The Oath We Give (The Hollow Boys Book 5)
The Oath We Give: Chapter 1

Coraline | Eight months of freedom | November

The piece of paper in my hand is worn, crinkled from being shoved deep into a pair of burnt-orange Vans that sit in the back of my closet. I’m surprised it’s held the white color it had when it was originally given to me.

I smooth my thumb across the scrawled digits, the moon providing me just enough light to make them out clearly. My back rests against the side of my parents’ house, the white slats digging into my back and the roof rubbing against my thighs.

The night sky is brilliant tonight. Many people don’t even know that because of the complete lack of light interference, the Oregon Coast provides some of the best views of starlight and the Milky Way.

There was a time when I would spend hours on this roof, lying on my back, blowing smoke rings, and contemplating just how vast our universe was. I’d smile to myself as the stars winked at me, as if mischievously saying, You’ll never know all our secrets, but you can admire our truths.

Tears wet the apples of my cheeks, shed so casually that I don’t even notice them anymore until a breeze passes by.

I’m not usually like this. Weepy and sad. I do not often stumble drunk onto my parents’ roof to cry about what happened to me, to feel sorry for myself. Life is a constant pendulum of pain. Everyone experiences it, and I am not special.

So maybe it’s my father’s expensive cognac that I stole from his office or the smell of rain in the wind that is unearthing these emotions I carefully buried.

I keep thinking if I just continue doing things the way I did before, if I mold myself into the person I was prior to being taken, life will go back to normal. Last week, I hung out with friends from high school. We sat at the cafe we’d frequented every Thursday during our summers off school. Yesterday, my stepmother and father demanded I attend an art show, and I went. Tonight, I’m sitting on the roof to stargaze.

The tea at Luca’s Cafe was bitter and cold. The friends I once knew are strangers with moving lives, while mine is stagnant. Art, which had always been something I found joy in, is lacking life. And the stars don’t feel so bright anymore.

When I stand in the mirror, I look the same. I am the Coraline my family and friends recognize, but I am a different person now. I was never this afraid before. Scared to breathe, to move, to live.

On the inside, I’m still Circe.

I left that basement physically, but I’m still living in it mentally.

I hate it. Despise myself for living in fear, being stagnant, and not just moving the fuck on with my life. I was kidnapped, beaten, raped. So what? There are millions of people who experience that. I’m lucky. I shouldn’t feel so fucking sad.

My bed I’ve had since freshman year of high school is too soft. There is always too much sun, and everything is loud. Food doesn’t taste like anything but sustenance, and joy has become a dream just out of my reach.

Life isn’t supposed to be this hard.

The wind flutters the small piece of paper between my fingers. With shaking hands, I dial the seven numbers I never thought I’d call. Promised myself I wouldn’t. But this is the end of my rope. What could it hurt?

When the dial tone begins, I immediately want to hang up. This is stupid. I survived, came out on the other side with my wealthy family waiting ready to make me shiny and new. It could’ve been worse.

My finger hovers over the End Call button, but a scratchy voice filters through my speaker.

“Coraline.”

My name slips off his tongue. It’s not hurried. He takes his time with it, not rushing or shortening it, keeping it in his mouth until the last syllable is spoken.

“How’d you know it was me?”

My heart bangs loudly against my ribs, thrashing around inside my chest from the nerves. I hadn’t expected him to answer. Maybe a part of me hoped it would keep ringing until I got his voicemail.

“I’m the heir to a cybersecurity firm,” he says plainly, as if it’s obvious. “Are you okay?”

It’s simple, three words strung together that I’ve heard on repeat for the last eight months, but coming from his throat, from him? It triggers my eyes to produce more tears and my chest to tighten.

God, I hate this.

I don’t know how to explain it, but I know he truly means it. That he’s not just asking to be polite, knowing I’ll lie and say I’m okay. In his voice, which sounds like night and crackling embers, lies genuine concern.

The sob that echoes from my chest trickles out of me, and I slap my hand over my mouth to keep the rest buried inside. My eyes shut tight as my body shakes. I fucking hate crying. Loathe showing this weakness, this vulnerability that has no room in my life or in this town.

“Where are you—”

“No, don’t, I’m fine.” I rush my words, shaking my head for no one to see, hearing through the phone the sound of him rustling around like he was getting up to come to my aid.

A complete stranger that he doesn’t even know.

I bite down on my bottom lip to keep it from shaking. “Did I wake you?”

“No,” he says simply.

Up to this point, I had no plan. I’m not even sure I really knew why I’d scrambled to the back of the closet to fish out this number from a forgotten pair of shoes.

When he came to see me at the hospital, I was bitter.

