In The Shadows We Swear

In every life, the shadow devil starved as he watched her die.

Her mouth spilled prayers he could never feed on.

Her body slid through his grasp like blood through water, down into the grave.

But this time—

this life—

he will not let her be devoured by death's teeth.

He will fasten her by throat and wrist, by hip and mouth,

a feast claimed bone by bone, breath by breath,

until even her shadow learns to kneel when he hungers.

This time, she will not escape.

⸻

The morning train carried the night with it.

Cold breathed out of the walls. Metal and old coffee. Damp wool. Salt that never really dries. I slid into my usual seat—second car from the back, right side, window, clear sightline to both doors. Routine can't save you, but it keeps your hands from twitching.

The river kept pace outside like a dark animal, slick and slow, fog tearing itself to ribbons when we passed. On quiet mornings the track joints announce themselves in my teeth—tick, hum, settle. Like the train was keeping count for me.

Three regulars shared the car. Green Coat folded and unfolded the same newspaper he's held all winter. Tight Bun stared at her phone as if it were the only pulse she trusted. Finger Tap drummed his thigh to music I couldn't hear. We never spoke. Habit made us kin enough.

At Harbor Station the platform greeted me in its usual shrug. Wet concrete that lives in your bones. I changed trains, because harbor to town and back again is my life in lines. Home is the leaning apartment above the bait shop on Harbor Street. Work is the Gull & Anchor, where the jukebox is moody and the neon is vain. Between them: steel, fog, repetition. I am the middle carried back and forth.

⸻

The Detour

I had thirty stolen minutes before shift. The library kept late hours on whim and mercy, and I had a paperback to return three weeks late.

The bell above the door never rings the same twice. Dust and cedar polish wrapped me when I stepped inside. The shopkeeper—a silver-haired woman with an ink-smudged thumb—lifted her chin in greeting, then went back to her ledger as if she were writing spells instead of receipts.

"Sorry," I said, sliding the book onto the counter. "I meant to finish it."

"Some endings don't want to be found." She stamped the card like blessing.

I drifted toward local history, pretending it was for a friend. The lighthouse glared back from three separate covers, smug with its own mythology.

And then—him.

Tall. Balanced like floors were optional. Hair dark, damp at the temple, not styled but shaped by weather. His forearms inked in letters and lines that looked earned. A black notebook in one hand, pencil moving with strokes confident enough to wound if he wanted them to.

His eyes lifted. They met mine.

The air stuttered. A soft sound slipped out of me before I could catch it—a small, startled gasp, the kind you make when lightning finds the tree too close to your house. Not loud. Barely there. But enough. Because for one dizzying second, I swore I knew him. Knew the shape of his gaze, the weight of it, as if my body had already memorized a story my mind hadn't read.

Heat climbed into my cheeks, betrayal quick and hot. Embarrassment tugged my chin down. I couldn't possibly know him. Of course I couldn't. The thought was ridiculous. And yet my pulse beat at my throat like it did.

The aisle was narrow. I had to pass. The wool of his sleeve grazed my arm, heat traveling where fabric met skin. He smelled like cedar and smoke and the breath after lightning.

"Sorry," I said. Reflex.

"Not yet," he murmured, without warmth or apology. He turned a page.

My mouth had an answer, but forgot it.

At the counter I bought nothing, just slid a postcard of the lighthouse forward because I needed to put something between us and silence. The bell rang behind me. I turned back—empty aisle. No notebook. No storm-colored man.

Outside, fog pressed the lamps into swollen moons. By the time I reached Harbor Station, the image of him still clung like smoke to my hair.

⸻

The Gull

The Gull breathed in beer lines and wet wood, exhaled through jukebox static. Nora slid past and harmonized with the jukebox under her breath. Mick cursed at the register, the printer chewing numbers like it resented them. The Gull breathed the way it always did—wet wood, citrus, laughter warped by glass.

But I couldn't sink into it the way I usually do. Not tonight.

Every time my hand wrapped a glass or my knife slid through lime, he was there. The bookstore. The aisle too narrow. The moment when his eyes caught mine and something in me betrayed me— that ridiculous, unplanned gasp that had slipped out of me like a secret I didn't mean to share.

God, I'd blushed. Blushed like a schoolgirl, cheeks hot, throat tight, embarrassed because it felt impossible to know a man I had never met... and yet I swore I did. My body swore it, anyway. My pulse knew him. My skin did.

I tried to drown it in work. I poured whiskey for Joey Caps, but the glass wasn't glass in my hand—it was the graze of his sleeve, heat traveling through wool into my skin. Cedar. Smoke. The bite of a storm in the air right before it breaks. I could smell it again, just standing there behind the bar, the sound of pool balls cracking around me.

