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: Interested / Bisexual - males preferred
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.
My grandmother, Evelyn Henderson, was a firm believer that everything in the universe — every breath of wind, every whisper of flame, every speck of soil — was bound by nature’s law. She said the earth remembered things. That the stars listened.
I can still picture her, hunched beneath the yellow lamplight of her study, surrounded by shadows and the smell of old parchment. A single strand of silver hair always escaped her braid as she turned the brittle pages of an obscenely large leather-bound book. Its spine was cracked, its corners softened by decades of use, and the parchment inside was littered with faded ink smudges, spidery notes, and the ghostly rings of long-forgotten coffee cups. Sometimes she’d murmur to herself in a lilting Scottish brogue that hadn’t entirely left her, tracing a line of text with one ink-stained finger as if the words themselves were spells.
Her craft — as she called it — was of the old ways: naturalism, philosophy, and earthbound witchery. No wands, no spectacle. Just ritual and reverence, patience and practice. She believed power came from understanding the living world, not controlling it. As a child, I’d watch her crush herbs between her palms until the air bloomed with their scent, or pour salt in strange circular patterns on the floor. I found her fascinating — mysterious, even — but our meetings were rare and fleeting, like chapters read out of order.
My parents never spoke much about her. Especially not my mother.
When the dementia began to hollow her out, it was my mother who made the decision — “It’s for the best,” she'd said — to move her into an aged-care facility across town. I never saw her again after that. The thought of her, sitting in a sterile room with no windows to the garden she once worshipped, still knots something deep in my chest. The Henderson bloodline stretches back centuries, all the way to the Scottish Highlands — a lineage of midwives, healers, and cunning women who crossed the sea in search of a new beginning. My great-great-grandmother brought her craft to the New World, to the swamps and bayous of La Nouvelle-Orléans, where folklore and faith tangled like vines. The Henderson name became one whispered in the corners of apothecaries, written in ledgers and burial records alike. But time, as it does, wore down the edges of belief. Each generation practiced a little less, forgot a little more. By the time my mother came along, magic was spoken of only in metaphor — something romanticized, even ridiculed. She traded rituals for reason, herbs for medicine, instinct for certainty.
And then there’s me. I don’t cast spells. I don’t summon spirits or stir potions by moonlight. But I collect. Mother calls it hoarding, of course. But I like to think of it as preservation — an attempt to hold on to what’s left of us. My shelves are lined with dust-coated tomes and yellowing manuscripts. Drawers spill over with talismans, bundles of dried herbs, animal skulls, wax-sealed jars, and crystals that catch the light like trapped stars. There’s history in every object, a quiet hum of something ancient still alive, still waiting. Maybe I’m not the witch my grandmother hoped I’d be. But I keep her world alive, piece by fragile piece — in the spaces between dust and memory.
"She has witchcraft in her lips and stars in her eyes."
I did not step onto English soil so much as I was banished into it. My mother had called it a “change of scenery” — with that brittle, too-bright tone of a woman rearranging furniture while the whole damn house was burning down. But I knew better. I’ve always known better. Truth has sharp edges on my tongue, and this time, one of those edges cut too deep: Grandmother is slipping. Faster than you’ll admit.
I said it out loud. The forbidden thing. And my mother, all spine and stubbornness and grief warped into denial, punished me the only way she knew how. Distance. So now here I was, standing on a rattling coastal train grinding its way through miles of bleak English countryside, watching a world outside the window turn stranger by the minute. Fog pressed against the glass like a living thing trying to seep in. Fields blurred into pewter smudges and frostbitten green, the sky sagging low and swollen with unshed rain. Everything looked cold. Everything felt colder.
By the time the train finally lurched to my stop — the family estate, as my mother so elegantly phrased it—I felt the chill deep in my bones. And then I saw it. The manor rose on the horizon like a bruise blooming across the land. A crumbling silhouette of stone and shadow, more exhaled by the fog than built into it. Yellowed windowpanes bowed inward on tired frames, and the roof slouched under the weight of too many years. Ivy choked the stone walls in a thick, tangled shroud.
Civilization had long abandoned the surrounding grounds. Wild garden beds erupted into chaos. Skeletal trees scraped at the wind. Gravel paths disappeared beneath creeping green. Even the air felt different here—thicker, heavier, watching me. I had barely set my bags down in the entry hall when the pull started. Not a sound. Not a scent. Not anything reasonable. Just a tug beneath my ribs, subtle and insistent, like something forgotten had reached out and hooked its finger into me. It drew me past the dead fountain, past the roses turned brittle and brown, toward the back of the estate where the fog curled darkest.
And there it was. The Greenhouse. Half-ruin. Half-relic. Entirely wrong, in the best possible way. Once, it must have been magnificent — iron framework rising like cathedral ribs, glass panes tall enough to baptize sunlight. Now it sagged under its own memory, rust streaking down metal bones, moss swallowing what time hadn’t already claimed. A forgotten beast. But as I pushed through the hedge line — branches clawing at my arms like desperate hands — the world changed. The wind went still. The crows stopped calling. And a warmth — soft, impossible — bloomed across my skin. The greenhouse door groaned under my hand. Ancient. Reluctant. As it opened, something alive breathed heat straight into my face.
Inside the Greenhouse the air shimmered.
