She lets out a brittle laugh. “I don’t even know what ‘after him’ means. I don’t know why hearing his name felt like?—”
She stops. I don’t ask her to finish. I know. It felt like recognition.
“He’s not safe,” I say. “He never was.”
Her eyes flick to mine. “Neither are you.”
Fair. I step closer anyway. “He didn’t protect you. He watched. There’s a difference.”
“What if I needed both?”
Chapter 31
RAVEN
I don’t fall asleep on the drive back. I just pretend to.
Because my eyes are open behind my eyelids. Wide open, staring into a void I’m not ready to cross yet. The chapel is still inside me—that heavy, ancient silence between River’s words.
The way he said my name like it was a mantra he’d been practicing in the dark for a decade. And Damien… Damien stood in front of me like a wall of meat and fury, ready to go to war not just with River, but with any part of my memory that dared to choose him.
That’s the problem. I don’t remember cleanly. I just have these slivers, like someone threw a photo album into a furnace and I’m picking through the ashes.
But it’s not the priest’s face in the ash. It’s a boy’s.
He’s sitting on a step. Twelve, maybe younger. He’s holding a lighter in one hand and a broken wing in the other. A moth. There’s blood on the wing. Or maybe on his fingers. The air in the memory smells like bleach and rot.
And he says:“Don’t scream.”
My body jolts. The car doesn’t. Damien glances at me, his eyes sharp even in the dashboard’s dim glow. He felt the ripple under my skin. He’s waiting for the flood.
“You said something,” I whisper. “In the chapel.”
He looks back at the road, his jaw flexing like he’s trying to grind stone. “I said a lot of things.”
“You said I left you there.”
Silence. Then, a heavy, jagged breath. “I didn’t mean?—”
“Yes, you did.” I sit up straighter, my skin cold, my chest burning. “You said I left you. Like I made a choice. Like I abandoned you.”
“I meant,” he says, his voice dropping into a gravelled register, “that when they pulled you out, they left me behind.”
My heart stops. Not for a second, but for a lifetime. “Pulled me out of what?”
He doesn’t answer. I reach over and grab his wrist, my nails digging in, forcing him to pull the car over. The tires skid on the gravel shoulder. We’re in the middle of nowhere. Just woods, shadows, and the ticking of a cooling engine.
He looks at me, his eyes bloodshot, his hands gripping the steering wheel so hard the leather groans.
“Tell me,” I say. “Tell me what you meant.”
He stares at me for a long time. Then, with the weight of every memory I still haven’t unburied, he says: “You were never supposed to be there that night.”
The world goes sideways. Suddenly, I’m small. I’m barefoot. I’m standing outside a building I don’t recognise, and someone is whispering my name through a crack in a door.
It wasn’t the priest. It wasn’t a monster. It was a boy with haunted eyes and a voice full of warning. A boy who was already owned by the dark—and still tried to protect me.
“Raven,” Damien snaps. He’s out of the car, coming around to my side, grabbing my arms as if he’s scared I’ll vanish into the memory. “Talk to me. Where did you go?”
