“I had to.”
My voice breaks. I don’t care. The poise I’ve spent years building is sloughing off like dead skin. I step closer. And this time, I touch her. Fingers ghosting up her ribs, stopping just beneath her jaw. I tilt her chin until she’s looking at me like I’m the last thing she’ll ever see.
Maybe I am.
“There was a boy,” I say, the words scraping out of me. “Do you remember him? A quiet place. A floor covered in dust. A prayer whispered into the dark.”
She freezes. Breath caught. Eyes wide and locked on mine, reflecting the madness I’ve been carrying since I was fifteen.
“Your knees bled that day,” I whisper, the memory rising up like a tide of oil. “And you didn’t cry. Not once. You sat there, holding your fucking breath like that could protect you from the sound of his footsteps. But I was already there. I’d already picked the lock. Already told him—take me instead.”
Silence.
A heavy, agonising stretch of time where the forest seems to lean in to hear. And then—the tiniest gasp.
She stumbles back like I’ve struck her, her heels catching on the roots of an ancient oak. Hands clutched to her stomach like she’s been gutted.
“Oh my god.”
One step. Two. Her back hits the rough bark of the tree. Her breath comes ragged, coming out in white puffs against the cold night air. And I follow. Slowly. Gently. Like a predator who doesn’t want to spook the prey before the final blow. I don’t touch her again. But I say what needs to be said.
“He picked me,” I murmur, the reality of it settling between us like a corpse. “And I let him. And I’d do it again.”
“No.” Her voice cracks, a high, thin sound of despair. “No, I—I never knew?—”
“You weren’t supposed to.”
My hands curl into fists at my sides, my nails biting into the calloused skin of my palms.
“He said he wanted you next. I couldn’t let him. So I made him need me more. I let him… do things. I played the part. I let him believe I liked it. And when he tried to hurt you again—I fucking burned him.”
She makes a choked sound. Half sob. Half scream. The sound of a girl breaking under the weight of a debt she never asked for. She sinks down the wall—the tree—her knees folding under her like her body can’t hold up the weight of the truth.
And I follow her to the floor. To the dirt.
No distance now. No air. Just us, two broken things in the middle of a dark wood. Us and a truth we’ve both been bleeding from for years.
“I didn’t come back for closure, Raven,” I say, my voice low and raw and bloody. “I came back because I’m not done. Not with you. Not with him. And not with River.”
She lifts her head at the name. Eyes burning with a sudden, sharp lucidity that makes me flinch.
And I know, in that moment—she remembers more than she’s saying.
Good. Let it come. Let it break her. Because I’ll be here when it does. I’ll be the one to gather the splinters.
Chapter 33
RIVER
I move like I’m weightless, a ghost drifting through the graveyard of my own past, as if the physical world can no longer find purchase on my skin. Because it can’t.
The gravity of this life stopped working on me the moment she let the memory of us go. I burned the last part of it that mattered—the soft part, the part that hoped—the night she forgot me.
And now? Now I’ve built something new in the ashes. A cathedral of shadow and obsession, something just for her.
The streetlamp above me flickers, a dying pulse of electricity that casts stuttered, rhythmic halos onto the wet pavement. I pull the hood of my jacket tighter; the fabric is still damp from her breath, carrying the phantom heat of her panic from when I pressed my palm against her mouth.
I can still feel the vibration of her throat against my skin, the frantic, muffled whimpers as I whispered into her ear:shh… shh… you remember me now, don’t you, baby?
