“You felt me, didn’t you?” I whisper, kneeling beside her. My voice is smoother than Damien’s. No gravel, no grit. Just the eerie lilt of something born in the shadows. “He was too loud. He broke you open. I would’ve waited. Iwaswaiting.”
I rise and open the cabinet in the wall. Behind the glass: relics. A Polaroid of her at fifteen—eyes wide, dirt on her knees. A page from the priest’s journal. A jar of dead moths.
“They think the priest died screaming. But he didn’t. He died begging.” I smile under the mask. “But I’m not God.”
Raven groans, her lashes fluttering. Her eyes open—unfocused, glassy—and for a single, perfect second, she looks right at me. Not through me.Atme. Like she knows.
“Wh-who…?” she croaks.
“Not him,” I say quietly. “Not yet.”
I press a cool cloth to her lips, hushing her back into the dark.
I sit in the chair opposite the cot and fold my hands, timing her breaths like a metronome. She stirs, and a name slips out of her like a splinter working its way free. Not mine. Not his.
The priest’s.
“You see,” I murmur. “Your body remembers even when you don’t want it to.”
I lean forward until my shadow falls across her. “You were always quiet. Other girls cried. You just… watched. Like you were waiting for someone else to do it for you.”
I take out my notebook and read aloud:“She stops breathing when footsteps pass her door. She looks out the window when she thinks no one sees.”
Raven whimpers, her head turning side to side as if trying to escape the sound of her own history.
“I knew you before you learned how to lie about being okay.”
I move to the door, my hand resting on the cold metal. “You’re not alone,” I say without turning back. “You just chose the wrong guardian.”
I leave her there, suspended between memory and fear. He will come, and when he does, she will finally have to decide which monster she remembers first.
Chapter 24
RAVEN
He disappears behind the curtain of dark once more, and I’m left swallowing the echo of his words like poison.
You remember how I feel, even if you’ve forgotten my name.
I don’t want to remember. Not him. Not the way the air in this room feels like it’s being siphoned out by his very presence. But memory isn’t obedient; it’s a parasite. It claws, it drips, it hunts you in your sleep and nests in the seams of your scars. And mine? Mine are stitched with a decade of silence.
I close my eyes, trying to drag myself somewhere safer—back to the chapel, back to the rough, honest weight of Damien’s hands. But there is no anchor here. Only the bite of rope against my wrists and the metallic taste of a fear that hasn’t changed since I was small.
There is no sound of a door opening, but I know he’s back. I feel the static rise of the hair along my spine, that sickening pulse of presence that hits just before the world breaks.
I grit my teeth, my jaw aching. “You think I’m scared of you?”
A beat of silence follows. Then—a laugh. It’s low, soft, and profoundly unsettling. It sounds like someone remembering an old joke that used to make them cry.
“No,” he murmurs, his voice a distorted rasp. “You’re scared of yourself.”
I feel his fingers drag through my hair. The movement is gentle, almost reverent, which makes it feel a thousand times more violent. It’s too slow to be kind.
“Scared of what you liked. What you wanted. What you begged me for in the dark before you even had words for it.”
My throat tightens. He’s lying. He’s twisting the trauma, performing some twisted Stockholm cosplay. Except… a part of me knows. A part of me remembers the attic steps. The sound of my own breath bouncing off the wood. A hand clamped over my mouth that felt more like protection than a threat.
And that whisper, echoing from a ghost:“Don’t scream. He’ll hear.”
