I stand. Slowly. Phone clutched in one hand. My other curls into a fist so tight I feel the bone grind.
“Someone touched you before I did.”
My voice is hollow. Mechanical. Like it’s coming from outside my own body.
She pushes to her feet, reaching for me.
“Damien. Look at me?—”
I do.
And she flinches.
Because she’s never seen me like this.
Not unhinged.
Not unravelling.
Not vulnerable.
“No one touches what’s mine,” I whisper, but it’s not for her. It’s to whatever god is listening. “No one stalks the stalker. No one watches what I claimed.”
She’s saying something, but I don’t hear it.
All I can hear is the voice on the message. The phantom behind the screen.
“She’s not just yours.”
And suddenly, my obsession isn’t just an obsession anymore.
It’s war.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
RAVEN
He doesn’t speak for a long time.
He just stands there, back rigid, staring at the message that cracked him open like glass under a boot. The screen is still glowing on the floor between us.
She’s not just yours, Damien.
I touched her first.
The room is too quiet. I can hear the hum of the fridge three walls away. I can hear his breathing. Measured. Controlled. A lie.
I know that look.
It’s the same one he wore the first night he touched me, like I was salvation wrapped in sin. Like he wanted to fuck the hurt out of me and make sure it never came back.
But now?
Now he looks like he wants to tear the skin off the world just to see who else has looked at me.
He turns. Slowly.
His eyes land on mine like they belong there. Like they own me.
