The moor was mist-lashed, brittle with frost, and the clouds hung low and gray like mold on a ceiling. Eliza stood in the high tower window of Withering House, her hands resting on the cold sill, her breath fogging the ancient glass.

Beyond the fieldstone wall, down the long road of drowned heather and half-dead trees, a figure moved with slow, deliberate purpose.

She had not seen him in twelve years. Twelve years since the night of the fire, since the chapel bell cracked from heat and the priest was found blackened like old parchment, mouth agape, hands twisted in a pose of warning, or prayer.

Now he was coming again.

Eliza’s heart did not pound. It grew still, tight. A silence crept into her bones as though the cold outside had seeped through the walls and taken root inside her ribs. She felt it then—that impossible thing—something curling in her gut like a serpent. Not fear. Not longing. Possession.

The Devil had entered into her. Not in myth, not in smoke or sulfur, but in memory. In him.

The house shuddered. A deep groan from the beams overhead. The fireplace spat ash though no flame had burned there for days. Portraits watched her with oil-dark eyes. Even the staircase seemed to twist slightly, as though it too recognized the man approaching and recoiled.

He had once been called Nathaniel Grey.

She had loved him. Loved him beyond sense, beyond the pale teachings of her father, the cold Reverend who claimed Hell slept beneath the moor and that certain names should never be spoken aloud.

Nathaniel had spoken them. In the chapel. In the cellar. In her ear, while the wind howled outside and the walls of Withering House pulsed with heat.

After the fire, after the bodies, he had vanished.

And yet now he walked the same path as before, unchanged, unweathered, as though not a day had passed. He did not age. He did not blink. His coat was the same velvet black, his boots the same deep red as the blood he had spilled in the altar room, long ago.

She descended the stairs, each creak of the wood sounding like the house groaning in protest. The great front door stood shut, swollen with damp, but already the iron latch trembled.

He was close.

In the drawing room, the mirror bloomed with frost. Her reflection stood still even as she moved. And when she reached for the crucifix on the mantle, her hand passed through it.

Too late, something whispered. The Devil does not knock. He waits.

A knock—soft, like knuckles on flesh—echoed through the corridor.

The door opened.

Nathaniel stood in the doorway, untouched by wind or time. His eyes glowed faintly, like embers buried in ash. He smiled, and the smile was both familiar and wrong; too wide, too knowing.

“Eliza,” he said, as though speaking the name unlatched the past.

Her knees weakened. The name was a key. And the door inside her—locked since that awful night—swung wide.

“What are you?” she whispered.

He stepped inside.

“I am what you invited in,” he said, brushing the snow from his shoulder. “What you begged for beneath the chapel ruins. Don’t you remember?”

And suddenly, she did.

The ritual. The words. The kiss on the altar stone. The bargain written not in ink, but in pain and blood.

She had not summoned the Devil for wealth and power. She had summoned him for love, to keep Nathaniel. And now, after all these years, the Devil had come to collect.

The End