” she said, voice flat, cutting. “The night you buried Isaac under the Skull Tree. You and Father. The storm. The earth still fresh from the shovel.”

Morticia’s poise faltered only slightly—an infinitesimal crack in her composure. She exhaled, then flicked a glance toward Gomez, lingering in the corner like a loyal blade waiting for orders. “My love, perhaps you should see to Cousin Itt’s arrangements as we’ve discussed.”

He hesitated, concern tugging at his features, but her hand brushed his sleeve in a silent command. With one last look at Wednesday, Gomez swept out, leaving the air sharp and taut in his absence.

Morticia turned fully to her daughter. For once, she allowed her voice its unguarded weight. “I remember that night. I remember the grave. And I remember— you.” Her gaze sharpened, obsidian and luminous all at once. “A girl standing where no girl should have stood. A shadow cut loose from time. I thought her a phantom, perhaps a trick of grief or sight. But now—” her head tilted, studying Wednesday with aching clarity, “But of course, it would take me years to recognize that girl in my own daughter’s features.”

Wednesday’s pulse stilled, though she betrayed nothing on the surface.

Morticia moved closer, the faint scent of roses and myrrh trailing with her. “I knew only this last year, when you confessed your growing powers with the sight— what I denied to myself earlier. That twenty years ago, on the worst night of my entire life, my gift had reached across decades and delivered me a glimpse of the future. Delivered me the first meeting I ever had with you, Wednesday. Years before I held you as a newborn in my arms.”

Her words pressed in like a trap.

“Your gift is powerful, far more than mine ever was,” Morticia said, her tone low, certain. “But power consumes. Ophelia was proof enough. She pushed too hard, too often, until she could no longer distinguish between vision and waking. The descent was not just steep, Wednesday—it was a drowning.”

Wednesday’s hands folded neatly in her lap, pale fingers steepled. “If you are warning me not to swim, you forget. I was born with water in my lungs.”

Morticia’s expression wavered. “I will not see my daughter shackled to the same fate as my sister.”

Inside, Wednesday felt the sting of recognition, like a scalpel drawn over skin already raw. Her visions were no longer benign curiosities or mere glimpses into another’s fate. They were invasive, parasitic things gnawing at her marrow. The seizures left her trembling, the black tears etched trails of ruin down her pale face, and the paralysis had begun to seize her limbs like iron shackles. Her body was a battlefield, each vision another wound carved into her flesh.

Morticia was not wrong. That was the worst part. Wednesday’s mother had diagnosed the illness for what it was: the slow fraying of mind and body, the unrelenting pressure of sight pressing too deeply into a vessel not built to contain it. Wednesday knew it. She felt it in the marrow of her bones, in the echoing fatigue that haunted her even after she woke. But to admit it aloud? To let Morticia hear her say yes, you are right? That was an indignity far worse than madness.

Her mouth curved, the faintest of brittle and sharp edges. “Your concern is noted.”

Morticia’s eyes glistened. “So you say. But I saw you, long before you were born. And even then, I knew—that girl in the storm was destined to walk a line between brilliance and oblivion. I pray you choose brilliance, my darling.”

Wednesday did not answer. She turned her face back to the window, the fractured colors of the stained glass cutting across her pale skin.

Privately, though, in the hollows of her mind where no one could follow, the word gnawed. Oblivion.

It wasn’t much later that the narrow stairwell creaked beneath her steps as Wednesday descended into lower levels of the Gardener’s Cottage, Elvis padding faithfully at her side. The air shifted colder with every second that passed, until the stone corridor opened to the hidden door concealed behind her parents’ bedroom wall. With a shove of her pale hand, the panel gave way, and the secret seance chamber of Rosaline Rotwood yawned before her.

The room smelled faintly of wax and old incense, as though rituals still lingered in the walls. Heavy curtains blocked out the world, and the space was littered with the detritus of hiding—Tyler’s hiding.

She moved with quiet precision, her eyes falling over the things that marked his temporary existence here: a makeshift bed fashioned from blankets, the indent of his weight still present; a scattered pile of books her father must have loaned him; scraps of paper with restless sketches scrawled in dark graphite, curling edges betraying hours of agitation.

And then she saw it.

A black sweatshirt, folded carelessly on the edge of the bed, smelling faintly of pine, leather, and something uniquely him. Wednesday’s hand hovered for only a fraction of a second before she took it, sharp and deliberate. She pressed it to her face, the cotton cool against her skin, and breathed him in. The scent wrapped around her, steadying her the way nothing else could.

Elvis huffed as though in approval, tail swishing once before he settled heavily on the floor.

Wednesday sank onto the edge of the cot, the sweatshirt still clutched in her grip. It was absurd, sentimental, weak. And yet—she did not let go. She let his scent anchor her, soothe the static in her veins, hush the lingering tremors of her vision. For the first time since Tyler had been dragged away, she allowed herself to feel his absence fully, and to cling to the one thing he had left behind.

It didn’t matter that it made little sense. Wednesday pulled the black sweatshirt over her dark gown, the cotton hanging heavy and warm across her shoulders. It was oversized, and the incongruity of pairing it with a formal dress suited her perfectly—mourning attire with the armor of the one who was absent.

She lay down on the cot in the seance chamber, Elvis curling at her feet, and closed her eyes. With practiced control, she reached through the tether, stretching across the invisible strands that bound her to Tyler.

What met her was not his warmth, nor the magnetic hunger that usually blazed in the bond. Instead: silence, sedation, the muted roar of a Hyde’s body dragged under by drugs. She saw flashes—his monstrous form chained within the sterile white walls of Willow Hill, his wrists and ankles bolted in reinforced iron. Three Sheriff’s men stood watch as they transferred him into the room, tranq rifles leveled, their fingers twitching against the triggers as though they longed for an excuse to fire again. Tyler didn’t move. He couldn’t. He was drugged so heavily even the Hyde’s rage lay drowned.

Dr. Rachel Fairburn stood in the far back, framed by the double doors. Arms folded, her posture was a study in clinical detachment, though her sharp gaze never left Tyler’s sedated, shackled form. The guards wrestled the Hyde into his restraints with the reverence one usually gave a bomb. Fairburn said nothing, but her silence cut like a scalpel.

Wednesday’s eyes narrowed. The woman had returned to her post, resurrected as Willow Hill’s head psychiatrist as if the institution’s prior collapse had been a brief technical error. Fairburn had been blind to Judy Stonehearst’s cruelty, blind to the years of sadism masquerading as treatment under her very nose. To Wednesday, such blindness was indistinguishable from complicity. Ineptitude was no absolution. And now Tyler—her Tyler—was back under those same hands.

Anger flared in her chest, bitter and black. They feared him like an animal, even Fairburn, who in her lectures so loved to remind others of her progressive philosophy. Wednesday had even bothered to read her book cover to cover: Unlocking the Outcast Mind.

“The Outcast mind is not a deviation but a mirror. It reflects humanity’s own forgotten impulses—its fears, its hungers, its wild capacity for survival. To treat an Outcast as wholly Other is to deny that mirror, and in so doing, deny our own nature. The more we chain them, the more we chain ourselves.”

Wednesday recalled the words with bitter clarity. Too flowery prose, all honey and respect. Yet here Fairburn stood, watching as Tyler’s wrists were bitten into by reinforced iron. Not a word to stop them. Not a move to intervene.

The hypocrisy soured Wednesday’s tongue. Fairburn’s philosophy might speak of dignity, but her practice still consigned Tyler to chains and padded cells. They still shackled Tyler like an animal. They did not see what Wednesday saw: the boy who had caught her every time she fell, who had chosen her over his own blood.

Guilt gnawed at her insides.

She had seen his death in her visions, had watched the nightmare of his uncle and her aunt standing triumphant over his corpse. Now she was watching another death in miniature—drugged, shackled, lifeless in every way that mattered. The difference between the vision and this reality was only a matter of patience.

So she watched over him as he lay unconscious, Hyde form still, the beast tamed not by mercy but by chemical force. Her eyes stayed on him as though her vigilance alone could keep him safe.

The sound came like a crack across the chamber—footsteps, hurried, voices above. Wednesday snapped her eyes open, severing her tether with effort. Elvis growled low in his throat, ears pricked. The hidden door creaked, and light spilled down the stairwell. Enid appeared first, her golden curls a stark contrast to the gloom, Agnes close behind with her calculating eyes, and Bianca last, regal even in haste.

Enid’s voice carried worry. “Wednesday—your mom said you were down here.”

Wednesday sat up, adjusting the black sweatshirt, her expression cool and unyielding despite the fury still burning beneath. “Then you already know more than you should.”

But they had found her, and whatever she intended to do next would now have witnesses. Enid, Agnes, and Bianca arranged themselves nearby. None of them pressed too close; they knew Wednesday’s tolerance for touch was limited.

Enid’s voice came first, carrying the ache of resignation. “They’re sending us all home. Nevermore’s shut down after Dort’s death. Classes suspended, dorms emptied. We’re— done.”

Bianca nodded, her arms folded, trying to mask the emotion flickering in her face. “It doesn’t feel real yet. But—” Her eyes met Wednesday’s, steady. “My mother’s free now. And that’s because of you. You cut us loose from Morning Song, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to repay you for that.”

Wednesday tilted her head, pale as porcelain, her gaze sharp. “I may require payment sooner than you think. Tyler will not remain in chains forever. A siren’s voice could prove useful in an escape, should subtlety or distraction be required.”

Bianca’s shoulders tensed, a flicker of fear shadowing her poise. But then she lifted her chin. “Then I’ll do it. Whatever you ask. I owe you too much to refuse.”

Enid nodded, her hands fidgeting at her sleeves, blue eyes glancing between Wednesday and Bianca. “I’ll help, too.”

Wednesday’s brow lifted in faint disbelief, her gaze slicing sharp. “Even though you’ve despised Tyler since the day you met him?”

“That’s a little harsh,” Enid admitted, grimacing. “Maybe true. But still harsh.” She took a breath, her voice softening. “I saw him at the Gala, Wednesday. I saw him fight for you—for your family. He didn’t even hesitate. That counts for something. Even if I don’t like him… it gave him—I don’t know. Some marginal good will.”

The words prickled in Wednesday’s chest like thorns, but they lodged somewhere deeper than she cared to admit. Enid was sentimental, ridiculous, but she was also sincere, and sincerity was a rarer quality than most people credited.

Agnes, naturally, broke the gravity with her trademark bluntness. “I’ve always shipped you two. The whole doomed-dark-romance thing? Very on brand. So, yes. I’m in.”

Wednesday gave her a slow, flat look, the kind that could freeze marrow. But even she couldn’t entirely kill the strange, faint warmth that rose at having these three standing with her—even if their reasons were flawed, sentimental, or absurd.

“My dad actually showed up in person this time.” Agnes gave a careless shrug, though her eyes lingered on Wednesday with something close to fondness. “Guess this is goodbye for now. But don’t think I won’t come running if you call me back in. Someone has to witness the gothic chaos of your life up close and catalogue it for the rest of society.”

Wednesday’s expression didn’t change, but her fingers tightened in the fabric of Tyler’s sweatshirt, the cotton holding the ghost of his scent. She offered nothing sentimental in return—only a cool, precise: “I expect competence if I call. No less.”

