She did. I felt the moment the recognition hit her—that sharp, electric jolt that bypassed her brain and went straight to her marrow. That look in her eyes when she finally forced my name past her lips?
It was everything I’ve waited for. It was the only prayer I’ve ever said that was answered.
Years of hiding in the peripheral of her life. Years of watching her love him—a man who is nothing but a shield made of scar tissue. Years of letting another man touch what was always meant to be mine. I’ve stood in the corner of her vision for so long I’ve become part of the scenery, a monster she mistook for a nightmare instead of a memory.
I wanted to slit his throat tonight. I wanted to hear the wet, heavy sound of his life leaving him and watch her eyes fill with the truth while his blood soaked the chapel floor. I wanted to show her that her protector is just a hollowed-out boy playing at being a king.
But that would’ve been too soon. The crescendo has to be perfect.
She doesn’t understand yet. She doesn’t know what he did. What theyalldid. The priest with his sanctified violence. Damien with his misplaced martyrdom. Her mother with her eyes squeezed shut. The whole rotted, decaying town that watched her die in pieces, bit by agonising bit, and had the audacity to call it girlhood.
I was the only one who saw her cracking. I was the only one who didn’t look away when the light left her eyes. And I still am.
That’s why I left her there tonight.
That’s why I slipped away like smoke. Because I need her desperate for me. I need her to claw through every jagged, blood-stained memory, tearing her nails on the truth until she finds the one with me in it. I need her to reach for the one she burieddeepest of all because it hurt too much to keep—the one where I was the only thing standing between her and the abyss.
The boy in the moth-light.
The shadow in the wall.
The hand that reached for her when no one else did.
I never stopped watching, Raven. I watched you learn to breathe without me. I watched you learn to smile at a man who doesn’t know the colour of your soul. Even when you forgot me. Even when you screamed for someone else in the middle of the night. Even when you let his hands touch what should’ve been sacred—whatImade sacred.
I was still there. In the dark of your periphery. Behind the mirrors you didn’t want to look into. Beneath the floorboards of every house you tried to call a home.
Waiting.
And now that your eyes are open again, now that the fire has been relit, I’ll make sure they never close. I’ll be the only thing you see until the world burns down around us.
Chapter 34
RAVEN
The road keeps going even though I don’t feel like I am.
The headlights cut a narrow, trembling tunnel through the dark, trees blurring at the edges like they’re trying to escape me, and I realise somewhere between one mile marker and the next that my body is moving on instinct alone, like it learned how to survive long before my mind ever caught up.
The asphalt hums beneath the floorboards—a low, rhythmic vibration that feels like it’s trying to shake the secrets out of my bones.
Damien’s hands are locked around the steering wheel. Too tight. White-knuckled. Veins standing out like they’re trying to crawl off his skin. He hasn’t looked at me in minutes. Not since the chapel disappeared in the rearview mirror.
Not since River.
The name presses against the inside of my skull even when I don’t say it. Even when I try not to think it. It’s there anyway, lodged between heartbeats, threaded through memories thatwon’t quite surface but won’t leave me alone either. I swallow, and my throat hurts.
Not from screaming. From not.
“You knew,” I say quietly.
The words feel fragile. Like if I push them too hard they’ll shatter and cut us both. Damien’s jaw flexes, a hard, sharp movement in the dim light of the dashboard.
“I suspected,” he says. “I didn’t know.”
That’s not what I meant.
“You knew it wasn’t the priest,” I say. “Not really. Not the way we thought.”
