And I feel it. A splinter rising to the surface. I blink—and suddenly I’m in a different room. Metal lockers. A boy—seventeen, maybe—his hands shaking as he hides me.
“Don’t make a sound,”he whispers.
“Why?”
“If he finds you, he’ll take you, too.”
I wake up. Or I come back. It’s hard to tell. Damien is still holding me, but his hands are shaking, too.
Because maybe he remembers that night, too. Maybe he remembers that he wasn’t the one who hid me.
Chapter 32
DAMIEN
She doesn’t pull away.
And that’s somehow worse. The weight of her trust is a leaden thing, pressing into the hollowed-out cavern of my chest where a heart should be.
I watch the moon catch the silver of her tears, feeling the phantom itch of every scar I earned in the dark. Because I don’t deserve her hands on me. Not after what I’ve done. Not after what I’m still doing—dragging her back into a world of ash and bone.
But she stays.
Fingers curled over mine, pulse stuttering beneath fragile skin like a trapped bird, heart thudding in that terrified, beautiful rhythm that tells me she’s standing on the edge of something—and she hasn’t decided yet whether to jump or run.
The air between us is thick, heavy with the scent of pine needles and the iron-tang of the blood still drying on my knuckles. I want her to run. I want her to find a life where names like mine are never whispered. But God help me, I want her tostay. I want to grab her by the throat and shake the truth out of her—Do you remember now? Do you remember the fucking priest? Do you remember what he made me do? What I did to keep him from touching you again?
The silence of the woods is suffocating, a vacuum waiting for the explosion. But all I say is her name.
“Raven.”
A single syllable, but it cracks apart in my throat like glass.
She flinches. Not like she’s scared of me—no, never that—but like the sound touched something deeper than it should’ve, a dormant nerve ending buried under a decade of repression.
Like some broken shard of the past just twisted inside her lungs, slicing through whatever part of her was still convinced she imagined it all.
“I remember…” she starts. Then stops.
The wind picks up, rattling the skeletal branches above us. She shakes her head like she can’t get the memory to focus, her eyes darting toward the tree line where the shadows are densest.
Then whispers, “No. I almost remember.”
Almost.
That word slices me to pieces. It’s the jagged edge of a knife that refuses to go all the way in. I should let it go. Should leave her there, tangled in the edge of something half-buried, let her brain protect her the way it always has, wrapped in the mercy of amnesia. But I can’t. Not anymore.
Because River’s back. I saw the look in his eyes in that chapel—the look of a man who has been tending a garden of vengeance. And if she doesn’t remember soon… he’ll take her from me. He’ll take everything.
“You asked me why I came back,” I say again, slower now, my voice dropping to a gravelly rasp that matches the crunch of the earth beneath our boots. “But that’s not the real question, is it?”
She looks up at me. Silent. Still. The world around us seems to shrink until there is nothing left but the heat of our breathing. I step closer, not touching her, just close enough to let her feel the static of my presence—that thing between us neither of us ever had words for.
“The real question is why I left.”
Her eyes flicker. Some shadow flashes behind them, a dark shape moving beneath the surface of a frozen lake. I see it. Feel it. The flick of a match just before the flame. The moment the trapdoor opens and you don’t fall—you remember falling.
“You didn’t,” she says, her voice trembling like it’s struggling to hold onto a lie. “You never would’ve?—”