Enid’s bright eyes shimmered, even as she tried to be strong. “Since they’re sending us all back home—probably for good, I don’t know when—or if—we’ll be back to Nevermore.” She pulled Wednesday into the closest thing to a hug she could manage without losing a limb: a quick squeeze around her stiff shoulders, letting go before Wednesday could protest. “Don’t do anything reckless while I’m gone.”

Bianca only gave a cool acknowledging nod from afar, far more civilized than the teary-eyed spectacle of the other two. The three girls eventually filed out, the stairwell swallowing their chatter and footsteps until the chamber was quiet again. Elvis shifted at her side, head on her knee, as though sensing the ache she would never name.

For a moment, Wednesday sat in silence, letting the emptiness settle. She was not built for companionship, and yet the absence of her unlikely circle struck sharper than she anticipated. Allies were tools—but tools abandoned to distance dulled quickly. She was alone again, save for Elvis and the faint hum of the tether that tied her to Tyler, drugged and shackled miles away. The thought twisted in her chest like a knife.

Nevermore was closed, her circle dispersed, her parents watching her too closely.

But Wednesday Addams did not despair.

She plotted.

She also laid back down on the bed. The tether snapped taut the moment Wednesday closed her eyes. Darkness rushed over her, and then—she stood in the void of his prison at Willow Hill, the padded walls white as bleached bones. The air smelled stale, sterile.

Tyler lay in the center, his Hyde form sprawled out, shackles biting into his wrists and ankles. He was bare, pale under the glow of the fluorescent light, breath shallow. Alone. The guards were gone, at last. They had left him sedated, chained, abandoned like a rabid dog.

Wednesday hovered over him through the tether, her incorporeal form shadowing his.

He looked cold. She hated it. Tyler was not meant to be cold—his skin always burned hot, feverish with Hyde fire. Cold made him look wrong. Her hand lingered above his chest, unable to cover him, unable to give him warmth. Guilt pressed sharp in her ribs.

Then his body twitched.

A low growl scraped from his throat, guttural, unformed. The Hyde blinked awake, no trace of the boy left in his eyes—only raw, feral instinct. His head whipped around, wild, shackles clanging as he jerked against the chains. His breath tore from his lungs, panicked, uneven, the tether searing her with every pulse of his terror.

Wednesday did not flinch. She pressed her palm against his chest—not flesh to flesh, but through the tether, her presence sank in anyway. “Stop,” she commanded, her voice even, cool, unyielding. An anchor cast into stormy waters. “You are not alone. I’m here, Tyler.”

The Hyde froze. The tether snapped taut between them. His glowing eyes locked on hers, wide, haunted, caught between rage and collapse. His chest rose and fell like that of a cornered animal, trembling as if every nerve was raw. Then—slowly, shockingly—he leaned into her touch. Desperate. Starved. It startled her. Wednesday was not one for touch; she had always recoiled from it, even from Enid’s suffocating embraces. But this was different. His body practically begged for it, pressing into her palm like a parched creature finding water. He had been starved of warmth, of contact, of reassurance, and it poured out of him now, unguarded.

His monstrous body shook beneath her hand, muscles taut, breath ragged. She smoothed her touch down his chest, along his arm—slow, deliberate strokes, comfort as much as control, but the effect was the same. “You are not alone,” she repeated, each word precise, binding.

The tether thrummed. His panic bled into her in waves: fear sharp as knives, confusion coiled in knots, longing so fierce it scorched. Wednesday pulled it into herself, refusing to be overwhelmed, forcing calm back through the bond like a transfusion. The tremors slowed. His thrashing dulled into stillness. Slowly, haltingly, the Hyde leaned closer, his massive frame sagging under her hand like a beaten hound rediscovering safety.

Her gaze flickered, studying him with dispassion she no longer felt. She let her hand linger longer than she intended, her pale fingers resting where his pulse hammered strongest. His trembling eased, finally, and the tether settled into a steady hum. A sigh slipped from his lips—not annoyance, but something rarer. Relief.

With that, the Hyde’s trembling frame shuddered, bones folding in on themselves, muscle twisting, claws retreating into flesh. The transformation ripped through him with a guttural sound, until at last, it was only Tyler again—human, raw, and naked in the white sterility of the padded cell. The shackles were so loose on him now that his arms slipped through the gaps, metal scraping uselessly against the floor as his wrists fell free.

For a moment, there was no recognition there at all—only a boy dragged violently back into himself, reeling from the cage of his own body.

Wednesday remained beside him, unflinching, her palm still pressed to the fevered drumbeat of his chest. His heart rattled like a trapped bird, too fast, too furious, alive against her touch. His breath came uneven, ragged. Sweat slicked his temples, tangled his curls, ran in rivulets down the sharp lines of his neck and shoulders, over all the various scars and lacerations he had been doled out in life.

The tether hummed between them, alive with panic. Exhaustion, fear, confusion—all of it bled across the thread and into her. He was not just exhausted; he was hollowed out, scraped raw from the inside. He blinked again, slower this time, his gaze flicking across the padded walls before finding her. His eyes sharpened at once, like iron drawn to a magnet.

Wednesday’s stare did not waver. “You’re awake,” she observed, her tone flat, as though the world hadn’t just crumbled around him.

He shifted slightly, shoulders drawing forward, instinct pulling him closer to the one familiar thing in the sterile white nightmare. The chains rattled faintly but fell away like dead weight. His body leaned toward hers, heat brushing against her arm, his breath trembling against her shoulder. For a moment, the roles were inverted. Not Hyde, not predator. Just Tyler—frayed, vulnerable, shivering like an animal dragged back from the edge of slaughter.

His gaze swept the cell. The chains. The sterile white walls. Recognition struck, sharp as glass, and bitterness carved itself into his features. His jaw clenched. His fists curled. But he did not erupt—he simply sagged, exhausted, trembling, and moved closer into the cocoon of her presence. She, always cold as a corpse, had become the only source of warmth in the room. And she was glad for it, for once —allowed him to press against her, his heat wrapping around her as if it might keep the truth at bay.

Her arms circled him, uncharacteristically, more than she had ever offered before. Comfort—Wednesday Addams did not comfort, but here she was, anchoring him, her pale fingers splayed against his bare back, steady, unyielding. A dark parody of a cradle.

He buried his face against her shoulder, breath shuddering out in a half-laugh, half-groan. “You’re wearing my sweatshirt,” he muttered, nonsensically.

Wednesday’s lips barely moved, voice soft. “It’s in my color.”

His laugh came again, ragged but faint, vibrating against her collarbone. Bitter as it was, the sound made something inside her tighten. Tyler, naked and afraid, but still hers—and she still had him, for now.

And she would protect him, if it was the last thing she ever did.

Chapter Text

The Addams family’s removal from Nevermore felt less like a quiet relocation and more like an omen of doom falling over the residents of Jericho.

Morticia had been asked to vacate the Gardener’s Cottage, as the board of Nevermore were busy taking it upon itself to find a new principal that would be willing to take on the administration of the school for the rest of the year, an especially daunting task after the last two consecutive years had ended in the abrupt and early demise of the presiding principal. Not many appeared to be willing to take on such an intimidating task. Wednesday didn't understand that. Had she been of age, the prospect of employment at such a dubious and dangerous institution would have been appealing. Other outcasts apparently didn't agree.

​​When the family arrived on the main streets, they were met with the standard welcoming of immediate suspicion and fear. The townsfolk were already uneasy after the chaos of the Gala and Principal Dort’s public immolation. Seeing the macabre family renting a modest (if still brooding) house on the edge of town did not sit well with them. Store clerks whispered, adults and their children crossed the street to avoid them. At least three petitions landed on the desk of Jericho’s new interim mayor within the week, demanding to know whether it was legal for “such a family” to move within town limits. The complaints ranged from fear of property value collapse to muttered accusations that the Addamses brought “unnatural energy” with them.

There had been another option. Grandmama had offered to let them stay in her palatial rental on the other far side of town—an old mansion perched on a hill, filled with musty tapestries, iron chandeliers, and a collection of apothecary jars whose contents no one asked about. But Morticia had refused almost instantly.

“Exposure to my mother in excess,” she told Gomez with grave solemnity, “has been proven fatal to my nerves.”

Gomez, naturally, agreed.

So they settled in Jericho, the Gardener’s Cottage left behind, and Willow Hill looming like a shadow at the edge of everything.

Even their ordinary routines became spectacles. One crisp morning, Lurch lumbered down Main Street, dutifully walking Elvis with a squeaky black leash. The small dog trotted happily beside the enormous pillar of a chauffeur, which had apparently been a sight that had surprised the dullard minds of this insufferable town. Of course, Lurch had been Lurch about it — bending down with a dainty black bag, scooping up Elvis’s mess with meticulous care, uncaring to the wide-eyed stares following him. To Jericho, the sight of Lurch acting like an ordinary dog-walker was somehow more terrifying than if he’d been dragging a coffin.

For Wednesday, the move was tolerable only in the sense that it brought her physically closer to Tyler, even if he was locked away behind Willow Hill’s walls. She made no outward complaint as they unpacked their belongings, but in her heart the town’s hostility, the smallness of Jericho, all of it seemed irrelevant. Her mind was already turning on darker gears: Tyler’s imprisonment, his suffering, and the chains she had seen clamped around him.

The others might treat this as a new chapter of Addams eccentricity, but for Wednesday, it was nothing less than the staging ground for war.

Still, her extended stay in town inspired a riot of sensations. The little bell above the Weathervane’s door chimed as Wednesday pushed inside. The same warm smell of espresso and sugar clung to the air, the hum of a grinder in the background, the din of chattering teenagers. Everything looked the same as last year when she used to walk through this door so frequently, but Wednesday felt the phantom burn of memory clinging to every surface. The place where she had first met Tyler. Each time afterwards where the draw of him had pulled her back as much as the craving of a quad. The place where she had first kissed Tyler — the place where she had first felt betrayal. The banal walls of commercialized coffee now felt like a mausoleum.

She slid into line with her usual chill indifference—only to find Lucas Walker behind the counter. The boy had once been an annoyance, the mayor’s spoiled son, with a sneer that barely hid his disdain for outcasts.

When his gaze caught hers, his easy barista-smile faltered. “Wednesday.” His voice was quieter than she remembered, tinged with something almost— weary. “I heard your family moved into town.”

She ordered her quad without returning the greeting. Lucas blinked, his mouth twitching like he wanted to say more, but he only rang it up with mechanical precision. Before she was forced to endure idle chitchat and the insufferable wasteland of small talk, she turned on her heel and claimed a shadowed corner table. Yet a few minutes later, Lucas approached, the cup in hand. He placed it before her, but didn’t immediately step back. His shoulders were squared, braced, like someone steeling themselves to face a firing squad.

He cleared his throat. “I heard—about Tyler.”

Her gaze snapped up, sharpened like the edge of a blade. “What did you hear?”

“That he’s back at Willow Hill.” His jaw tightened. “That they dragged him there in chains. I heard they’re trying to appeal?”

Wednesday’s fingers tightened around the cup. “Yes.”

The word hung like frost in the air between them.

For a moment, Lucas’s mask of composure slipped. He looked older than the boy she remembered —haunted, even. “He was my best friend, you know. Before all of this. Before—” His words snagged in his throat, and he shook his head as though to clear it. The hesitation, raw and unpolished, was not what she expected from Lucas Walker, son of Jericho’s late mayor, self-styled golden boy.

“Most people in this town have already written him off,” she said coolly, testing him.

