The next day, Tom decided to test how far the village would go to shun him out of the place he had lived all his life. First, he stopped by the butchers where Gren worked with his mother.

He was their first customer of the day. They widened their eyes and hurried into the back room. Tom waited for ten minutes before realising that they weren't coming back to serve him, and it stung. Gren was Cal's neighbour, and someone he had hung out with enough to consider him a friend. "Hello?" he called out. The silence knotted his insides.

He sighed and moved onto the charity shop next door. The door was quickly locked. The worker stood on the other side of the glass, shaking her head with pursed lips.

Tom sighed again and moved on.

The next shop, nor the next café, treated him with kindness. Tom wondered how Ezra had dealt with it, and how he wasn't bitter, and cruel, and hateful towards a world that loathed him simply for existing.

Tom paused outside the library, looking up at its arched entryway. His heart wildly thumped. He was sweating under his jacket, and almost ready to turn and run, until Haisley spotted him loitering by the steps. She opened the door slowly and pulled her glasses up to sit among her greying roots.

The dread in her green eyes was like a punch to the gut. "Please don't ban me," Tom whispered.

"I'm sorry," she said, failing to meet his eyes.

"You're not, you can't be," Tom said bluntly. "I've done nothing wrong."

"To love a demon . . . you must be troubled." She tightened her quivering lip. "I have to stop leaving the keys out for you."

Tom blinked back tears and swallowed hard. He nodded, staring at his feet. "Shame on you," he muttered before she hurried back inside, leaving Tom to stand alone, numb.

Ezra was on soul stripper duties. Cal was with Harper. His other friends hadn't returned his calls, and his parents were busy fixing a blocked toilet in the pub. His sister was the only person he could turn to, but even she couldn't truly be trusted with his problems.

He heard the faint hum of the angel's choir from the library. Even that didn't lighten his heart as he turned and dragged himself to the country road. He wanted to scream and yell, to defend himself and fight, to be emotional and show how much he was hurting. But that was what they wanted, so they had an excuse to shun him out for good.

For a while, he sat on the fence and watched farmer Joel's sheep, hoping Ezra would appear to comfort him. But the longer he sat, the worse he felt. Overthinking ate away at him until he truly felt empty to his core.

In the pub, locals stared as if he couldn't see them. They muttered as if he couldn't hear them. They talked about him with ill intension as if he didn't have feelings of his own.

"What the fuck are you all looking at?" Tom snapped. He paused by the bar to glare around. "If you have a problem with me, say it."

Everyone diverted their attention to their pints. "Cowards," Declan muttered, patting his son on the shoulder. "Where's Ez?"

Tom shrugged and pushed past him. Neasa was sitting on the couch with a mug in her hand, and her gaze on the TV. She paused her show when he tried to get to his bedroom unnoticed.

"Wait!" she called out, stopping his bedroom door from slamming. "Tom . . . "

"What?" he asked coldly, not wanting her to weigh his low mood down any further.

"Are you okay?"

"What do you think?" He tried to shut the door again. She didn't let him.

"Talk to me."

"Why would I? You'll just go straight to Gerry and tell him everything."

"I'm divorcing him."

Tom met her gaze. She was close to tears. Her lip wobbled, but like he had done so many times that day, she sucked in her sorrows until she felt nothing at all.

"Why?" he asked, towering over her as she stood closer.

"Can I come in?"

Tom widened his door. She sat on his bed, and he sat next to her. "Have you told Gerry this yet?"

Neasa shook her head to say no. "I decided the moment he outed you to mum and dad. I can't even look at him anymore without wanting to punch any happiness out of him. It disgusts me to see him going about his day while you're struggling because of him."

"I don't understand how you're only just seeing him this way. He's been a dick from the moment you met him."

"I was blinded by love."

"Blinded? You were living in a delusional world, Neasa."

"Maybe I was." She turned to face him and touched his forearm softly. "I'm so sorry for allowing him to be so horrible to you for so long. I don't expect you to forgive me for betraying your trust. I just want you to know that while we've not been speaking, I've never been so alone."

Tom closed his eyes and felt his heart leaking through his body. "I've missed you too."

Her fingers squeezed his arm. "I'm telling Gerry when we move out. I just need to make sure he can't get back into this house when I do. He'll be angry."