I’d thought my self-loathing and anger would push me through life, fuel my need to live, but over the months, the rage deflated. A punctured balloon. Now, I’m left only with a hollowness in my chest that feels like being stabbed with knives soaked in memories.

A therapist I saw for a while said it was the grief. I’m grieving the girl who died in the basement and trying to make amends with the one that remains. I think I’m just tired.

Sleep rarely comes without nightmares, and the days are filled with anxiety, constantly looking over my shoulder, waiting and waiting for the day my monster makes good on his promise.

The pressure alone is too much. The weight has shattered my shoulders, and I’m tired of suffocating. I can’t breathe, ever. Why can’t anyone see that? Can they not see me turning purple? The hands of my mind choking me?

Because every time I look in the mirror, I see it.

“You told me you knew what it was like to fight demons you can’t see,” I start, not sure where I’m headed but hoping the end destination makes sense. “Did you mean that?”

There is more background noise, the sound of a bed creaking and a blanket rustling around. Muffled voices hushed in the night. My cheeks warm as I shake my head. This was stupid.

“I’m sorry, you’re probably busy—”

“I meant every word,” he blurts, interrupting my rush to get off the phone.

My head leans against the side of my house as I gaze up at the stars, wondering if wherever he is, he can notice how dim the usually bright sky is or if that’s only a side effect of what happened to me.

Silence tumbles into our conversation, and all the buzz from his side of the phone goes quiet as the clicking of a door echoes in my ear. It’s mute wherever he is now. It makes me wonder what he’s doing, if he’s able to keep living after everything that happened, if I’m the only fucking one still stuck.

He breaks the sound of stillness with a voice like gravel.

“Why’d you call?”

I’d laugh if I could. It’s the same question I’d ask if a girl I hardly knew called me at one in the morning. I mean, why did I call him? Who even is he to me?

“I—”

“Don’t lie.” The intrusion isn’t cruel, not a demand. Instead, it feels like a harsh truth, as if he knew what I was thinking before I spoke. “I’m just a voice on the phone. Don’t think of me as a person. Just a voice, an ear.”

He owes me nothing. Not an ounce of kindness or a second longer on this ridiculous phone call, but he’s here, anyway. And it’s that tender generosity that breaks something in me.

I have no one.

I’m surrounded by people and well-wishes, but I am utterly alone with my thoughts. There is no one I can talk to about the experience that is haunting my dreams and slowly feeding.

No one gets the fear or the shame. How it didn’t just leave when I was rescued, that it exists just beneath the surface of my skin. Yet, no one cares enough to peel back the first layer, all of them too afraid of just how dark the blood I’ll leak into them will be.

They all want to know the horror of the basement. News stations want an exclusive, papers want direct quotes to feed human curiosity, but no one cares about the aftermath of what it did to me.

I’m only a headline to Ponderosa Springs. A trophy for my parents.

“I don’t have anyone else—” I swallow the lumpy truth in my throat. “I don’t think anyone understands what’s happening to me.”

“They can’t see the demons, can they?”

I shake my head, my cries coming out choked as I struggle with the simple reply of “No.”

No one sees any of it. How one minute I feel strong, and the next, I am breaking. How I hate myself for what happened, and the guilt of my weak will eats at me. It’s a shame I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

“I was abducted a year ago today.”

He lets the silence stretch, not saying anything. I know it’s because he wants to give me space, room to gather the courage so I can keep talking. Finally speak aloud words I buried with the old Coraline.

Eight months of freedom, eight months of being locked in a new prison, and this time, I’m the warden. I’ve not told anyone about this, not the police, therapist, my family. It’s a vault inside of me, one that I told myself if I just keep it locked, it would eventually go away.

But he’s not a person I’m talking to.

He’s just a voice.

“I was leaving a party.” My eyes shut tightly, hoping when I open them, I’ll be back to that night so I can avoid ever going out. “It was the first college party I went to. My first of many.”

A humorless laugh rattles from my mouth as I remember the tequila my friends and I tossed back.

“Nothing bad happens when you’re just starting life, right? Not to the rich and just, not me. Never me.”

There are parts of that night I can recall vividly. The loud house music, all the people I knew and those I didn’t. Shots of what I think was tequila and how badly my belly hurt from laughing.

I’d wrapped my arms around my high school best friend, a girl who’s only a stranger to me now, and screamed, “This is the best night of my life!”

“A friend was supposed to drive me back, but he’d gotten wasted and crashed on a couch. I didn’t want to sleep in some random place, so I decided to just walk back to campus. It was only a few miles, that was it. I don’t even remember anything past walking out of the house. It’s this big black hole in my mind. But I—”

I bring my knees to my chest, dropping my forehead to my knees and letting my body feel the ache of the tears as I press the phone to my ear. Allowing myself to remember, to cry and hurt freely, with no one watching.