“Most people in this town are cowards,” Lucas muttered, surprising her again.

Wednesday studied him in silence, her eyes narrowing. Lucas had been a small-town boy steeped in his father’s disdain for outcasts, but maybe the aftermath of everything that transpired last year had carved him into something different. Suffering tended to do that. She could see the faint tightness around his eyes, the gravity in his voice, the way he seemed to wrestle with every word before setting it loose.

He lingered, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck as though the words itched there. “You know— last year, if I’d seen you sitting here, I’d have walked the other way. Maybe muttered something about outcasts under my breath. Thought it was funny. Thought I was better.”

Wednesday sipped her drink, unimpressed. “Self-awareness is not absolution. It only proves you were both a coward and a fool.”

He huffed a laugh, quick and humorless. “Yeah. I guess I deserved that. I’m not asking for a gold star. I just—I guess I don’t want to keep pretending to be that kid anymore.”

She knew hatred had simply been easier for him. It usually was for normies. As if bitterness had been a shield against the dissonance of losing both a father and a friend to the same sickness—small-town bigotry and the chaos of monsters hiding in plain sight.

Wednesday tilted her head, studying him like one of her dissected specimens. “And Tyler?”

His throat worked, struggling to explain himself — to explain anything. “I don’t know. I hated him. I hated him more than anyone after—after everything came out. The murders. Thornhill. All of it. I wanted to blame him, because it was easier. Because I knew him. Because we used to sit in this shop, splitting muffins and ditching school, and the idea that he was—” He broke off, rubbing the back of his neck. “It messed me up.”

Wednesday raised an eyebrow. “I know I have a habit of dressing in black, but I’ve never been mistaken for a religious cleric before. I’m not someone you confess your sins to — I am the person that doles out the reprisals.”

Lucas didn’t have a reply to any of that.

Wednesday’s eyes narrowed. “Tyler doesn’t deserve pity, least of all from the residents of this backwater town.”

“It’s not— I’m not,” he stammered. “That’s not what I’m doing.” Silence stretched, taut as piano wire. Lucas broke it with a sigh. “Most people here, they think the Addams family moving into Jericho is the worst thing to happen since Thornhill. But maybe— maybe it’s exactly what this place deserves. Someone who doesn’t care what the rest of us think.”

Wednesday tilted her head. For once, she didn’t immediately cut him down. She studied him like one of her own specimens, dissected under glass. Lucas Walker was probably still a coward, probably still prone to weakness, but grief and guilt had possibly carved him into something slightly less loathsome than before. The fact that he’d even approached her, approached the topic of Tyler with something other than disdain and bigotry, told her so.

Wednesday was about to reply when her world split in two.

The Weathervane blurred at the edges—the clatter of cups, the hiss of steaming milk, Lucas standing across from her—all of it receded under a flood of something else. She blinked. And suddenly she saw it: the same café, only drenched in night. Tyler’s mouth pressed to her own. His hand cupping her jaw, tentative and hungry all at once. The first kiss—her first kiss. She saw herself lean back just slightly, her eyes lifting to him, smiling. Smiling. A look of trust so raw and devastating it struck her chest like a blade. Then she saw herself press back to him, as though she couldn’t stop, as though the choice had never been a choice at all.

“Wednesday?” Lucas’s voice cut through, startled. He looked confused, his tone heavy with alarm. “Are you—are you okay?”

This was different from all her other visions. She was in both places at once—daylight, Lucas staring at her across the table, and night, Tyler’s lips still ghosting her counterpart. She was standing in two worlds at the same time, caught between memory and present, between then and now.

Her hand shook.

She blinked again, and the Weathervane snapped back into focus. The vision tore away, but its echo clung, burning across her mouth as if Tyler’s kiss still lingered there. Her breath came slow, deliberate.

She hadn’t trusted her own powers fully for months, but this was something worse.

This was new.

“Christ,” Lucas whispered. His eyes widened as he took another step closer. “You’re—” His words faltered. “You’re crying something black.”

The room tilted faintly. Her hands curled into fists at her sides, nails biting into her palms. She wiped the tears away, hating showing weakness. But inside—inside, dread coiled cold and certain in her stomach. Her visions were no longer visions. They were bleeding into reality. If what her mother had promised would come to pass, soon she would no longer be able to tell where one ended and the other began.

The past week had been difficult for Tyler, she knew.

The first Attorney-Client visit from Cousin Itt had been both absurdly long and necessary. Tyler had stared at the small, hair-covered figure with his oversized hat and dark glasses as though the universe had played one final cruel joke on him. The garbled rapid-fire cadence of Itt’s voice had made Tyler gape outright, at first. But to his credit, Tyler had — as he had always done — adapted to the oddities of the Addam’s family with surprising discernment, even if he spent half the time alternating between stares and muffled confusion at her cousin’s incomprehensible mumbling.

Itt had spoken in that rapid chittering torrent of syllables that was his language; Gomez translated in a calm, syrupy voice, turning Itt’s gibberish into crisp and devastatingly competent legalese. “Two primary avenues,” Gomez said, translating, tapping a pad. “Court route and hospital route.”

Itt chirped affirmatively. Gomez smoothed his notes into a tidy list and read them aloud as if he were reciting a prayer: a petition for incompetency, and alternatively, a negotiated deferred prosecution conditioned on intensive treatment and supervision.

Wednesday listened to the specifics Itt and Gomez marshalled, the cold surgical architecture of a legal campaign. It was the sort of thing Itt could do on paper in his sleep: deconstruct, sequence, weaponize bureaucracy into motion, a plan both clinical and ruthless in its kindness. He would file. He would subpoena. He would drag Willow Hill into courthouse light and make its practices answerable. He would turn Fairburn’s own prose—Unlocking the Outcast Mind—back on her if necessary. He would show that a woman who wrote of dignity could not, in good conscience, endorse unending sterilized imprisonment when alternatives existed.

The defenses were outlined and itemized over grueling hours. The allegations of grooming and lack of agency, a timeline documenting when Thornhill unlocked Tyler, the period he was under direct control, and the acts that coincided with that coercion, all while he’d been a minor. Then, later, during his outbreak, the matter of psychological devolvement and temporary insanity. The need for further neuro-psychiatric evidence, with independent outcast experts willing to testify that the Hyde state was a dissociative/neurological phenomenon exacerbated by external coercion—this was not mere moral failure but an exploitable condition.

Itt’s hair trembled with emphasis. He rapped out an excited staccato that Gomez only half translated before confessing, “He specifically recommends an independent psychiatric evaluation. A motion for a court-ordered clinical review will follow immediately.”

Furthermore, Itt decreed he could get the independent psychiatrist to outline a detailed conditional-release/treatment plan, including names of clinicians, monitoring protocols (24/7 surveillance, ankle monitoring, health check-ins), secure transitional housing, emergency contingencies.

“But Dr. Fairburn is still pivotal,” Gomez said next, and the words carried like a hammer. “If she’s persuaded—if she signs off on a supervised outpatient model—her clinical recommendation will sway a judge. If not, we force a judicial review and present independent experts to contest her findings.”

Wednesday realized with a descending annoyance that Dr. Fairburn was a necessary evil. If they could convince Fairburn and Willow Hill’s board that Tyler’s condition mandated therapeutic care, not penal confinement, they could file for a step-down or conditional release that could short-circuit a public trial—provided the hospital was willing and the court signed off.

Tyler’s jaw tightened. “And if she’s against it?”

“We litigate,” Cousin Itt answered in a rapid tumble; Gomez’s voice folded the translation into a new plan. “If Willow Hill’s administration was blind under Stonehearst, there are precedents for judicial skepticism. A judge may prefer a supervised community program rather than open-ended confinement under a scandalized institution.”

Wednesday’s mind cataloged the practicalities like a coroner arranging evidence on a morgue table: documents, witness affidavits, a credible psychiatric expert. The neat little parcels lawyers adored and judges respected—the kind of things a court could not casually dismiss. Rehabilitation evidence to illustrate Tyler’s capacity for change: Morticia and Gomez testifying to his protection of their family, Enid and Bianca recounting his restraint at the Gala, even Sheriff Santiago acknowledging that when the Hyde could have torn the room apart, he had chosen not to escalate. Then there were the guarantees: financial, custodial, legal. Gomez had already offered the Addams coffers as surety, Itt’s formidable retainer as a shield, every tool in the family arsenal to assure the court that Tyler would not slip away.

All of it was necessary. All of it would take time.

But Wednesday had no talent for waiting.

When she returned from the Weatherwane, the noise of small-town chatter still grating in her ears, she went directly to her room. She lay stiffly on the too-soft mattress of their new Jericho house, staring at the ceiling washed in glaring sunlight. Elvis snored faintly at the foot of the bed, a loyal shadow of the boy who could not be there. Her hands folded over her sternum, her mind still restless, refusing the stillness her body demanded.

She closed her eyes. The tether thrummed, eager.

Her breath thinned as she reached, threading herself through that invisible artery that bound her to him. When the tether pulled her across, the first thing that struck Wednesday wasn’t what she saw—it was what she felt. The air bit against her skin like frost, leeching the warmth from her bones. Sterile. Clinical. Normally she loved that sensation more than most children loved Christmas, but here she could almost taste the antiseptic tang clinging to the walls. Through Tyler, she sensed how the white walls swallowed everything: no shadows, no texture, no dignity. It was absence given form.

For someone who thrived in darkness and texture, Wednesday recoiled at the emptiness, the suffocating sterility that threatened to unmake him.

And Tyler was there—shackled, weary, but breathing— as always.

But what made it all the more jarring was that she’d been drawn directly into Tyler’s cell, mid-therapy session. Wednesday blinked to find him seated across from Dr. Fairburn. The room itself was an antiseptic box—walls padded in sterile white vinyl, stitched seams like scars running across every surface. The floor had the same soft, unforgiving give underfoot, muffling even the smallest movements. It was less a room than a containment chamber, designed to strip away every comfort until only silence and restraint remained. One wall was the same sort of iron bars that Wednesday had stood across from the last time she had visited Tyler in person at Willow Hill. Thick, reinforced, framed in brushed steel. It divided him from visitors or staff, allowing them to look in without stepping inside.

They were mid-session: Dr. Fairburn with a pen and a pad, seated in a chair; Tyler with his wrists cuffed, leaning forward, talking with unusual animation.

And every other word out of his mouth was Wednesday’s name.

“—she’s the only reason I don’t lose it,” Tyler said, his voice raw, straining as though every word might break loose into a growl. “You don’t get it, Doc. When everything’s pulling me apart, Wednesday —grounds me. She touches me, I stop shaking. Wednesday talks, and the Hyde listens. That’s never happened before. Not with anyone. Not even Laurel.”

Through the tether, Wednesday’s incorporeal form leaned closer. She should have felt scandalized or enraged by his confession, the raw intimacy of him laying bare what belonged only between them. Instead, something molten curled low in her chest. Warmth. Possession. A dark satisfaction she refused to name.

Across the glass, Dr. Fairburn froze mid-note. Her pen hovered, her eyes cutting sharp as glass. “You’re telling me Wednesday Addams has a stabilizing effect on your Hyde state?”

“Yes,” he bit out, too fast, too defensive. Then softer, resigned: “It’s like she’s—like she’s in control of my worst impulses. Of me.”

Wednesday’s gaze sharpened. Control. The word snagged like barbed wire. She had never sought mastery by replicating Thornhill’s chokehold of chains and commands. And yet—on his tongue, it did not sound like subjugation. It sounded like devotion, like truth spoken without shame.

