CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
RAVEN
The first thing I feel is the cold.
The kind that sinks into your bones—not the crisp kind from outside, but the heavy, damp kind that clings to walls. The kind that lives in basements.
My head throbs.
There’s something soft beneath me. Not a bed. A mattress. Thin. Stiff.
I try to move my arms. My wrists drag against fabric straps.
Panic spikes before memory.
I bolt upright—only to be yanked back down.
I’m not bound tight, just enough to remind me I’m not in control anymore.
My eyes adjust to the dark.
The walls are concrete.
Paint peeling in sheets and on the wall across from me?
Moths.
Not real. Paper. Hundreds of them, each one pinned in perfect rows, like trophies. Some drawn in pencil, others in ink, and still others with a darker substance I hope I’m wrong about.
Above them, in precise block lettering:
YOU REMEMBER NOW.
I shake because I do. Not everything but enough. The boy. The whistle. The wasps.
He used to hum to me when I cried. Said he was the only one who really saw me. That we were the same kind of broken and then one day, he vanished.
I thought he’d been expelled. Arrested. Dead.
But he wasn’t.
He was waiting.
Preparing.
Preserving.
A sound draws my attention—soft and rhythmic.
A camera shutter.
I whip my head toward the corner of the room.
A vintage camera sits mounted on a tripod, the kind you crank to wind the film.
It’s aimed directly at the bed.
My bed.