Light fractured through grime-coated glass in long, wavering beams that felt almost liquid. Humidity licked her cheeks, dampening her hairline. The smell — gods, the smell — rich, sweet, loamy, alive. A jungle had been birthed inside this dying structure. Spring orchids spilled down from rusted hooks, their velvet petals plump with dew that glittered like captured stars. Ferns unfurled from corners as though waking from enchanted sleep. Moss draped itself across stone planters in soft emerald sheets. Insects hummed a low, droning symphony — a vibration that felt almost sentient, as though the greenhouse itself were breathing with her. The Venus flytraps caught her eye first. They opened and closed with slow, deliberate precision, serrated mouths flexing in a rhythm too synchronized to be coincidence. Their movements responded to her presence — or so it felt. A hypnotic cadence, luring her deeper into the heart of the structure.
Above her, droplets of water fell from copper lines strung across the ceiling like veins — each one catching the fractured sunlight before dissolving against the soil in tiny, glimmering impacts. A timer clicked somewhere unseen. Soft. Mechanical. Like the beating of a metallic heart. Magic — subtle but unmistakable — pulsed beneath everything. She felt it. In her fingertips. In her breath. In the quiet thrum of the earth beneath her boots. Color bled across her vision — indigo melting into scarlet, emerald bleeding into amber. Everything grew wild, unrestrained, almost triumphant in the face of the ruin surrounding it. But at the far end of the greenhouse, the riot of life surrendered to something else entirely. Order. Precision. Intention. A single garden bed, bordered in dark stone, its soil richer and darker than the rest — tended, loved, cultivated with a devotion that bordered on reverent.
Holby stepped closer, pulse tightening. This was no random assortment of flora. Deadly Nightshade rose in delicate clusters, inky berries glistening like drops of midnight. Oleander, pale and deceptively soft, unfurled blossoms that whispered poison beneath their beauty. Jimsonweed, twisted and ghostly, lifted its trumpet-like blooms in eerie silence. Hemlock grew feathery and innocent as lace. And Aconite, robed in deep blue, bowed its hooded heads as though in a congregation of silent prayer. Every poisonous plant she knew — and more she didn’t — thrived here, carefully curated, meticulously nurtured. Not chaotic. Not accidental. Not forgotten. Intended. Holby’s breath trembled. This greenhouse wasn’t a relic. It was a sanctuary. A confession left behind by someone who understood beauty and danger were often born from the same root. And perhaps — just perhaps — A warning. She felt the truth of it settle into her bones. Whatever exile her mother thought she’d sentenced her to… this place was something else entirely. The manor wanted her here. The greenhouse called to her. And Holby — aching, angry, unwanted — stepped further inward, the door closing behind her with a soft click, as though sealing her fate.
I'd love to pretend I hate him. It would make this easier. Instead, I feel him before I ever see him. The bond doesn't whisper anymore, it sings. A beautiful, unforgiving symphony beneath my skin that swells with every step he takes toward me. It curls through my veins, settles beneath my ribs, and wraps itself around my heart until I can't remember where I end and he begins. The closer Asher gets, the louder it becomes. Like my soul is trying to crawl out of my chest just to stand beside his. I tell myself I ignore it. I tell everyone else the same lie. Then I walk through Club Desire with my chin high and my dress clinging to every curve I know he can't help but notice. I let the music carry my hips a fraction slower than necessary. I laugh a little louder when someone tries to flirt with me. I pretend I don't feel those familiar eyes following every step I take across the floor. He's always watching. Always. I don't know when I became addicted to it. Maybe it happened the first time I caught him staring like I was both a miracle and a punishment. Maybe it happened the night he looked at me with enough restraint to make my own pulse ache. Or maybe it happened long before either of us had the courage to admit that whatever exists between us stopped resembling duty a long time ago. Now I chase it. Not because I want another man's attention, because I want his. Only his. It's cruel, selfish, and it's the closest thing I've ever had to asking him to touch me without saying the words aloud. He never does. He stands in the shadows with his jaw locked so tightly I wonder if his teeth might shatter, every muscle drawn taut beneath his skin as though simply existing in the same room as me demands every ounce of his control. Sometimes I think that's worse. Sometimes I think watching him fight the bond is the only thing keeping me from surrendering to it completely. Because I remember. Goddess... I remember: the gala, the gunfire, the moment the world disappeared beneath my feet. People screamed. Glass exploded. And then there was nothing. Nothing except him. He didn't hesitate. He didn't stop to think. He threw himself from the balcony after me as though the choice had never belonged to him. One heartbeat I was falling toward certain death, the next I was crushed against his chest while enormous black wings exploded around us, wrapping so tightly around my body they became a fortress against the chaos below. I still remember the sound they made. The rush of feathers. The violent beat of wings. The way his arms locked around me like the universe itself would have to tear me away.
I linger where I know he'll find me, steal glances over my shoulder because I know he'll be there, tempt fate with every teasing smile, every deliberate step, every second I spend within arm's reach before walking away again, and not because I enjoy tormenting him. Because I'm terrified of the day he stops looking. Because if this bond has taught me anything, it's that love doesn't always arrive gently. Sometimes it buries itself beneath your skin. Sometimes it drinks from your veins. Sometimes it becomes the only thing separating obsession from survival. And sometimes… Sometimes… it wears the face of a Fallen angel who looks at me like I'm both the reason he still breathes… and the reason he may never find peace again.
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