Fairburn reclined slightly, her posture shifting from clinical to calculating. Wednesday drifted forward, curiosity overcoming her restraint. She peered at the psychiatrist’s open notes, words scrawled in crisp black ink:

Laurel Gates — groomed, conditioned into servitude. Hyde responded with violence.
With W.A. → rage episodes ameliorated. aggression redirected.
comfort? Not trigger? A new master.

The phrase cut into Wednesday like a scalpel. A new master.

So, Fairburn was aware that Wednesday had taken up the reins.

Tyler’s jaw worked, tight as though he felt her scrutiny even through the tether. His eyes flicked unconsciously toward the space where she hovered, seeking her like a compass inexorably north.

Wednesday’s pulse ticked faster. Hidden but watching, she felt the clash of emotions writhe inside her chest: fury at the comparison with Laurel Gates, fascination at the accuracy. Dr. Fairburn wasn’t entirely wrong, but she wasn’t entirely right, either. Wednesday would never be Thornhill. She would never use Tyler as a weapon chained to her whim. But salvation and mastery—perhaps they were threads spun from the same dark loom. And perhaps she, more than anyone else, was capable of walking the blade-thin edge between them.

Eventually, the session ended. The reinforced door slammed shut, muffling the scrape of Dr. Fairburn’s heels as she left Tyler alone in the padded cell.

Through the tether, Wednesday lingered like smoke. “You let her scribble down notes about me,” she said at once.

Tyler rubbed at the raw marks the shackles had left on his wrists. “She was going to scribble anyway. I just— didn’t fight it. Besides—” He tilted his head slightly, eyes flicking toward her. “I couldn’t exactly leave you out of it. You’re part of this. Of me.”

Her lips pressed into a thin line. It was true, but hearing it aloud still needled. “You should learn discretion.”

He huffed, restless. “Teach me then.”

She paused. “I have a different lesson in mind today,” she offered. “How to touch me through the tether.”

He groaned. They’d been trying that nonstop for days, and it was still only a one-way method for them. Wednesday could touch him. He could not touch her. It was an exercise in building frustrations. Everytime he lifted a hand towards her, he met nothing but air. When she moved, her palm pressed against his solidly. Still, where his skin should have burned hot, the tether only carried the whisper of heat and desperation. She smoothed her hand along the line of his chest, the phantom echo of touch that calmed his breathing every time, and started the lessons for today.

“You have to learn discipline,” she admonished, coolly. “It isn’t your nature. Paranormal arts bow to discipline, not instinct. You can’t touch me because you still surrender too easily to what you are.”

He leaned into her hand all the same, the brush of it, hunger in his eyes. “This isn’t fair.”

“Fairness was never a real concept.”

For a while they stayed like that, his breathing evening out beneath the weight of her hand. Then, as though struck by a thought, his gaze flicked down her frame.

“You’re not wearing it,” he muttered.

Her brow arched. “Wearing what?”

“My sweatshirt.” His mouth curved, softened with something dangerously close to fondness. “The black one. You looked better in it than I ever did.”

She rolled her eyes, withdrawing her hand. “Trite. Sentimental.”

He grinned crookedly, undeterred. “You don’t get how distracting it is, seeing you in something of mine. You looked—” he faltered, then let it out, low, unguarded— “like you belonged to me.”

Her eyes narrowed, dark as cut obsidian. “I belong to no one. Least of all a half-feral Hyde who can’t even figure out how to hold my hand through a tether.”

“Trust me,” he warned, tightly, “if I could touch you I’d be doing a lot more than holding your hand.”

She scoffed and rolled her eyes, even if there was a hint of redness that escaped her control, tinging her cheeks.

“I’m serious,” he said, pressing his advantage, leaning his head back against the wall, grinning despite the chains. “I really liked seeing you in it. I kinda miss it. You’re telling me you can sneak into a psychiatric facility through some creepy psychic cord, touch me whenever you want, and you won’t wear my sweatshirt again even if it's one of the few things I look forward to?”

Wednesday’s expression cooled. “Your logic is faulty. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. The sweatshirt is now mine.”

His brows lifted, amused. “Oh? You steal one piece of clothing and suddenly you’re a lawyer?” Tyler raised his shackled wrists in mock surrender, smile crooked. “Okay, fine, keep it. But at least admit it— if possession is nine-tenths of the law, does that mean you own me, too?”

Wednesday tilted her head, considering him like an unsolvable equation. “If by possession means the demonic kind, perhaps.”

His grin only widened. “That’s practically a love confession coming from you.”

“I should remind you,” she said, tiredly, “that the last person who claimed ownership of you ended with her corpse fertilizing daffodils.”

“And I’d gut her again a thousand times,” he said quietly, meeting her gaze through the tether. “So long as I got you at the end of it.”

For a moment, silence stretched—thick, electric. Declarations of homicidal intent had always left her with a tingling sensation under her skin.

Wednesday broke the stretched silence first, lips curling in the barest hint of a smile. “Flattery is beneath you.”

“Not when it works,” Tyler murmured.

For a while after their exchange, Wednesday lingered in the tether’s dim half-space, watching the way Tyler’s fingers flexed and unflexed against the shackles, a restless habit he didn’t even realize he had. It was still broad daylight. The cameras were still studying him, and she wondered what the security guards thought of his one-sided conversations with thin air — but it hardly could have merited too much suspicion in a mental institute.

His words still echoed—does that mean you own me, too? The audacity. The earnestness. She should have cut it down at once. Should have sharpened her tongue into the blade it usually was and left him bleeding on the edge of his own sentimentality. That was the sensible course. The safe one.

Instead, she stayed. She let him talk. She even—horrifyingly—bantered back. The realization pricked at her, like a thorn beneath the skin. In truth, she was unsettled by how comfortable it had felt, even through the tether. How easily her retorts had softened into something almost playful. How easily she had allowed him to look at her that way. She had built her life on control, on the satisfaction of distance, yet here she was letting an imprisoned Hyde with drugged eyes and a raw voice reach further into her than she allowed anyone else. The last person who had managed to get beneath her skin like this had been — well, Tyler too, but the practiced facade of him.

What was building between them was something far more dangerous than control or ownership. It was mutual recognition. The kind that crept under armor, found a heartbeat, and slipped a blade there between her ribcage.

From the other side of the tether, in the real world, she could hear her mother calling for her. Someone is phoning for you, dear. When Wednesday finally withdrew from the tether slowly, the echo of his warmth still clung to her palms. Back in her bed in Jericho, the black sweatshirt was draped over her chair like a claim she hadn’t meant to make — she lay staring at it, expression as unreadable as ever—except for the faint, traitorous flicker of warmth in her dark eyes as a plan formed.

“Wednesday,” Morticia called, again. “You have a phone call from Dr. Fairburn’s office.”

The infernal plastic receiver — a landline, one that came with the rented house — was pressed into Wednesday’s hand before she could protest. The line hummed cold against her ear, and then Dr. Fairburn’s clipped voice slid through. “Wednesday Addams,” Fairburn said, not a question but an assertion. “Good. I had hoped to speak to you.”

Wednesday’s posture stayed stiff. “Doctors are not in the habit of calling students on social visits.”

“This is not social,” Fairburn replied. “I’ve been conducting regular evaluations of Tyler Galpin. Your—presence—has not gone unnoticed.”

Wednesday’s eyes narrowed. “Presence?”

There was a faint pause, the kind that betrayed careful calculation —as Wednesday remembered well, the doctor’s confidence in the patient-client relationships could be bent out of shape for the greater good. Ethics was a malleable thing for Dr. Fairburn.

“He speaks of you frequently,” she confessed. “At first, I attributed it to adolescent attachment. But then I observed the pattern: his rage episodes shorten when you are mentioned. His vitals stabilize. His violent compulsions diminish. You are not merely a distraction or fixation. You are—something else. His new master.”

Wednesday’s grip on the receiver tightened. “I am not repeating Laurel Gates’s delusions.”

Fairburn’s voice sharpened, but not with hostility—with fascination. “No. I think not, but I would like to examine the—alleged stabilizing effect you have on him. The Hyde state has always been documented as uncontrollable—primal, dissociative. And yet he claims, incredibly, that you anchor him. You are the fulcrum on which his mind balances.”

Wednesday’s lip curled faintly. “That sounds like another word for leash.”

“Or lifeline,” Fairburn countered. “The distinction, I think, rests in your intent.” Silence laced the line, taut. Fairburn continued, her tone now deliberate: “If this bond is genuine, it may be clinically— useful. But more than that—it could be a case study with implications far beyond Mr. Galpin. I want you to come to Willow Hill. Officially. As part of his treatment.”

Wednesday’s brows arched, though no one could see. The audacity. To treat her as both subject and scientist. “And if I refuse?”

Fairburn exhaled softly. “Then you abandon him to confinement, sedation, and decades of wasted potential. You say you care for him? Then demonstrate it. Be present. Let me study this— effect you have. For his sake—and yours.”

Wednesday’s jaw tightened. Under any other circumstances, she would have rejected it outright, but the tether thrummed faintly at her wrist, whispering Tyler’s exhaustion, his loneliness, his clawing need.

“I’ll consider it,” she said at last, voice flat.

Fairburn’s satisfaction was audible. “Good. I’ll have my office contact you to arrange a visitation tomorrow.”

“I’m available today,” Wednesday said sharply.

A pause. “Very well. Come in before nightfall. Visitation hours end at six.”

The line clicked dead.

The doors of Willow Hill closed behind her with the same hydraulic hiss she remembered. White walls, polished floors, and the faint tang of antiseptic—it all pressed in with the sterile weight of déjà vu. Wednesday’s boots clicked against the linoleum as Dr. Fairburn escorted her down the short corridor. The woman’s posture was rigid, her notebook clutched against her chest, her eyes reserved with restrained fascination.

“This is unusual,” Fairburn murmured. “To grant an adolescent such access. But then, you’re hardly ordinary, are you, Miss Addams?”

“I’ve been repeatedly told otherwise,” Wednesday replied flatly, her expression unchanging.

Dr. Fairburn’s voice cut across the silence, clinical and precise. “He insists you’re the only one who can steady him. That when his impulses fracture him, you anchor him. That you are—his master.”

Wednesday’s gaze cut to her, lethal. “You once wrote in Unlocking the Outcast Mind: ‘The monstrous is not the negation of humanity, but its distorted reflection. To treat the monster, one must recognize the man within it.’”

Fairburn’s eyes widened faintly. “You’ve read my work.”

“He is as much human as monster. Your mistake would be in treating him as one without the other.”

They stopped at the familiar reinforced door. The sight was eerily the same as before—the keycard, the flick of switches, the heavy thud of locks disengaging. The door opened, and Wednesday’s gaze landed on him. The reinforced door slammed open with its usual metallic hiss, and Wednesday stepped into the padded chamber expecting Tyler.

But it was not Tyler.

The Hyde crouched low in the sterile white space, monstrous shoulders bowed, claws curled against the padding. His eyes snapped open at the intrusion—feral, unblinking, predatory. A guttural growl reverberated from his chest, a sound meant to rattle bones.

From behind, Dr. Fairburn’s voice cut, clinical and sharp. “He transformed only a few minutes ago. I thought, rather than delay this encounter, we exploit the opportunity to see your restraining effects.”