Evan leaned in on the counter, voice low. "North docks were loud last night," he said, eyes sharp, steady. Watching. Always watching. "Scuffle. You weren't around Harbor Station close to midnight, were you?"

I nodded, automatic. "Caught the 11:40. Went straight home."

His gaze softened, protective in its way. "Good."

And for a heartbeat, I tried to let his steadiness ground me. Evan's attention was careful, practiced, the kind that made people feel safer than they were. He wanted me safe. He wanted me seen.

But Calder's attention—or whatever it was I'd felt from him—was different. He didn't look at me the way Evan did, steady and patient. He marked me. That's what it had felt like. As though some invisible line had been drawn and I'd stepped into it without meaning to.

The thought twisted heat low in my stomach. Unwanted, unshakable.

Evan was still talking, something about timestamps and loiterers, but the words slid through me like water. All I could hear was Not yet. The way he'd said it, casual and sharp at once, like a promise and a warning dressed as two words.

I shook it off, forced a smile, and wiped down the counter. Customers laughed. Nora hummed. Mick swore. The Gull went on the way it always does. But in the corners of my mind, in the rhythm of my pulse, Calder lingered like smoke that refused to leave even after the fire's gone.

Last call always felt like exhale—the jukebox sputtering down, tables scraping back, the Gull thinning to its bones. Nora stacked glasses like she was building a shrine. Mick muttered at the till.

I should've felt that same relief. I should've let the routine carry me: wipe, sweep, lock, out. But my skin hadn't cooled since that aisle. The echo of his sleeve, the weight of his eyes. The memory of my own gasp humiliating me all over again.

Evan stayed planted at the bar even after his beer was gone, watching the last stragglers filter out. He always did that—sat quiet, steady, making sure nothing went wrong. Protective in a way that should've made me grateful. And I was. I was.

But when his gaze met mine, I didn't burn. I didn't forget what my mouth was for. Evan's attention was a blanket. Calder's had been a blade.

I shook it off, locked the back door, pulled my coat tight.

"You're walking?" Evan asked, already sliding off the stool like he'd decided for me.

"Train," I said.

"I'll wait with you." Not a question. A fact dressed in gentleness.

We stepped into the night. Harbor air had teeth—salt and iron, the kind that bit through fabric. Evan walked close enough that our arms brushed sometimes, but his heat didn't linger. Not like Calder's had.

The platform was nearly empty. A man asleep under his coat. A woman clutching her purse, eyes darting. Headlights far off in the fog.

Evan talked low about loiterers, about how patrols were thinner lately, about how people slipped through cracks when no one was looking. I nodded when I should, grateful for the company, grateful for his steadiness—but every shadow along the tracks looked like it could move.

Because Calder was still there. Not in body. In me.

I could still hear him: Not yet. Could still see that look, like I'd been named without permission. Could still feel my own betrayal—that gasp, the blush, the heat low in my stomach I hadn't been able to smother since.

Evan's hand brushed mine once, deliberate, careful. He meant it as safety. But my pulse jumped for someone else.

And I hated that. Hated how much I couldn't scrub him out. Hated how, even with a cop at my side, I felt less safe than I had in the aisle with Calder's eyes on me.

The train pulled in, brakes screaming. Evan stepped back just enough to let me board first. Always careful. Always good.

And still—my gaze swept the car before I could stop it, searching shadows, waiting for a shape too tall, too still, to belong to anyone else.

⸻

Home

The bait shop crouched against damp salt. BAIT & ICE peeling off the sign. Inside: thawed ice, rubber boots, rope that still smelled of fish. Up the crooked back stairs, my apartment leaned toward the water like it had already chosen which way it would fall.

I undressed in a trail. The mirror fogged before I turned on the shower.

Heat came in a rush—steam clinging, water striking shoulders, collarbone, breasts. I braced a palm against tile and arched, back bowing, lips parting on a breath I didn't mean to give away. The spray dragged tension from me and replaced it with something else—want threaded with unease.

When I tipped my head back, hair slick against spine, I imagined rough fingers there instead. A mouth hovering too close. The man from the library, standing just behind my reflection.

The thought sharpened low in me—anger and hunger shaking hands. My nipples pebbled under the water's bite. My thighs pressed together before I noticed. Heat pooled there, blooming traitorously.

I rinsed slow, as if rinsing him off though he'd never touched me. Steam blurred the mirror, blurred me. I turned off the water, chest rising fast, lips still parted, breath ragged like I'd been caught doing something forbidden.

My robe snagged on the hook, tugging my coat forward. Something slipped loose and fluttered against the wall with a dry sound.

Paper.

I bent, heart knocking stupidly hard, and lifted it. Black card stock, heavy as if it had weight beyond itself, edges worn like it had been handled too many times.

