My throat closes, a physical phantom grip tightening around my windpipe. I can’t scream. I can’t even draw enough air to sob. That isn’t Damien’s handwriting. It’s too neat, too deliberate, too cold.
It’s the boy in the dark. The one who watched. The one who waited while I gave my heart to a man who was only ever a shield. The one who followed me through every year of my life like a second shadow I couldn’t cast off.
And I know he’s not far.
I feel it again—that breath, that whisper, the unmistakable shape of a smile hidden in the gloom. Then, a sound. The heavy creak of the chapel door swinging on its hinges.
I spin around, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs, my lungs seizing. I expect to see him. I expect the mask, the hood, the truth.
But there is no one there. Just the open door. Just the black maw of the night and the mourning howl of the wind.
But I know better. He was here. He has always been here, tucked into the places I refused to look. And now? Now he’s done watching. Now he wants me to remember exactly what I promised him in the dark.
Chapter 27
RIVER
She doesn’t scream anymore. Not in the way girls usually do.
Not the shrill, decorative panic of someone trying to survive. Not the messy, beautiful sound of someone who still believes they can. No, Raven’s screams are buried now—folded neat and quiet beneath her ribs, like a secret she’s keeping from the world. She learned early that silence buys more time than begging ever did.
I watch her from the shadows of the choir loft, perched where the angels have long since rotted out of the leaded glass. The candles I lit for her earlier have almost guttered out, soft wax puddling beneath iron holders like a melted, unanswered prayer.
She’s sleeping. Or pretending to. Curled on the velvet pew where I laid her after her last fall. There’s blood on her thigh and bruises on her hips—the calligraphy of a history she’s too terrified to read. Behind her lashes, a tiny sliver of the girl she used to be still flickers, stubborn and dying.
She always tried so hard to be good. Even when no one ever told her what that meant. Even when the man with the white collar used his sermons like a noose, tightening the knot of obedience until she called it love.
I wonder if she remembers me. Not like this—not the hood, the gloves, the predator. But the boy who sat three pews back, quiet and watching. The boy who never spoke a word but always noticed the way she flinched when the priest touched her shoulder after communion. The boy who kept the moth with the broken wings because it reminded him of her.
She doesn’t, of course. Raven’s memory is a stitched-up thing. Torn, rewoven, and stitched again. I’ve spent years learning the gaps, threading myself into the empty spaces, becoming everything she chose to forget.
They think I’m the ghost of the priest. And that’s the beauty of it. Because they don’t realise the priest died screaming. I made sure of it. I made sure he never touched her again.
But I let Damien think he did. I let Damien burn the wrong bones. Because it was always me. Me who watched. Me who waited. Me who cut out the rot and buried it beneath the floorboards of a church that doesn’t know the meaning of forgiveness.
And now she’s here. Mine again.
A sob breaks from her lips in her sleep, and I’m already halfway down the spiral staircase before I realise I’ve moved. The candlelight paints her skin in holy gold. I kneel beside her, my heart a dull, heavy thud. I don’t speak. She doesn’t wake. My fingers hover just above the pulse point of her throat. Not to hurt. To remember.
She belongs here—between prayers and punishments, between me and the ruin I’ll make of her. And when she finally remembers who I am? She’ll beg to forget all over again.
She stirs. Not all the way, just a twitch of her fingers against the velvet, a faint wince tugging at her brow. Or maybe it’s not a nightmare at all. Maybe it’s just me.
She always felt me first, even when she didn’t know she was being watched. Some part of her always sensed that the air had teeth, that the shadows bent around her body just a little too tightly.
I lean closer, just enough for the heat of my breath to brush her cheek. There’s a reverence to restraint. A holiness in denial. It’s the waiting that makes it sacred, and I’ve waited half a lifetime.
She flinches. Her eyes snap open, pupils blown wide and wet. For a split second, she’s underwater. Then—she jolts upright. She stumbles back against the altar rail, hands scraping along the stone, her breath coming in short, ragged gasps.
She doesn’t scream. She just stares into the dark, trying to piece the world back together.
“What do you want from me?” she rasps. Her voice is like gravel, dragged over too many sleepless nights.
I don’t answer. She isn’t ready for the truth, and I’m not ready to give it. I want her desperate. I want her broken open in the exact shape of me. But right now, she’s still too whole, stitched together by memories that lie to her.
“I thought…” she swallows hard, blinking against the gloom. “I thought you were someone else.”
A seed of doubt cracks through her concrete reality. I tilt my head, watching her like I used to from the choir loft. Quiet. Patient. Starving.
