“No,” he says. “But the smell might.”
He turns and picks up a candle. Not white tallow. Not vanilla.
Frankincense.
The scent hits me like a physical blow. He lights it, letting the smoke curl under my nose like a hook in my sinuses, dragging up pews, whispered prayers, and a sweaty hand resting on my lower back while I knelt on stone.
The memory hits like a truck. Me, on my knees. A voice whispering my name. Another whispering his. And between them—a choice.
“Do you remember now?” he asks through the holy fog.
I shake my head, because I don’t know which version is real. The one where I was alone, or the one where someone else was meant to bleed in my place.
“You used to follow him,” he murmurs. “Like a lamb. But you always looked back at me.”
He crouches again, setting the brush and the candle between us. Then, he adds a third item. A silver moth pin. Sharp. Bent at the edge.
My heart stutters. That isn’t mine. That belonged to the boy. The one who told me to hide. The one I thought I’d dreamed up to survive. He disappeared, and I never even learned his name.
“Why are you doing this?”
The hooded man leans in until his breath brushes my lips. This time, there are no riddles.
“Because I’ve waited long enough.”
Chapter 25
RAVEN
He leaves the candle burning.
He doesn’t say a word as he walks out, his footsteps echoing across the stone floor like a warning I’m too exhausted to heed. The scent stays behind, though. It clings to the air, wrapping around me like incense from a dead religion—something that was once sacred but is now just ash and heavy, suffocating memory.
And I’m still tied. Still kneeling on the cold floor. Still trying to hold all the fractured pieces of myself together with nothing but skin, teeth, and a heartbeat that won’t fucking quit, even when every other part of me wants to surrender.
I don’t know how long it’s been. Minutes? Hours? Time doesn’t move in this cellar; it just waits. It holds its breath, crouching in the corners, waiting for the next cruel thing to happen.
My wrists ache where the hemp bites into the bone, and my thighs tremble from the strain of my posture, but I don’t cry. I won’t scream. I just stare at that pink brush, that silver pin, andthat flickering flame. I wonder if this is where I’m meant to end—surrounded by relics from a past I still can’t fully grasp.
Until I hear it.
A door creaks open. But it’s not the one he left through. This sound is behind me. Soft. Intentional.Wrong.
My breath hitches, and I twist violently in my restraints, trying to see through the peripheral dark, trying to hear over the roar of my own blood—but nothing comes. Not a footstep. Not a breath.
Not until the hand touches my neck.
It isn’t rough like the stalker’s. It isn’t possessive like Damien’s. It’s just… there. I freeze, my skin turning to ice beneath the contact. This isn’t him. This isn’t the man in the hood.
The hand doesn’t tighten. It doesn’t grab. It strokes. A single finger trails from the base of my pulse to the hollow of my throat, moving like a signature written in ghost-ink. It moves with a terrifying, intimate familiarity. Like it knows the exact map of my terror.
Something in me shatters. I twist, wild and feral, my heart slamming against my ribs like a trapped bird, but I can’t see the face. I only catch the blurred shape of a figure retreating, slipping back into the shadows as if it were carved from the dark itself. No face. No words. Just a presence that feels like a burial shroud.
And then—the flame blows out.
I scream. It’s a loud, ragged, ugly sound that tears through the silence. I don’t know who just touched me. I don’t know how long they were standing there, watching me bleed in the candlelight. I don’t know why I suddenly feel like I’m being hunted from more than one direction.
The room plunges into a total, heavy blackness, and I start to shake. This isn’t just the cold. Something is wrong—more wrongthan it was ten minutes ago. The man in the hood isn’t the only one playing games with me. There’s a third shadow. A third memory. A third nightmare.