Wednesday did not flinch, but her glare hardened. She stepped forward, deliberate, hands clasped neatly behind her back as though addressing a disobedient hound rather than a beast that had torn men apart. The tether thrummed, heat and fear pressing into her veins. The Hyde surged forward, chains clattering as his muscles bunched. His breath steamed in ragged bursts, and for a moment, the room trembled with the weight of his violence.

But Wednesday’s voice cut through sharply. “Stop.”

The Hyde froze, looming over her. His claws hovered inches from the bars, far from her, trembling. His chest heaved. Those wild, yellow-ringed eyes locked on hers, and something shifted—hesitation, recognition.

She stepped closer still, until she was pressed to the bars, until the heat of his body, feral and wild, curled against her like the lingering effects of smoke. Her pale hand lifted, deliberate, cool fingers brushing against the iron bars that separated them. Through the tether, his constant rage throbbed like a storm. She pressed into it, claiming space.

“You are not a mindless raging monster,” she said quietly, flat but edged with iron. “You are mine.”

The growl broke. His breath hitched, body shuddering forward, trying to reach for her hand — but the chains prevented contact from completion. Slowly, the tension built in him, denied contact — but his massive frame sagged in frustration, claws retracting slightly as he leaned toward her as much as was permissible, her touch something the creature was starved for. The tremor in his shoulders betrayed him—he was desperate, reaching for her as though she were the only thing anchoring him to the world.

Wednesday’s gaze softened only a fraction. Her monster. Though her hand remained steady against his bar, she could feel it—the Hyde’s craving for touch, for warmth. He pressed against the restraint of the chains with a low, almost plaintive sound, but the fury was gone, replaced by something fragile, intimate.

Behind her, Dr. Fairburn’s pen scratched furiously across paper. “Remarkable. Complete reversal of aggression. Obedience without sedation.”

But Wednesday ignored her. She let her hand drift upward, tracing along the beast’s jawline, until his trembling stilled entirely. He exhaled, hot and ragged, the sound almost like relief. To anyone else, it would have looked like mastery. To Wednesday, it was something far more dangerous. Recognition. Bond. Devotion.

The Hyde bowed his head. Chains clinked softly, like a vow sealed in iron.

And for the first time, even Dr. Fairburn looked unnerved.

The gates of Willow Hill clanged shut behind her, the echo of the reinforced locks biting into the night. Dr. Fairburn’s words still hung in Wednesday’s ears—clinical, measured, but tinged with reluctant fascination: “You’ve given me much to think about.”

Wednesday did not linger on the drive home. Lurch drove without comment, as customary. The air of Jericho clung too heavily, too thick with suspicion and weakness. She went straight through the door of the Addams’ rented house, past Morticia’s raised eyebrow and Gomez’s pointed silence. Up the stairs. Into her room.

The black dress came off in sharp, unceremonious movements, pooling around her ankles like shed armor. One by one, the rest of her layers followed, stripped until there was nothing left of the day clinging to her. Her pale body stood unadorned in the dark light, vulnerable only in appearance, never in truth.

And then she reached for it. His sweatshirt. Black, oversized, soft with wear. It swallowed her whole when she pulled it over her head, the hem falling indecently low across bare thighs, the sleeves dangling past her hands. His scent still lingered in the cotton—male, soap, faint musk. It draped over her like a claim she refused to surrender.

She didn’t bother with mirrors or hesitation. Bare legs brushing against cool sheets, she sank onto her bed, eyes closing as she reached across the tether.

The world folded.

And there he was.

Tyler—no, the Hyde—chained, raw, trembling in the sterile white box they called a cell. His breathing hitched as her presence filled the room like shadow. His eyes found her, wild at first, then softening, tether tugging taut as recognition lit him. Wednesday moved to him without speaking, the sweatshirt brushing against her thighs as she knelt phantom-close over his crouched body. Her hand pressed to his chest, steady, unyielding. The growl that had been coiled in his throat faltered, collapsing into a shudder as his body leaned into her.

“You did well today,” she said, voice flat but threaded with steel.

His lips parted, desperate, the Hyde’s breath a hot rasp. The chains rattled. He pressed closer to her touch, seeking warmth, seeking her approval.

And Wednesday, wrapped in nothing but his black sweatshirt, let him.

Her hand lingered, smoothing over trembling muscle, her voice a whisper only he could hear through the tether. “Mine.”

The trembling in his monstrous frame slowed under her hand, the tether pulling taut until, with a final shudder, the Hyde receded. Bones snapped, muscle tightened, his body folding inward until only Tyler remained. Naked, human, chest heaving, hair plastered damp to his forehead.

He blinked at her, the tether’s shadow-light softening the raw edge of his gaze. His lips parted. “Wednesday.” His voice was hoarse, but a grin ghosted his mouth. “You’re wearing my sweatshirt — nothing but my sweatshirt.”

Wednesday’s expression didn’t flicker. “Correction. My sweatshirt.”

He huffed a laugh, low and bitter-sweet. “God, you don’t even know. You show up here like that— you’re killing me, Wednesday.”

“Dramatics don’t suit you,” she replied coolly, though she adjusted the hem where it brushed high against her thighs. “And I did not come for theatrics.”

“And what did you come for?” he challenged.

His eyes dropped again, blatant, lingering at the oversized drape of fabric, the way it swallowed her frame and still hinted at what lay bare beneath. He swallowed hard.

Before she could carve a taunting reply, the intercom buzzed above, tinny and impersonal. “Lights out. Final check.” The heavy locks clanked. One by one, the fluorescents overhead dimmed to black. Darkness swallowed the padded walls. Wednesday didn’t move away. Instead, she shifted deliberately, guiding him backward onto the cot. The chains slackened around his wrists now that the Hyde had ebbed, and he let her maneuver him without resistance, body still humming with heat.

Then, wordless, she climbed into his lap. Her naked thighs framed his, her palms anchoring on his shoulders, her black hair brushing forward like a curtain. The tether pulsed between them, dark and alive, binding tighter in the hush of night. In the utter darkness of his imprisonment, Wednesday felt the courage to move without restraint, especially when she saw the effect she was having over him — the hard press of his desire lining up perfectly with the wet seam of her.

The cot creaked beneath their combined weight, the sound loud in the padded silence as she kissed him. Soft and tentative at first, then deeper and more insistent. Tyler’s breath shuddered as she settled against him, the hem of the black sweatshirt brushing his bare skin, every inch of her movement deliberate.

He swallowed hard, head tipping back against the wall. “You’re— really doing this,” he whispered, awe and disbelief threaded through the rasp of his voice.

Wednesday leaned in, her mouth grazing the curve of his jaw though she never quite kissed him. “You’re still trembling.” Her voice was steady, almost clinical, but her hands betrayed her—fingers curling into his hair, anchoring him in place.

His laugh was ragged, breaking halfway. “That’s because you’re sitting in my lap, in nothing but my sweatshirt, and I can’t even touch you.” His wrists flexed uselessly against the chains. “You’re cruel.”

“Accurate,” she replied. “But I did warn you about that, didn’t I?”

The tether thrummed violently, his hunger bleeding into her, pulling at her control like a riptide. In the dark, his eyes gleamed, half-feral, half-boy, all hers. Her hand skimmed down his chest, phantom through the tether but real enough to still him, to keep him unraveling. He sucked in a breath at the contact, every line of his body leaning toward her.

“You’ll learn,” she murmured, tilting her head so her hair brushed his throat, soft where her words were sharp. “How to hold me. How to master yourself. Or you’ll break trying.”

His reply was guttural, laced with desperation with an abortive laugh. “Go ahead and break me.”

For a moment, she hovered there, their breaths mingling in the dark, every nerve tight as piano wire. She could have pulled away, left him raw and wanting. A part of her thought about it. Instead, she shifted—still perched astride him, still letting him feel the weight of her thighs, the press of her body, the proof that he was not alone.

The guards outside would see nothing but a boy hunched in chains, head bowed, whispering to shadows. But inside the tether, the intimacy was molten, electric, and far too dangerous.

She slid over him, again and again, coating his stiffening cock on her juices. She rocked her hips against his until his breath hitched and broke off with a strangled moan. The stroke of his erection against her, hard and arousing, filled her with a sense of cruel power. The friction built as she set a slow sway, hips rotating, grinding, hitting her clit at the perfect angle to send a burst of pleasure coursing through her. The tension quickly mounted into a thing that was agonizing and deviously erotic. The dark pressed in around them, swallowing sound until the only thing she could hear was his ragged breath and the hammering of his heart beneath her palm. His body was hot, strung tight as a bowstring beneath her weight.

“Wednesday—” Tyler’s voice broke on her name, low and hungry. He tried to shift under her, tried to close the little space she allowed between them. The chains clinked, holding him back. “You’re killing me.”

She simply hummed in response, lost as she continued the slow tactile sensation that was nothing more than an imitation of fucking, a teasing prelude, but it felt so good, so right. Her lips brushed the shell of his ear, deliberate, a ghost of contact, then she bit down hard to have him jolting. His head snapped back, eyes squeezing shut. He shook with restraint, with need, his chest rising fast beneath the thin fabric of her stolen sweatshirt. The tether hummed with every jagged pulse of his longing, and she drank it in like poison.

“Do you want me naked?” she asked. “Or do I leave the sweatshirt on?”

“Fuck,” Tyler groaned, eyes squeezed shut. He opened them like the sight of her in his sweatshirt was something painful, something he wanted to devour, but he couldn’t decide. “Both— fuck, can I have both?”

She almost grinned. Then, sufficiently pleased with how well-coated he was, she moved to mount him.

The breach of him into her was divine — burning, pleasing, a wonderful stretch of too much. Her fingers slid down the line of his throat, cool where his skin burned feverish. She felt his swallow, felt the tremor that coursed through him as he restrained himself and let her take control, let her drop her weight onto him, taking him inside inch by inch. When she finally pressed closer, settling fully against him, her small frame was dwarfed by his; her palm was steady over his heart as though pinning it in place. He had remarkable power, even in human form. But here he was subdued by a single hand of hers. She knew she had him—completely, utterly—bound not by anything as easily breakable as chains.

He groaned aloud when she rocked against him.

“Careful,” she murmured, her lips grazing his ear. “The guards will hear you.”

His laugh was strangled, low. “You think I care?”

“Your lack of discipline—” she hissed, warning. Her nails traced lightly over his chest, a deliberate scrape that drew a shudder from him as she lifted her hips and settled back down again, establishing a decadent cadence. “You claim you can master yourself, yet every shift of my body has you trembling.”

“Fuck you,” he rasped, the tremor in his voice betraying him. His eyes burned in the dark, fixed on her as though she were the only thing keeping him from breaking apart. “I’m holding on by a thread. I wanna fucking ruin you—” he admitted, broken. “And I can’t even grip your hips.”

“And whose fault is that?”

His eyes — his eyes hinted at yellow, at red, at the Hyde inside him coming out to play. Even as she rode him, she could feel something shifting in his body, the presence of the Hyde surfacing again. There was the way his fingers bit into the mattress at his sides, razor-sharp. There was the gleam of his eyes — feral, beastly. There was even the slight stretching of her muscles where he invaded her body, as if— as if his shaft was elongating, enlarging. The delicious stretch of it inside her was a fast-spreading burn, making her gasp, throwing her head back into bliss. She instinctively tightened over his hardening dick, on a scale that wasn’t just all Tyler, but the Hyde — and the sensation only made him growl more.