"When you move out?"

"We've found a house. I convinced him I wanted to leave the area, somewhere far. It'll all be in his name, so he can leave, but me and Catherina will stay."

Tom frowned. "A man like that will be furious a woman is divorcing him. He won't let you do this without a fight."

"I know. For the sake of you and Catherina, I'll try and get this over with as quickly and as easily as I can."

"He'll be nasty. He'll use the fact that I'm dating Ez as a weapon to get Catherina."

Neasa raised her brows. "So, the rumours are true?"

"Yeah."

Neasa hugged him, and Tom relaxed into her. "I'm glad you're happy," she said.

"And I'm sad you're not."

"I will be soon," she reassured him. "Anyway, enough of Gerry. I want to hear everything about Ez."

They talked until the conversation flowed, and they were belly laughing, and throwing insults around like siblings do. As they talked about the time Catherina threw up on one of Gerry's shirts when she was a baby, Ezra appeared in his room.

He froze when Neasa looked up with a gasp.

"Don't leave!" Tom said, leaping from the bed. "This is my sister, Neasa." Ezra only stared. "Neasa, this is Ez."

Tom's sister smiled brightly. She looked a little like Tom with mousy brown hair, pale skin, and blue eyes, though her features were sharper, with a sharp nose and a protruding chin like her fathers. "It's lovely to meet you, Ez."

Ezra stopped anxiously chewing his lip to say, "You too."

Tom smiled up at him. Ezra's face softened at the sight.

"I should be going now." Neasa moved towards the door, trying not to smirk in her brother's direction. "Text me later."

"I will."

She left and shut the door behind her. Tom stood in front of Ezra, close enough to feel his warmth and smell the cold on his clothes. "Hi."

"Hello." Ezra's intense brown eyes circled his face. "How was your day?"

"Not too bad. Yours?"

"I've had better." Ezra's black brows twitched towards a frown. "You're sad."

"I'm okay."

"You're not."

"Fine, I'm not. Haisley banned me from the library today." The flicker of fury in Ezra's eyes shivered Tom's bones. Instead of shuffling away, he wrapped arms around his back and buried his face into Ezra's shoulder. "I'm upset, but there's no point in making a scene."

"They can't do this to you," Ezra grumbled, rigid against him.

"They already have."

Hearing the pain in his voice, Ezra moved him to the bed, and they curled up together above the duvet. "Are you definitely sure that you still want this?" he asked with their faces so close, their noses touched.

"Yes. Part of me hoped it wouldn't be this difficult, but maybe the village just needs time. I'll carry on like normal. Surely, they can't hate me forever."

"They're stubborn. They'll try."

Tom traced a finger along the barbed wire tattoo on Ezra's neck, fed up with talking and thinking of nothing other than other people's hate. "Did this appear the moment you were condemned?"

"Yes."

"Did it hurt?"

"Yes."

Tom rested his hand on the side of Ezra's face. "So unfair," he whispered.

"Well, if it didn't happen, you wouldn't have been in my timeline."

Tom was reminded that he was just passing through Ezra's life. There was a before, and there would be an after. He kissed him softly. The pain and the anger was suddenly worth it to be a small part of Ezrakhell's long life.

"That's true. And maybe the pub would have been shut down. And Neasa wouldn't be divorcing Gerry."

"She's divorcing him?"

"Thankfully. She should have never married him. I don't understand how she could love someone like that in the first place."

"People like him have many faces. He would've shown her what she wanted to see. Maybe she realised her mistake long ago. It's not easy leaving people like Gerry. I've seen it countless of times. They're the ones I take the souls from the most, when they've finally shown their true colours."

"What were you called to today? It's okay if you don't want to talk about it."

"A demon had killed three angels. Then I was called to protect humans against demons. Then I was called to a bad motorway accident across the country. The worst was a demon begging me not to take her soul. She hadn't started the fight and had to protect herself, but she had hurt a human badly. That was hard. I didn't want to come back upset, which is why I was gone a while."

Tom coiled their legs together and pressed lips to Ezra's forehead. He held him, not knowing what to say because really, there was nothing he could say to make it all better. Ezra was a soul stripper, and he would be for the rest of his life. At least for now, Ezra had a safe place to return to, and someone waiting on him with open arms.