I was never the only one in that chapel. And I’m not the only one being watched.
I stumble backward, the ropes gone now—did they cut them? Did they just fall away?—and I almost trip over the edge of the stone altar. My palms slap the floor, stinging as they hit the grit. My knees burn. I don’t care.
The note is still there, lying where it was dropped, open and waiting. I don’t look at it again. I can’t. The words are already branded onto the inside of my eyelids.
It wasn’t Damien.
The boy with the moths. The one who watched me like he knew me. The one who never spoke but never left. If it wasn’t Damien… then who the fuck was it?
I clamp a hand over my mouth before the scream can crawl out. It’s not panic anymore; it’s something worse. It’s the sensation of my entire reality unravelling behind my ribs. Something is shifting in my chest, something that doesn’t fit anymore, something trying to claw its way out.
I back up until my spine hits stone. Cold. Ancient. The chapel wall. I press into it as if the granite can hold my bones together, but I’m splitting down the middle. The memories are no longer flickers; they are haemorrhaging. The garden. The insects. The boy.
The second shadow.
The one I thought was a hallucination born of trauma. He was real. He was always real. And he’s here.
I drag in a breath that tastes of dust and old regret. My hands are vibrating. My heart is louder than the silence. I twist my head toward the entrance, expecting Damien to come storming in to find me. He doesn’t. Which means he doesn’t know. Which means I’m alone in this.
Which means the other one planned it that way.
I slide down the wall, hugging my arms around my knees, fingers digging into my skin until I draw blood. I want to scrape the confusion away. I want to peel back the years and make the truth look the way I need it to, but the architecture of my past is changing.
Everything I believed—everything I felt for Damien—was it built on a lie? What if this isn’t new to him? What if he already knows who the other boy was? What if that’s why he really came back to me?
My jaw locks. I rise, slow and uneven, using the wall for support. If there’s a second player in this game, then I need to learn the rules. I need to remember all of it—every dark corner, every whispered secret—before someone else starts playing with my mind again.
I am not the victim anymore. I am the evidence.
Chapter 26
RAVEN
The night tastes wrong.
It clings to the roof of my mouth like soot—thick, hot, and cloying—even though the chapel is colder now. Emptier. It feels as though the building has finally exhaled something it held inside for too long, a stale breath of incense and old secrets.
I keep seeing it behind my eyelids. The moths. The boy. The second shadow.
For years, I told myself it was Damien. I had to. I stitched that lie into the fabric of my sanity because the alternative was a void I couldn’t cross. It had to be him because the truth would have killed me before I was old enough to understand it. But now? Now the lie is dead, and the truth is moving in the dark. It’s alive, breathing, and it’s hungry.
I walk through the nave like I’m being watched, and I am—by ghosts. By versions of myself I tried to bury in shallow graves. I am haunted by the girl who flinched at the soft brush of moth wings but didn’t blink at the sight of blood. The girl who sleptwith her hands clenched into white-knuckled fists, whispering secrets into the dark corners of her room and calling it safety.
I don’t feel safe anymore. I don’t feel anything except the pull. The presence.
Someone is following me. And it isn’t Damien. It’s the other one. The first one. The real architect of the nightmare.
I’m halfway to the shattered door when I hear it. Not a footstep. Not even a whisper. It’s something older, deeper—a vibration in the air that sounds like my name. It isn’t spoken aloud; it’s a phantom breath against the shell of my ear, just enough to make the blood turn to slush in my veins. It’s a reminder that this chapel was never truly empty. Not then. Not now.
I turn slowly. The altar glows with a sickly, fading light from the dying candles. I left the note there, splayed open like a wound, still mocking me. I walk back to it—not because I want to, but because there is a thread tied to my heart, yanking me toward the epicentre of the rot.
The air grows heavier with every step, thick as water, dragging at my limbs. My hand trembles as I reach for the stone slab, but the note is gone. In its place lies something new.
A moth.
It’s dead. Its wings are pinned open with savage precision, its body crushed into the stone. And underneath it, written in a dark, rusty smear that isn’t ink, are five words:
“You were supposed to be mine.”