She kissed him—slow, deliberate, a claiming — even as she fucked herself on him in a cadeance that built a quick tempo. His chains rattled, his body straining against restraint, but she kept control, her hand firm at his chest, her mouth moving with cool precision over his. In the black void of Willow Hill, where monsters were chained and broken, the Hyde stayed obedient, feral against the building rhythm of her hips, tamed by nothing but her commands.

“Keep moving,” Tyler breathed in a shaky voice, a voice she couldn’t deny, and Wednesday took a shuddering breath and forced herself to continue a faster sway, more eager. “That’s it,” he encouraged, his voice thick and raw and so greedy. “Keep moving for me, keep coming for me.”

She did. She let herself get lost in the rhythm of it. When she decided that Tyler had been patient long enough, her hand skimmed past his abdomen, tracing the curves and natural hard lines of his muscles. Strong and toned, and Wednesday reveled in the feel of it. Her lips skimmed his chest, her hand moved lower. For a moment, she wanted his hands on her too — hated the bereft feeling that he couldn’t reciprocate — but there was something about having uncontested control over him, over fucking him, that made Wednesday almost preen.

Then, with the calm of a predator unsheathing claws, Wednesday shifted back just enough to breathe against his lips. Her dark eyes gleamed in the pitch-black cell, though he could only sense the shape of her, the weight of her.

Without a word, she reached for the hem of the sweatshirt and tugged it off. The motion was unhurried, deliberate. Fabric peeled upward, brushing pale skin until at last she pulled it over her head and tossed it aside. For a beat, silence stretched—his breath catching, his eyes wide with hunger and urgency. Then she rocked, while he shuddered beneath her, reduced to tremors and raw devotion. And still, the Hyde—the beast inside him—remained disciplined, soothed by her touch, her command, her presence like steel forged by the fire of a crucible.

The stiff penetration pushed her into action, her muscles clenching and she pulled up and lowered back down, hands planted against his chest as she began to rock more earnestly, enough that she felt the burn in her thighs. Tyler muttered her name in a dark, a dirty little voice with words like want and fuck, and her body picked up speed in response to the tension quickly mounting in her.

Her tempo grew erratic when she reached between them for her clit, and she moaned, head flung back, the perspiration working down the curves of her breasts, her trim waist, her rolling hips; he seemed to lose himself in the tangle of shadows at the junction of her thighs as she levered up and lowered back down.

When she came sharply, she doubled over him on the mattress — while Tyler was still hard as a rock buried inside her. He did a commendable job waiting for her to skate into the afterglow, murmuring her name in slow encouragement as she came down. She swept her messy hair out of her face and gave him a soft look.

“You haven’t—?” she began, with a growing frown.

“You didn’t give me permission,” he rasped out, thickly.

Oh.

Oh.

She resumed her cadence with a feral sort of pride, after that. Her nails traced down his chest, leaving faint red lines that made him shudder. The tether thrummed, carrying his want, his ache, his restraint—until she spoke of letting himself go, letting him come, watching as he groaned and then thrust upward with abandon. Flooded her with heat as he started to growl and groan. She bent forward, her lips brushing his jaw, then lower, along the edge of his throat — as he thrust up and spilled himself inside her. He groaned, a sound torn between reverence and desperation, head falling back against the cot, gasping for breath.

Afterwards, the cell was silent but for their breathing, ragged and uneven. Tyler slumped back against the cot, his chains still biting faintly into his wrists, chest rising and falling with the exertion of restraint. His hair clung damp to his forehead, sweat glistening along his collarbone, and his eyes — human again — flicked upward to find hers.

Wednesday was still draped across him, pale skin pressed to the fever of his. The black sweatshirt she’d discarded lay tangled near his shackled feet, a relic of possession neither of them commented on now. She did not shift away, nor did she offer him reprieve. Her hand rested lightly over his heart, her thumb dragging slow circles against his flushed skin, steadying him like an anchor dropped into storm-tossed seas.

For a moment, neither spoke. Words felt intrusive, brittle compared to the tether’s burn still threading between them.

At last, Tyler rasped, voice roughened by more than exhaustion: “You know what you just did?”

Her gaze flickered, dark and sharp. “Yes. I maintained control.”

He huffed something like a laugh, though it broke in his throat. “You can teach me that lesson anytime you want.” But his shackled hands twitched, aching to hold her properly, to trace the skin he could only feel in fragments. “Wednesday,” he said, his tone weighted, low.

She sensed it before he opened his mouth — the heaviness of his mood, the sacred and nefarious emotion he wanted to name, the feeling he could feel bubbling up to the surface harder than the presence of the Hyde. He almost wanted to say those damning three little words to her — and Wednesday didn’t know what she would say back.

Feeling it was one thing; confessing it to herself another.

But to say them? To admit them out loud? She wasn’t sure if she’d ever be ready for that.

“Sleep,” she told him, soothing, instead.

It was safer. It was better.

“I’ll be here until you fall asleep,” she promised him.

Chapter Text

Wednesday woke not to sunlight, but to the hiss of a rope and the metallic whisper of a blade — the familiar sound of a guillotine blade. It dropped with a snap—close enough to slice a strand of her braid, the wind of it ruffling as it bit into the mattress instead of slicing off her throat as she bolted upright. Splinters flew on her decimated bed behind her. She opened her eyes calmly to find her parents and Pugsley watching from the doorway, the contraption still humming from its violent halt.

“A most ruinous birthday, querida!” Gomez’s delighted voice rang from the doorway. Morticia, statuesque and serene at his side, inclined her head. “Seventeen years,” Gomez murmured with pride. “And already as composed under the blade as a duchess on the scaffold.”

Wednesday smoothed her nightdress, unimpressed. “Next time, sharpen the blade properly.”

Pugsley lumbered in behind them, clutching something round, pin-pulled, and suspiciously ticking. “I made you a present, Wednesday.”

Morticia extended one pale hand. “Darling, perhaps the grenade later. Let her have her fencing match first.”

Through the tether, Tyler’s presence pressed in suddenly, warm and watchful, brought about by the sudden spike in adrenaline that he’d felt through their bond. They nearly beheaded you. His voice throbbed low in her mind, incredulous.

Nearly, Wednesday replied. It’s tradition.

She felt him exhale, half growl, half laugh. Your family’s insane.

Downstairs she found Grandmama’s present — a greenish potion in a goblet. The accompanying note read: “A tonic to strengthen your third eye, child. Or melt your intestines. Either way, a milestone.”

Wednesday drank it without blinking.

Her family gathered for all the traditions, but Wednesday found she felt as if she’d outgrown some of the mayhem they would normally enact as a yearly custom.

Aside from the prior year where she’d celebrated at Nevermore, each birthday had followed the same carefully cultivated grotesquery: the ceremonial cake, a towering confection of midnight icing, always sculpted to resemble a funeral urn or sarcophagus or something else suitable macabre, studded with candied thorns sharp enough to cut the tongue. Thing would scuttle up the side of the table to light sparklers, their frantic crackle casting jagged shadows across the walls, as though the room itself might split open with the force of her entry into another year. Every meal was a mock-feast of morbidity—ash-colored porridge at breakfast, blood sausages carved with little crosses to ward off the bland, and wine-dark stews that steamed like offerings before the dead.

The garden of the Addams Estate had always been the arena for the true celebration: her father’s fencing match. Gomez, eyes alight with adoration, would greet her with gleaming rapiers, insisting that each birthday demanded a duel to prove her edge had grown keener with the passing year. Sparks would skitter in the air as father and daughter danced across the gravel, his flamboyant flourishes punctuated by his booming laughter, while Wednesday’s calm parries cut his joy into something darker and sharper. Pugsley, meanwhile, would contribute his own attempts at festivity: wrapping presents that exploded with sulphur, rigging “surprises” that left bruises, or stumbling out with homemade weaponry too clumsy to kill her.

And then came the gifts—antique and terrible objects with bloody histories. Bone-handled blades, taxidermied oddities, occult trinkets wrapped in black lace. Morticia’s gifts were always the most striking: relics steeped in history and shadow, bestowed with a kind of ceremonial gravity that said this is your inheritance, daughter, not merely a trinket.

It was everything she had been raised to expect.

And yet—this year, it felt slightly hollow.

The sparklers’ shadows seemed less jagged, their shapes more predictable. Pugsley’s blundering explosions less amusing, more tired. Even her father’s duel felt performative, his flourish predictable, her parry inevitable. Perhaps she was outgrowing the childish antics of traditional birthday celebrations and murder attempts. Or perhaps the last year had changed her more than she cared to admit.

She had seen deaths in her visions, and worse—Tyler’s. She had endured prophecies, betrayals, cults, prisons, and blood. The rituals of cake and blade and grenade seemed pale in comparison to the jagged realities she had been forced to survive. By mid-afternoon, she stared down at the cake’s glossy surface, the reflection of sparklers trembling like false stars. For the first time, she thought: This is not for me.

Later, when the family scattered through the rented Jericho house in their peculiar brand of chaos, Wednesday found herself seated beside her mother in the parlor. The curtains were drawn, the faint glow of the candelabras gilding Morticia’s pale face in sepulchral light. Her mother’s hand rested over hers briefly—cool, elegant fingers folded like silk, a gesture both comforting and suffocating.

“It has been a difficult year,” Morticia murmured, eyes liquid-dark, soft with that relentless maternal certainty. “But you have endured it, my little viper. Stronger, sharper than ever.”

Wednesday opened her mouth to reply—when the world buckled.

The vision seized her with no warning. One moment she was sitting beside her mother in the parlor, the candelabras casting slow-moving shadows, and the next, her chest locked tight. Her throat seized. Black tears bled down her cheeks as her body pitched forward, convulsed in Morticia’s lap.

“Wednesday!” Morticia’s cool hands caught her shoulders, easing her down against the fainting couch. Her voice, unshaken but urgent, cut through the blur. “Stay with me, little viper.”

Through the haze, the vision tore across her mind. She saw her mother again—but not here, not now. Morticia was lying in her bedchamber, hair black as obsidian spilling across pillows, a cradle at her side. And within it—an infant. Pale as milk, eyes wide and knowing, a fine black mustache etched above his lip.

Pubert, the name came with a certainty.

Wednesday’s body jolted, black tears streaking her face like ink spilled across porcelain. Another sibling. Another disruption. A grotesque inevitability, absurd yet undeniable. When her eyes flew open again, the parlor swam back into place. The candelabras still burned. Her mother’s profile loomed over her, pale and severe. Morticia cupped her daughter’s jaw, dark eyes gleaming with sharp concern.

“What did you see?” Morticia pressed, her tone commanding. “Tell me, Wednesday.”

Wednesday pushed Morticia’s hand aside, her movements stiff but determined. She sat up slowly, wiping at the black tears with the back of her sleeve. Her gaze was flinty, guarded. “Nothing that requires interrogation.”

“Do not lie to me, child,” Morticia murmured, low and knowing. “Visions are no trifles—”

But Wednesday was already rising, every line of her small frame vibrating with stubborn defiance. “Enough, Mother.”

And before her mother could say another word, Wednesday swept from the room, leaving Morticia alone with unanswered questions. By the time she retreated to her bedroom, she was still trembling. She tore off her fencing garb piece by piece, dropping it carelessly onto the chair, pale skin bared and marked by the day’s duels. Half-dressed, she lingered at the window, the vision echoing in her skull like a curse.

