The Last Real Thing by VoidAndVelvet

"The door was here."

Dominic Ferro knows buildings. He knows how walls carry weight, how rooms connect, how old houses settle into themselves over time. More importantly, he knows that architecture follows rules.

So when the front door of the Victorian manor simply disappears, leaving nothing but an unbroken wall behind it, Dominic knows one thing with absolute certainty:

This house is impossible.

Unfortunately, he is not trapped inside it alone.

August Lindqvist is an occult debunker with a talent for getting under Dominic's skin and a professional rivalry with him that has lasted for years. Sharp-tongued, reckless, and infuriatingly difficult to rattle, August is the last person Dominic would ever choose as a partner.

Now he may be the only person Dominic can trust.

Hired together to catalog the manor's strange floor plan, the two men soon discover that the house is much larger inside than it should be. Hallways stretch beyond the dimensions of the building. Rooms repeat themselves. Doors vanish overnight. Staircases lead somewhere different every time.

Then the house begins learning them.

It digs through memories Dominic has spent years trying to control. It finds the fear August hides beneath every joke. It wears familiar faces, builds rooms from old wounds, and turns their worst moments into something that can walk toward them in the dark.

Every attempt to escape only pulls them deeper inside.

And the longer Dominic and August remain trapped together, the harder it becomes to pretend the tension between them is only hatred.

Their arguments become confessions. Their rivalry becomes dependence. The man Dominic has spent years wanting to defeat becomes the person he searches for whenever the lights go out, while August discovers that being seen by someone does not always mean giving that person a weapon.

But the house notices everything.

Especially the things they begin to feel for each other.

In a place where nothing can be trusted—not the walls, not their memories, not even the faces standing in front of them—Dominic and August must decide what they are willing to believe without proof.

If the entire world around them is lying, can they trust that what is growing between them is real?