Only a voice on the other end to hear me. To judge me.

“When I woke up, I was naked and cold. They sprayed me down with a water hose and examined me. I still feel their hands at night, can see the flash of the camera on my skin as they spoke out loud about my body. How much they could sell me for. I don’t even know if I tried to scream because the drugs, they made everything fuzzy. They kept me so fucking high that by the time Step—” I bite my tongue so hard that the metallic taste of blood fills my mouth. His name makes me sick. “I went through withdrawal the first few weeks I was in that basement. Alone. Covered in throw up, and I had these insane muscle cramps. It was mental agony, and it was only the beginning.

“I wish I died in that basement.” A sob takes my voice, and I cry heavy tears into the speaker of the phone to a voice that owes me nothing. “I want to go back and die there. It took so much of me—why not just take it all? Why leave me this fucking empty!”

I shout the words to a darkened sky, begging for an answer I’ll never get. There are a million questions I ask myself every day, and never once have I been able to replace a single answer.

Why was I so weak? Why me? Why did I love him so much that I still feel the embers of it scorching my veins? How did he have that much control over me?

My cries are interrupted by an answer. Not from the stars but the voice on the other side of this phone.

“To fill.”

“What?” I lift my head, eyebrows furrowed.

His tone is a steady hand, calm water. “Life left you empty so that you’d have room to fill it. We are only hollow if we allow ourselves to remain that way.”

“How? Where do I even start? I don’t—”

“Learn, Coraline. You lived for a reason. Figure out why.”

“Aren’t you supposed to just be an ear?” I laugh a little, taking my palm and wiping the tears from my cheeks, inhaling a deep breath of fresh air. I’m dizzy from all the emotions.

“And a voice,” he notes, and although I can’t see him, I hear the smirk in his words.

Light rain wets my arms. Nature’s way of telling me my emotional dumping session is coming to a close. But I linger for a few minutes, sitting in the relief of having something, anything, to ground me to the earth for a couple of seconds longer.

I don’t have to be Coraline Whittaker, survivor of the Sinclair House of Horrors. I’m not the award-winning artist prodigy or the regal daughter of James Whittaker. I’m not the older sister to a girl I’ve trapped myself in this town for or the younger sibling of a brother whose own guilt is leaking into mine.

I’m Coraline. I’m not okay, and right now? That’s enough.

“I don’t want to die,” I whisper.

“Then don’t.”

The rain falls a little harder, bouncing off the roof. I lick a drop off my lips, letting the water wash away the tears on my face. Maybe if it rains hard enough, I won’t be able to tell the difference.

“I don’t know how to live either.”

“No one does.”

Forgoing boundaries, I ask him for another piece of advice. It could be the reason he hangs up on me because I don’t know a lot about the man on the other end of the phone other than rumors and seeing him around, but everyone knows what Rosemary Donahue meant to him.

“How did you live after losing Rosemary?”

I’d always thought it was beautiful, his grief. A living reminder of a love lost too soon.

To my surprise, he doesn’t hang up or tell me to fuck off. Instead, he sighs. The sound of a lighter flicking makes its way through the speaker.

“I didn’t.”

I scoff, “So you’re dead?”

“You don’t know?” Once again, I can hear the smirk. In my mind, I can see only his lips, tilted up in the corners. “They say I’m dead on the inside.”

“They call me cursed. I wonder which is worse?”

As the rain continues to build, I need to go inside before I slip off the roof and actually go through with my suicidal thoughts. Can you die by accident if the plan was already to kill yourself?

“Thank you. I owe you for this,” I say softly, throat hoarse from all the crying.

“Okay,” he mutters, not pushing me to give more than what I’m willing, accepting my declaration.

Lightning illuminates the sky, and thunder claps in the distance.

“Don’t call me back. And I won’t call again. I just—”

“I know.” There is a pause in his voice. “You don’t have to explain anything to me. I’m only a voice, remember?”

I know this phone call doesn’t fix me. It doesn’t heal my fears or cure my trauma, even though I desperately want something to. But it’s nice to be alive and not okay. To have someone to talk to, to know there is someone out there who knows I’m battling for every breath.

After this, I’ll have to go back to being cold, numb, and unfeeling just to get through the day. I’m allowing myself this one moment of weakness, but not again.

“Coraline,” he says before I can hang up.

“Yes, Silas?”

The voice on the other side once again reminds me he isn’t just a voice or an ear. That he’s a person who feels this pain too, that emptiness inside, and he’s looking for something to fill up the holes.

“I had to learn how not to live for the trauma and loss. I’m living in spite of it. Don’t let him win.”