And then—he was there. Tyler. Not in body, but in the tether, his presence sliding into her chest like smoke. A pulse in her veins, a weight settling across her chest as familiar as his fading scent on the stolen sweatshirt.

“Hey,” Tyler murmured, voice hoarse with the constant drag of chains and sedatives. “You okay? I felt like something jarred you—”

“I’m fine,” she snapped. “You’re late,” she murmured, after a beat.

“Yeah, sorry.” He winced, sheepish and apologetic. “They’re giving me some new drug cocktail. It kept me knocked out for the majority of the day.” His voice was hoarse, his posture slouched against the wall, but the tether throbbed with grogginess before he studied her keenly. He tilted his head, watching her with that unnerving way he had of peeling straight past her armor. “Another vision?”

Her eyes narrowed, and she swiped at a smear of the black tears she must have missed erasing on her face. “It was nothing.”

“Lie,” he said at once, voice rough but steady. His gaze sharpened, tether tugging. “What did you see?”

Her jaw clenched. She had never hated honesty more than in these moments. “I told you. Nothing that matters.”

He leaned forward, and distantly she heard chains rattling softly, the Hyde glint sparking faint in his eyes. “You’re terrible at lying. And you only bother to lie when it matters most.”

Wednesday held his gaze, her face schooled into stillness, but beneath it her mind twisted. The image lingered, unwanted: a cradle rocking in the shadows of her mother’s chamber. A pale infant, absurdly adorned with a downy black mustache. Pubert. Another Addams. Another sibling.

Her chest felt hollow. It wasn’t sentimentality—she had none of that for babies. When Pugsley had first arrived, she’d sharpened her scalpel within days, intent on slicing into his skull to observe the pulpy ridges of an undeveloped brain compared to the cadavers she’d studied. Her mother had stopped her before the first incision, humored. It had set the pattern for years: Wednesday honing her intellect against her brother’s misfortune, every near-murder a twisted form of sibling devotion.

But now— another. A new progeny, a fresh canvas. Another sibling thrust into her orbit. She could already hear the dark lullabies, feel the shift of shadows: her parents doting over a grotesque little mustached miracle, their hands too full of coos and cradle songs. Would Pubert become another subject for her clinical fascinations, a curiosity to dissect, torment, and measure her own brilliance against? Or worse—would he become something else? Addames could never be predicted or explained. Each one was a phenomenon uniquely its own.

Wednesday’s lips pressed into a hard, flat line. She normally could dissect and examine her own feelings, and she could normally judge a person within a single glance.

And yet—she had no idea how she felt about the idea of the Addam’s Family gaining another member.

“Wednesday,” Tyler said again, voice lower this time, more cautious. “You don’t have to tell me what it was. But don’t tell me it was nothing. I’m not stupid. These visions are fucking with you in every way.”

She exhaled slowly, forcing composure back into her body, letting the tether hum steady between them. “You overestimate their deteriorating effect,” she replied, her voice perfectly flat. “I won’t go mad like my aunt.”

“If you did, would you even notice?”

“Of course I would,” she said, at once.

But even as she spoke, she pressed her palm to his chest through the tether, grounding herself in the wild thud of his heartbeat, letting the truth of his warmth smother the memory of the cradle and the child. Whatever future her visions threatened, whatever grotesque inevitability Pubert represented, she didn’t have the wherewithal to let it linger when she already had so much to think about.

Tyler seemed to sense it, like he seemed to sense all her moods lately.

She closed the space between them, breaching it until her lips were pressed firmly against his, until the taste of her visions bled into the more favorable taste of his mouth.

“Happy birthday,” he murmured, when he pulled back.

Her expression didn’t move, but something sharp and aching stirred inside her. “I don’t need hollow platitudes.”

“I know.” His smile was tired, soft around the edges. “Still, I wanted to say I’m sorry. Sorry I can’t—do anything. Not this year.” She opened her mouth to dismiss it, but he pressed on, as if afraid she might cut the tether before he finished. “Last year, I got you that cake. I learned how to write Happy Birthday in foam. And then, well later on—”

“After you enacted another duplicitous act in a grotesque rendition of self-sabotage,” she cut in, “to throw off the scent of suspicion at the Gate’s house.”

He huffed a faint laugh, cringing. “Okay, admittedly not my finest moment.”

“On the contrary, I begrudgingly have to admit slicing yourself open with your own claws was inspired and effective.”

He shrugged. “Anyway, I did try to make up for it on our first official date? That picnic. Fairy lights in a crypt. The world’s worst movie choice.”

Her lips twitched despite herself. “Legally Blonde is grotesque.”

“And you still let me make you watch it.” His tone was warm, a touch of wonder in it. “That night was… perfect. I wanted to do something similar this year. Instead I’m locked up and can’t even see you in person.”

Wednesday swallowed, the tether humming with the phantom ache. “Nostalgia and such sentiment is a weakness. Don’t indulge in it.”

“Maybe,” he admitted. “But that's all I’ve got when I’m stuck in this white box.” There was a pause, then a quiet, mischievous lilt crept into his voice. “Well…not all I’ve got.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Explain.”

“I may have had to— borrow a hand.” He let the words hang, smug even while he participated in abysmal puns.

Thing scuttled into her room, dropping a parcel onto her desk, tied in string so tight it looked like it had been wrestled through half the countryside.

Tyler’s laugh rumbled low in her head. “Told you. I still get to be part of your day. Just needed a little accomplice.”

“Since when are you and Thing chummy?”

Tyler shrugged. “I guess he remembered his old soft spot for me?”

She turned toward the package, the corner of her mouth twitching against her will. The gesture was absurd, sentimental, foolish. And yet—the tether pulsed with his pride, with the effort he’d taken even in chains. Wednesday touched the box with pale fingers. The package was small, but heavy in her hands. She slit the twine with a nail and folded back the paper. Inside—blocks of military-grade C-4, neat as wrapped chocolates, nestled with care.

Her eyebrow arched, the faintest tilt of intrigue. “Explosives? How thoughtful.”

Through the tether, Tyler’s grin curled in her mind. “Not just explosives. A purpose. Check the note.”

She unfolded the scrap of paper tucked beside the plastique.

In Tyler’s sharp hand, ink scrawled: For your seventeenth: the fall of Pilgrim World.

Wednesday stilled. The name was acid on her tongue. Pilgrim World—the grotesque tourist attraction, a sanitised recreation of the settlement where Jericho’s founders had burned and bled her outcast ancestors in 1625. A “living history” where schoolchildren wore buckled hats and sang hymns about God’s providence while sipping slushies in plastic cups. The brainchild and pet project of the former Mayor Noble Walker, that hypocrite, before his timely demise.

Her lips curved, the barest edge of a smile. “Detonating Pilgrim World would be the most exquisite erasure of false history imaginable.”

Tyler’s chuckle hummed against the tether. “I thought you’d like it. Thing’s been my courier. Made sure the wiring and detonators got smuggled in with the package. All that’s left is timing.”

She traced one pale finger over the gray clay, reverent. “You’ve exceeded expectations. Annihilating that mockery will be far more satisfying than cake.”

“Good,” he said simply. “Because I wanted to give you something that mattered. Something that feels like— us.”

Her dark eyes gleamed. “You know me disturbingly well, Tyler.”

“That’s the point.”

For the first time all day, Wednesday felt the hollow thrum of her family’s antics ease. The guillotine, the grenades, the duels—they had their place, but this? This was better. Real destruction. History rewritten in fire.

Her fingers tightened around the gift.

Maybe this wouldn’t be such a displeasing birthday after all.

Wednesday stood on the rooftop of Jericho’s old mill, her pale face lit by the infernal glow rising in the distance. One part of Pilgrim World was ablaze. Fire roared through the false timber, the clapboard chapels, the mock-gallows erected for tourists. The explosions Tyler and Thing had so thoughtfully arranged tore the sham settlement apart in a symphony of chaos. Tourists would wake tomorrow to ash where lies had stood tonight.

Her lips parted, a thin curl of satisfaction. “Perfect.”

The night air carried the sounds of chaos, the distant sounds of the approaching fire department. Beside her, Thing clapped his fingers in gleeful rhythm and then bid her a goodnight, sensing that it was past his time to participate in tonight’s festivities. She thanked him quietly, and saw him disappear into the darkness.

Tyler’s tether presence was full of a male bravado that she would’ve cut down at any other time, but tonight she felt it earned.

“All right,” she admitted. “This was an acceptable enough gift. But you’ve set yourself up for future failures. How will you top this next year?”

“I’m hoping by next year,” Tyler answered, “I’ll be a free man and can make a different sort of spectacle.”

Wednesday was about to respond when her gaze sharpened. Among the panicked crowd below, two figures moved not with fear, but purpose. Ophelia—her aunt, still gaunt and radiant—and Isaac, the corpse-lover, his discerning gaze catching the hellfire’s glow. They looked up at Wednesday as though they had expected her presence there on the rooftop.

Wednesday’s stomach coiled, not with fear, but with fury sharpened to a blade.

Isaac’s hand lifted, almost mockingly—a little wave, a grotesque parody of a family reunion. She realized the trap a second too late. The rooftop cracked. A whip of invisible force slammed into her chest, tearing her from stone and shadow. It sent her tumbling over the side of the rooftop before she could catch purchase. At the last second, her fingers caught the edge, grip desperate and fingernails bleeding, as Tyler screamed her name in horror. Air ripped from her lungs as she struggled to climb up as Isaac’s power tried to tear her down to the ground several stories below. The world inverted—the rooftop above, fire below, her body weighed as if the universe had doubled down on gravity just for her.

A single scrape of her fingers, and she’d plunge down below.

“Wednesday!” Tyler screamed from above, panicked. “Hold on!”

He tried to reach for her, but his hands fell through as they had every other time he’d attempted to touch her through the tether. The terror on Tyler’s face was only too apparent, face stark white, palled with the horror he must be seeing below her dangling feet. The shriek of the wind devoured everything else. Flames from Pilgrim World’s ruin flashed past, their glow painting her in stuttering, hellish light. Her stomach dropped, her spine rattled, the fall stretching infinite in her mind. Is this how it ends? she thought, embarrassed. Not by blade, nor poison, nor even her own hubris, but at the hands of Isaac Night’s telekinetic whim.

It was the last thought she had before Isaac’s power tripled down, and she felt the yank of an invisible force bear down at her too harshly. Her fingers slipped, scraping across the desperate last hold she had, and she fell.

Then—impact. Not with the ground, but with hands.

Solid. Warm. Real.

Tyler.

Not the phantom half-embrace of the tether, not the ghostly brush of fingers that never quite met her flesh. Flesh met flesh. He caught her—caught her hard against her flailing arms, dragging her up, pulling her against his chest once she’d cleared the edge of the rooftop; his grip was iron bands. The fall had been arrested in one brutal miraculous moment. Her gasp tore free, raw and jagged. Shock splintered her composure as her feet finally met the concrete of the rooftop and she toppled over entirely. Tyler hit the ground hard with her in his arms, his knees buckling as he absorbed the landing. For a heartbeat they stayed pressed together in the shadows of the rooftop, the roar of Pilgrim World’s destruction still crackling behind them. The tether hummed bright and alive, his heat searing into her even as she recovered with a sharp look.

