“River?” The name scrapes out of my throat, raw and bleeding.
His mouth twitches. Not a smile—something hungrier. “Hello, Raven.”
My world tilts. The moths. The boy in the dark. The feeling of being watched when I was alone in the garden. It wasn’t Damien. It was never Damien.
He never left.
The name tastes wrong on my tongue.River.
I don’t know it—not really. Not with my mind. But the second it leaves my lips, it doesn’t feel new. It feels buried. It’s something I dug up from a grave I built in my own head, something I was never supposed to find.
His expression shifts, like the sound of his name in my voice did something to him. He likes it. Not the word, but the way I say it—like a prayer I once screamed into the dark.
“What…” My voice cracks. “What is this?”
River moves a step closer. He doesn’t rush; he moves with a stillness that feels like a coiled spring. “This is everything you forgot.”
A thousand needles thread down my spine. His voice is the one from the tapes, from the whispers behind the walls. I realise the terrifying truth: I never imagined the third person in that house. I knew him.
He brushes a hand against my jaw, his thumb dragging across my skin as if he has the right. I flinch, but he doesn’t pull away.
“You looked for monsters,” he whispers, his breath warm and terrifying. “But you never remembered me.”
“Did we—” My throat swells shut. “Were we?—”
“Yes.”
Simple. Brutal. Final.
I hate how my lungs forget to inflate. I hate that I don’t know what we were, but my body does. There’s a heat crawling down my spine and a tremor in my stomach that isn’t entirely fear. I don’t know if I should run or beg, and the worst part is, I don’t think this is the first time I’ve stood before him feeling exactly this way.
“Tell me what you did to me.”
His lips curl—dark, vicious, almost fond. “I don’t think you’re ready for that, baby.”
Baby.The word rips through me. A flash behind my eyes: A closet. A hand over my mouth. A whisper.Baby, don’t cry.
I stagger back, but he catches me. His grip is a ghost of a memory, too familiar to be a stranger’s.
“Get away from me?—”
“You don’t want me to.”
He’s not wrong. That’s the rot at the centre of it. There’s something terribly right about the way he touches me, like we have unfinished business that Damien was just an interruption for.
Like he watched Damien break me and simply waited his turn to pick up the pieces.
“You’re not real,” I whisper, desperate.
He tilts his head. “Then why are you shaking?”
“I’m not?—”
The moment shatters. A shift in the shadows, and Damien steps into the light.
His fists are clenched white. His mouth is a thin, bloodless line. And his eyes aren’t fire this time—they’re frost. Dead, burning frost.
“What the fuck did you just say to her?”
