Nickname: Flowerpot
Age: Twenty-six years young
Eyes: Starlit Ocean Blue
Hair: Mocha Brown
Home: La Nouvelle-Orléans, Louisiana, USA
Home Away from Home: London, England / New York, USA
Relationship / S. Orientation: Bonded
I wasn’t born yesterday. Far from it. But unlike the stories my grandmother used to mutter over boiling pots and candlelit altars, I am not ancient, immortal, or stitched from forgotten centuries. I’m just a witch — a Henderson witch, which admittedly carries its own weight. My lineage comes from La Nouvelle-Orléans, Louisiana, a place where magic is less superstition and more oxygen. People there don’t ask if you believe — they ask whose blood runs in your veins.
Mine? Henderson blood. Old as the river. Sharp as the truth. Stubborn as the southern heat. And still, even with all that history shadowing my spine, I find myself obsessed with the smallest, most ridiculous things: the way light fractures through the focus of a camera lens; the soft drag of a paintbrush blooming pigment across canvas; the electricity that gathers in the breath between two people who haven’t touched yet. And lately — gods help me — the man who lives in the apartment across from mine.
He’s in his mid-to-late forties, tall, dark, unmistakably Italian — the kind of man who carries old cities in the lines of his shoulders and moves as though gravity itself shifts politely out of his way. His voice, when it drifts through the open windows on quiet mornings, has that velvet-coated accent that could make even a confession sound like a seduction. But dawn is when he kills me. Every single morning, without fail, he steps into his window like a sin designed specifically to torment me. Sunlight pours over him, gilding the tan of his skin, tracing the stark lines of muscle beneath it.
He stretches — slowly, deliciously, absently — nothing on him but Ralph Lauren boxer briefs clinging to his hips like worship. I tell myself he doesn’t know I’m watching. I cling to that lie. But sometimes… gods… sometimes I swear he does. Sometimes he pauses mid-stretch. Sometimes the corner of his mouth lifts in the softest, cockiest smirk. Sometimes his gaze ticks toward my window — just long enough to suggest intention. And my stomach drops straight through the floor. My pulse jumps. My breath stutters. Heat crawls up my throat.
"Perv," I mutter into my morning coffee, the word entirely too breathless to be effective.
My name is Holby. A name that sounds like someone tried to say Holly and got distracted halfway through — which, honestly, tracks perfectly with the way my parents lived their lives. My mother swears I was born beneath the eclipsing of a blood moon, that the sky turned red and destiny cracked open just enough to spill something wild into me. I often wonder if she and my father were simply a little high, a little inspired, and very in love with the idea of naming their baby after a celestial moment they barely understood.
My parents were free spirits — until life caught up with them in the brutal way it often does. My father is gone. My mother is still here, worn thin by grief and by caring for my grandmother, whose mind is slipping away faster than anyone is ready to admit. So that leaves me. A Henderson witch displaced from New Orleans. Living in a city that feels more concrete than heartbeat. Drinking bad coffee and spying on a man sculpted by the gods and Ralph Lauren. People assume witches are serene, wise, divinely insightful.
We’re not. We’re messy. We’re emotional. We’re human — just with more candles and weirder dreams. As for life? I don’t believe in do-overs. You get one shot. One performance. When the curtain falls, it falls hard. And violins? Let’s just say: if the Devil has a favorite instrument — and he absolutely does — he’d rosin the bow himself, humming something wicked while he tuned the strings.
"She has witchcraft in her lips and stars in her eyes."
"ωнєη α ∂єνιℓ ƒαℓℓѕ ιη ℓσνє, ιтѕ тнє мσѕт нαυηтιηgℓу вєαυтιƒυℓ тнιηg єνєя. αη∂ уσυ ѕнσυℓ∂ вє тєяяιƒιє∂, ƒσя нє ωιℓℓ gσ тσ тнє ∂єρтнѕ σƒ нєℓℓ ƒσя нєя."
Holby Henderson was never meant to belong to anyone.
Not to the darkness that stalked her footsteps nor to the magic woven into her blood, not to the club that swallowed pieces of her soul beneath velvet lights and whispered sins, and certainly not to the Fallen who looked at her as though devotion and damnation had somehow become the same thing.
She had spent her entire life fighting to keep hold of the only thing she'd ever truly owned—herself.
Every choice she'd made. Every scar she'd earned. Every wall she'd painstakingly built around her heart had been another declaration of independence. The world had taken enough from her already. She refused to surrender what little remained. Then there was Asher. He arrived like a storm that never truly passed, lingering on the horizon no matter how many miles she tried to put between them. He never demanded her submission. He never needed to. He simply watched. Patiently. Unwaveringly. Like a man who had already decided that time itself would eventually bend in his favour.
Every time they found themselves beneath the same roof, something shifted. The air thickened. Conversations became battles disguised as banter. Every sarcastic remark carried the edge of something far more dangerous, while every lingering silence seemed to pulse with words neither of them dared speak aloud. They circled each other like opposing tides, drawn together by something neither entirely understood, only to crash apart moments later. There was always too much eye contact. Too many stolen glances. Too many moments where one of them would step just a fraction too close before stubborn pride forced them apart again.
The tension between them wasn't loud. It simmered. It lived in the brush of fingertips that lasted a heartbeat longer than either intended and in the way his voice softened whenever he called her Little Witch. In the countless arguments that somehow felt more intimate than any whispered confession ever could. People assumed hatred, others mistook it for chemistry, the truth was infinitely more complicated.
Asher’s fascination with Holby had long since evolved into something consuming. She occupied every quiet moment, every reckless decision, every instinct that told him to protect before asking permission. It wasn't merely affection, nor was it the fleeting hunger of desire. This was an obsession. She fascinated him because she refused to yield. Every time she challenged him, every time she shoved him away with another cutting remark or stubborn glare, she unknowingly pulled him closer. Holby wasn't fragile. She wasn't waiting to be rescued. She was fire wrapped in flesh, wild and infuriating. Beautiful in the way thunderstorms were beautiful; impossible to tame without destroying what made them extraordinary. And that was precisely why he couldn't look away. Holby hated how easily he unsettled her. She hated the way his presence made her pulse stumble despite every promise she'd made to herself. She hated that his voice could calm storms inside her she'd spent years pretending didn't exist. Most of all, she hated that somewhere beneath all the anger and resistance, she trusted him more than she wanted to admit.
"We are chaos wrapped in passion, and I never want to escape."
Threads;
✦ A S H E R - Private Messages ✦
✦ Syrius Gilroy - Private Messages ✦