Every detail seared into her: the ragged hammer of his heart against her ribs, the tremor of his muscles as they strained around her, the blistering heat of his skin as though the Hyde’s fire burned just beneath it.

“You—” Her voice cracked, fractured. Her pale fingers clutched at him without permission, gripping his shoulders hard enough to bruise. “You’re touching me.”

“Yeah,” he rasped, his voice guttural with exertion, wild with something deeper and fearful. His eyes burned, desperation and devotion mingled, his whole body quaking. “I don’t know how—I don’t care how—but when I saw him throw you—” His arms crushed tighter around her, as though daring gravity itself to try again. “I couldn’t let you fall. I won’t let you fall.”

The tether surged. It snapped. What had been one-way flickers of phantom sensation blazed into reality. The line between them, forged of shadows and psychic thread, now carried heat. His touch burned into her skin, undeniable, irrevocable, real.

The impossible had been made flesh.

And in that instant, as the firestorm raged below and the rooftop loomed above, Wednesday Addams, who had never once allowed herself to show weakness, knew the truth: Tyler Galpin would always be there to catch her if she fell, even under impossible circumstances.

Below, Isaac and Ophelia vanished into the smoke, their laughter disappearing into the flames.

But Wednesday’s mind barely registered their retreat. Her breath trembled, her heart pressed hard against Tyler’s. “You can let go now,” she said.

Reluctantly, Tyler followed her command. But the reprieve shattered fast. Flashlights swung through the smoke. Boots pounded against the cobblestones. The Sheriff’s men.

“Is anyone up there?!”

Wednesday’s eyes narrowed. She caught Tyler’s wrist and pulled him with her into the dark edge of an abandoned stairwell. They climbed down together, swift and silent, slipping away as the first wave of deputies swarmed the rooftop above them. Tyler’s breath was ragged at her shoulder, his body trembling from the tether exertion, but he followed her without question.

They hit the street just as a new voice cut through the smoke.

“Wednesday?”

She stiffened and whirled. Lucas Walker. He stood under the ruined light of a streetlamp, his barista apron still tied crooked around his waist as if he’d come running straight from the café. His eyes widened when he took in her disheveled form, the ash on her cheeks, the smoldering ruin behind her.

For a split second, she thought he’d call the Sheriff and hand her over.

But then the Sheriff herself rounded the corner, rifle raised. “Addams!” Santiago barked. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Lucas moved first. He stepped forward, arms spread just slightly, his face arranged in tight disbelief. “She was with me,” he said flatly. “I ran into her near the square. I was showing her the back road out when all that—” he gestured vaguely to the firestorm consuming Pilgrim World—“blew sky-high.”

Santiago’s gaze cut to Wednesday, suspicious. “That true?”

Wednesday’s face was a mask of practiced disdain. “I would hardly choose his company, but he is not entirely lying. I was here.”

Santiago’s eyes narrowed, but she didn’t press. “Go home, Addams. Now. And you, Walker—if you’re lying for her, you’ll regret it.”

“Sheriff,” Wednesday stopped her. “I saw Isaac Night again tonight, with his paramour dressed in white.”

The Sheriff paused, then nodded grimly, and moved on with her men, pulled toward the blaze.

Only then did Wednesday turn back to Lucas, studying him with cold, unblinking eyes. “Why?” she asked, voice flat. “You had the opportunity to ruin me. Yet you chose otherwise.”

Lucas exhaled, shoulders sagging slightly. For once, his bravado was gone. “Because maybe I’m tired of ruining things.”

Wednesday said nothing. Her gaze lingered, dissecting him. She didn’t thank him. She didn’t smile. But inwardly—privately—she marked the strange shift. Lucas Walker was not the boy he had been last year. Still, Wednesday did not look back at Lucas as she left him standing in the smoke-stained streetlight, his words still hanging in the air like ash. Tyler’s presence brushed along the tether—still burning with the impossible reality of touch.

Wednesday had already moved on from the terror-filled moment of a near-death experience, back to her natural role as a predator seeking prey. Her aunt and Isaac couldn’t have gone far.

“You shouldn’t chase them,” Tyler warned, falling into step at her side, his voice low and ragged. “I can’t— I can’t protect you from him. Not really. You saw what Isaac did. His telekinesis could rip you apart before I even reached you.”

Her expression was stone. “Your protests are predictable.”

“Wednesday—” His hand reached for hers, now impossibly real, stopping her in her tracks. “I’m serious. He’s dangerous in a way you can’t out-think.”

Her dark eyes flicked toward him. “And you think I will cower because of danger?” she snapped, yanking her hand free. “You know me better than that.”

Tyler swore under his breath, but followed her anyway.

They combed the grounds together, the ruins of Pilgrim World still coughing up embers. The wooden facades of the false pilgrim houses groaned and toppled, spilling sparks into the night. There was no one inside; she and Thing had made sure this part had been entirely emptied of tourists or employees before they’d set off the detonator. She was an anarchist, not an arsonist by whim or a psychopath by definition. Smoke burned her airways, acrid and bitter. Wednesday moved with unerring focus, pale face cast in red light, her boots crunching over debris.

She searched the rooftops, the shadows between burning timbers, the dark line of the woods beyond the town square. Nothing. No trace of Isaac’s lanky frame or Ophelia’s trailing white skirts. Only silence where their chaos should have been.

“They’re gone,” Tyler said at last, bitterness and a tinge of relief lining his voice. “They wanted you to chase them. They wanted to rattle you. And it worked.”

Wednesday stood still, staring into the treeline as though her aunt’s ghost might be lingering there. Her lips thinned, and her hands curled neatly behind her back. “No,” she said. “They only postponed the inevitable. Like she said: Frump, Night, Addams — there will be a reckoning.” Her gaze sharpened, hard. “They’ll resurface. And when they do, I’ll be waiting.”

Tyler said nothing, but through the tether, she felt the raw pulse of his unease—his fear for her. It should have been easier to dismiss him. To snap back that she needed no protector, that she walked into death willingly, as she always had. But his loyalty burned against her skin—dangerous, binding. He had chosen her over blood, over his own uncle, over the ghost of his mother. That kind of devotion was not cheap. It was not safe. Her voice may have been calm and steady, but inside, Wednesday’s thoughts were sharper, messier. Isaac and Ophelia weren’t simply enemies. They were blood. They were family. And as much as she loathed to admit it, they were a reflection—an echo of something dangerous she had not yet dared to put into words.

Isaac Night and Ophelia Frump.

Bound to each other with a devotion that defied reason, that defied sanity, that bled into destruction. Lovers, family, monsters—all at once. Wednesday’s stomach knotted as the thought crept in: Is that what people will one day see when they look at us? At me and Tyler? The parallels were too sharp to ignore. Ophelia, the seer, undone by her own visions. Isaac, the revenant, surviving only by consuming what others could not bear. Both cast out, both clinging to one another with a devotion that turned to bloodshed.

Her chest tightened. She remembered the vision she’d seen of Tyler’s corpse at Isaac and Ophelia’s feet. Could that be their future? Would she drive herself into madness, as Ophelia had, clinging to her monster until they both burned down the world around them?

History was filled with monsters who believed themselves exceptions, right up until the ruin came.

The possibility was intolerable.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Tyler spoke, forcing her to turn around and face him. “But we’re not them. I’m not Isaac. You’re not Ophelia. And I’d rather be damned at your side than anything else without you.”

The words landed heavier than any chain. Wednesday’s eyes flickered, betraying the faintest fracture in her composure. Damnation together, or safety apart. She loathed that he’d framed the choice so cleanly—because she could already feel which one she was leaning toward.

It took only a single moment of her crumbling resolve to bring them to a soft collision — for him to frame her face in his hands, hands she could finally feel without a conscious effort on her part, the thrill of it still wondrous. He stared at her with such an intensity and certainty of devotion that she couldn’t think of anything before his lips descended to hers, a soft bruising touch that left her breathless and reeling with too much emotion. The slow slide of his mouth over hers, his tongue against hers, his fingers threading through her hair. Every new touch felt like some wondrous new gift, better than all her other birthday presents combined, her mind awhirl at the possibilities this opened up for them. But in that moment, she was unable to assess anything beyond his mere touch and feel, grasping for clarity that did not come.

And then— it started as a pulse. Wednesday’s chest constricted, her black eyes narrowing at Tyler as if she could force herself to focus on him alone. But the tether—strengthened, alive—throbbed hot and violent. Her breath caught.

And then the world broke apart again.

The streets around them melted into streaks of gray and light. For one heartbeat, she was still staring at Tyler, his hands half-reaching toward her, his mouth forming her name.

The next heartbeat: it was Isaac. His eyes, fever-bright, fixed on Ophelia. “I would burn it all for you.”

Another blink—Morticia, young and furious, her hand on Gomez’s bloodied cheek. “I chose you. I’ll always choose you.”

And then—back to Tyler, whispering, “I’d rather be damned at your side.”

Her knees buckled. She didn’t know if she was falling into his arms or collapsing inside the vision. The walls spun, realities overlapping, each sentence crashing into the next until they were indistinguishable.

She saw Ophelia clutching Isaac’s scarf in the shadow of the Skull Tree—her eyes wild with grief and devotion. Wednesday saw her own hand clutching Tyler’s, black nails digging into his skin. She saw her mother’s trembling poise, standing against the storm while Gomez promised to bury any secret for her. It was all the same conversation, the same vow repeated through generations, rewritten in different mouths.

Her lips moved, but she didn’t know whose words came out: “You are my ruin. You are my salvation. You are my chains.”

And Tyler’s voice — pulling for her—his breath sharp, his voice echoing like it had no anchor. “Wednesday, stop—this isn’t real. Your visions are bleeding—”

But even his panic overlapped with Isaac’s laugh, Gomez’s plea, and Ophelia’s vow. She staggered back, clutching her head. Her eyes rolled white for a moment as black tears welled, dripping down her cheeks.

“Which one am I seeing?” she hissed through clenched teeth. “Which one is mine?”

Tyler grabbed her shoulders—or maybe it was Isaac, or Gomez, or all of them at once. His grip was hot, steady, dragging her back from the spiral. “It’s me. Look at me. Stay with me.”

Her eyes snapped open, vision still fractured. She saw Tyler’s face flicker, superimposed over Isaac’s, over Gomez’s—each one blurring until her mind screamed against itself.

“Stay with me,” he/they begged again.

For the first time, Wednesday wondered if she could.

The visions didn’t just bleed; they roared. They tangled until Wednesday couldn’t tell if she was watching, living, or remembering something that had never been hers. One moment she was in Jericho’s streets, Tyler clutching her shoulders. The next, she stood beneath the Skull Tree, watching Morticia’s hands drip scarlet as she pulled the blade from Isaac’s body. Gomez pulled her back, his face stricken, whispering, “It had to be done.” Then—another flash. Ophelia in her full madness, her voice hoarse, shouting across the hallways of Willow Hill: “Isaac, No!” Isaac’s hand, reaching back for her. “We will end this all,” he promised.

Back—Tyler, on his back, being buried alive, looking at Wednesday. His voice threaded through all of theirs: “I wouldn’t change a thing.”

The voices overlapped, words identical, spoken by different mouths, meant for different ears.

Gomez: “I would kill to keep her safe.”
Isaac: “I would kill to keep her free.”
Tyler: “I would kill for her.”

Morticia: “I buried her love under that tree.”
Ophelia: “I buried my sanity when they stole him from me.”
Wednesday: “I will be buried with him.”