chapter 7
Weird?
My mind flicked back to those strange mornings.
“There was one thing,” I said. “The month before everything started, I kept waking up on the floor.”
I stared at the table.
“I’d go to bed like normal. Then in the morning, I’d be curled up on the carpet, nowhere near the bed, with no memory of how I got there. At first I thought I’d just rolled off. I told Gavin. He said I was overreacting, that I probably flailed around in my sleep.”
I swallowed.
“But it kept happening. Three, sometimes four times a month. And then, right as the plagiarism drama started, it just… stopped. I got so caught up in surviving that I forgot about it.”
Logan’s frown deepened.
“And last time you visited your parents’ grave,” he said, “the soil looked disturbed.”
“Yeah.” I shivered. “Like someone had dug there recently.”
He sat back, thinking hard.
“My grandma used to tell stories from her side of the family,” he said after a minute. “Stuff I always wrote off as folklore. There’s one I can’t stop thinking about now. It’s about a kind of ritual.”
His grandma glanced at him sharply, then at me, then nodded once, like she’d already made peace with where this conversation was going.
“If someone is desperate enough,” Logan continued, “they can take soil from the grave of a person’s closest loved ones and use it in repeated ceremonies. Over time, they get limited chances to… piggyback on that person. Slip into their life for a few hours. See through their eyes. Hear their thoughts. Borrow their instincts. It’s not full possession—more like leaning over somebody’s shoulder from the inside.”
All the air seemed to leave the room.
I had taken Gavin to my parents’ grave once. It had been an emotional day. He’d held my hand, said the right things, promised he’d always be there for me.
He knew exactly where they were buried.
“So someone could’ve used my parents against me,” I said quietly. “To spy on me. To steal from me.”
“I can’t say it’s definitely that,” Logan said. “But the timing is… a little too convenient. You wake up on the floor three times a month. You suddenly have a ‘twin’ online posting your ideas before you. Then your boyfriend, who hears all your brainstorming, shows up in your rival’s background photos wearing the ring you bought him.”
My hands were shaking.
The horror wasn’t just that they had used me.
It was that they had used my parents. After everything. After death.
A slow, furious heat replaced the fear.
“Fine,” I said when I could speak again. “If they wanted my ideas that badly, I’ll give them something to choke on.”
Logan raised an eyebrow. “Now we’re talking.”