It was me.

Not the me in the mirror, damp and flushed from steam, but a version caught mid-motion: hair tossed as though by a storm only I could feel, collar turned high, mouth set in something between defiance and refusal. My eyes were drawn as if they'd been startled by a voice behind me—half-ready to turn, half-ready to deny it—and the gaze fixed on the page had the precision of cruelty.

Not beautiful. Not softened. Not kind.

Correct. Too correct.

I held it longer than I should have, my breath tightening, the certainty rising with it—this was not the first time his eyes had found me.

No signature. No words. Only the scrape of graphite like it had been laid down with too much certainty to erase.

My stomach dropped. My cheeks burned. I sat on the bed damp and bare beneath my robe, water ticking from my hair onto the page. I couldn't look away. It felt like holding a coin someone had kept warm in their palm and pressed into mine—a possession disguised as a gift.

The drawing didn't feel new. It felt remembered.

⸻

Once, under summer with cedar thick in the air and thunder gathering its courage, she laughed and didn't know it would be the sound I would carry through winters.

She didn't know my name then. She put other names in her mouth like sugar and spit them out when they turned to salt. I put my thumb to the pulse inside her wrist and drew a line where only I could see it. I told the water no. The water told me wait. It took her while I was away and left the shore wrong. Time teaches patience to the kind of men who survive it. It teaches cruelty to the kind who remember why.

She walked into the bookshop today like the bell had rung for a service I was expected to attend. She smelled like rain on rope and lemon burned into wood. She didn't look like a woman who has learned how to be kept; she looked like a woman I have kept before. The shadow part of me lifted its head, stretched, and put its teeth in the inside of my mouth so I would remember what they are for.

I didn't speak. I passed close enough that wool spoke to skin and memory spoke to nerve. I let the aisle do the work. When she turned her shoulder, the coat shifted; the pocket opened the way good pockets do when they want to be used. The paper fit my fingers the way a blade does—the confidence of a right tool in a right hand. I put the map where it belonged. Not a map of streets. Of a face. The only territory worth defending is the shape you know you own.

I don't need to stand on her train car and make spectacle. Overexposure teaches prey to run and the wrong ones to think they can keep up. I know where the steel hums under her feet. I know how the harbor breathes when it has plans. The water wants what I want. It is older and more patient. I am meaner.

She undressed and learned she was cold. She stood under hot water and her body claimed itself back from the day—collarbone and ribs and the points that make men forget which promises they made to their better selves. She thought of me without giving me a name. That is enough for a beginning.

The ones who can smell the mark will come. She doesn't wear it yet, not where anyone can argue with. But she carries the future piece of it in her palm, warm as if the paper has decided it belongs to her skin. They will test the edges. The train windows will lag a blink, the vending machine will watch with a black eye, the platform will learn her footfalls. They will try on my face because they are unoriginal and cruel.

Evan checks cameras and calls it care. He is useful and he will be proud of that until he learns what his use buys him. I already know. He will stand too close one night and touch what is mine in a way he thinks can be forgiven. He is not yet a problem. He is practice.

When she sleeps, the drawing rises and falls on her chest like a promise. The building leans toward the water as if it made a pact with tides. I put my shadow where the two pools of streetlight refuse to meet and watch the window without touching the blind. I do not need to let myself in. Not tonight. The third lock rattles and comforts; let her have it. The first mark will not go on her door.

There are places that belong to me I haven't introduced her to yet: the soft skin under her knee where kneeling becomes a decision; the notch at the base of her throat where truth sits sulking; the inside of her wrist where all good liars begin; the curve high on her hip that shirts expose when men pull too hard; the mouth, when she is ready to use it properly. I will put lines where they belong. They will look like possession and they will be protection. No one else will get to argue the difference.

The harbor lifts, sets, lifts, sets, counting its pulses like numbers in a language you learn by being born. In five years I will write the date clean again. She will hold up the page and tell me we haven't done this before. I will tell her we always have.

For now, I let her sleep with the proof on her chest and the train in her bones. The night is listening. It remembers her. I remember louder.

Because he watches her take a shower and fall asleep as well

~~~~~~~~~

Hi, and welcome 🤍

I'm Sarah Marie — mama, storyteller, and dweller of an old 1800s schoolhouse where thrifted treasures and "what if" daydreams become stories.

Here you'll find my latest work, In the Shadows We Swear — a haunting, romantic tale woven with folklore, dangerous oaths, and love that lingers like candlelight in the dark.

I write late at night (usually with cereal for dinner) and post chapters as they're ready. My goal? To make you feel like you've stepped into another world — one that might follow you long after you've closed the page.

So grab a blanket, get cozy, and welcome to my corner of Inklitt.

I'm so glad you're here. 🖤