He. The priest.
The room tilts. I suck in air, blinking hard, trying to find a horizon line in the dark. “Why now?” I whisper. “Why come back now?”
The man moves to face me again. I still can’t see his eyes through the hood, but I feel the weight of them, picking apart every secret I’ve ever tried to bury.
“Because you let someone else touch what’s mine.”
My heart drops into a hollow abyss. Damien. He knows.
“You’ve always been mine,” he continues, his voice darkening into something jagged. “Even when you tried to forget. Even when you let him fuck the obedience back into you?—”
“Shut up?—”
He doesn’t flinch. He just tilts his head as if listening to a melody only he can hear. “I waited. I watched. I saw every little thing he did to you. Every bruise, every whimper, every time youcriedhisname instead of mine. I forgave you for all of it. Because you were broken.”
He steps closer, leaning in so far I can see the faint outline of his lips through the fabric of the mask. “But now it’s my turn to put you back together.”
A sob claws at my throat, but I swallow it. I won’t give him that. I won’t give anyone that ever again. But he sees the tremor anyway. He touches my cheek as if I’m expensive glass he plans to shatter at a glacial pace.
“You’ll remember,” he whispers. “Piece by piece. Just like before.”
He steps back, and the sudden absence of his heat hits harder than the touch. He lifts a small object and sets it on the floor beside me.
A child’s hairbrush. Pink. Worn. A single missing bristle.
It hits me like a scream in a locked room. I had one just like it. I lost it the week I stopped speaking for six months.
My vision tunnels. That brush shouldn’t exist. It was gone. Lost. Stolen. I had buried it in the same mental grave as the rest of that week—the muffled screaming behind closed doors, the red-soaked tiles, the memory of nails digging into my skin that weren’t my own.
I hadn’t seen that brush since the day I hid in the church supply closet, praying to a God I didn’t believe in to makehimgo away. Not Damien. The other him. The priest with the patient smile and the key to every room a child wasn’t supposed to enter.
I lurch forward, the ropes snapping me back. He crouches beside me, dragging a gloved finger along the faded princess on the handle.
“I kept it,” the stalker says softly. “You dropped it the day you ran. I tried to call you back, but you didn’t hear me. Or maybe you just didn’t care.”
“I don’t know you,” I rasp, my voice sounding like broken glass.
“You will.”
The brush is a landmine. I was seven when I stopped using it. Seven when I stopped smiling. Seven when my sister asked why I started locking my bedroom door even when Mum said not to. I close my eyes, trying to force the memories back down, but a new one cracks open: a breath in my ear. A voice, younger, desperate.
“I’ll keep you safe, okay? Just don’t look at him. Just stay behind me.”
My eyes fly open. There was someone else. Not the priest. Not a shadow. A boy. And he’d had my brush in his hand when he pulled me away.
I swallow hard. “You were there.”
The stalker doesn’t respond immediately. He lifts the brush and presses it to where his mouth would be, a kiss against the plastic. “I was always there,” he says. “You just stopped looking.”
“Why didn’t you say anything? Why this?”
He shrugs, as if the answer is too simple for words. “I needed time. Time to make sure you’d forgethimbefore you rememberedme.”
The world tilts again. This isn’t a stranger. This is a ghost with unfinished business. And maybe I’m the one who let the door open when I started following Damien’s footsteps in the dark.
He rises, and I hate the way the brush swings from his fingers like a trophy. It was a weapon once—the handle used to silence me when I cried. Now it’s back, a relic of a war I thought was over.
“You think this will make me remember?” I spit. “A fucking hairbrush?”
