Because if this is what I think it is—if someone else is circling her, close enough to know where to leave a message and what it should say—then this is a game with new rules.
And I don’t know who’s writing them.
Not yet.
But I will.
Because I don’t need to chase shadows.
They come to me.
But when the apartment finally goes still, I can hear it again — that hum.
Low. Constant. Crawling through the vents like memory made sound.
It isn’t the system this time. It isn’t feedback or static. It’s older than that. Deeper. A frequency that lives in my bones, one I grew up breathing.
The same hum that haunted the chapel.
The same one that seeped through plaster and prayer and the slow scrape of leather against skin.
My throat locks because I know that sound, and I know the man who made it.
He used to hum when he hurt me.
Softly.
Like worship.
Like he wanted God to hear what he’d made.
And when I close my eyes, it’s all there again—the shadowed pews, the candle smoke, the altar steps slick with wax andsomething darker. His hand at the back of my neck. His breath in my ear. The whisper I thought I’d buried.
Good boy. Don’t move.
I flinch, but only inside. Never on the outside.
Across the room, Raven shifts on the couch. Her head tips against the cushion, her fingers twitch, her body caught somewhere between waking and a dream. She doesn’t remember. Not the sound. Not the chapel. Not the man.
But I do.
And I can feel him crawling back through the cracks I thought I sealed shut.
Maybe he never left.
Maybe he just changed the hymn.
I look down at my hands—the scarred knuckles, the ink stretched tight over skin I once carved to make him stop seeing me as prey.
Venator.
Hunter.
But what if that’s exactly what he wanted me to become?
What if that was the point all along?
The thought settles heavy behind my ribs, slow and inevitable, like rot in clean water. Because if the priest is still out there—if he’s the one who left that note—then this isn’t a haunting. It’s a resurrection.
