RAVEN
The floor is cold. No—damp. No—bleeding.
My knees press into the grit of a reality that shouldn’t exist, and I feel something squirm beneath the surface of my skin like frantic worms, like a low-frequency heat, like the precursor to an all-consuming panic—and then, with the jagged snap of a shutter, it’s gone again. A blink. A heartbeat. A carefully constructed lie.
There is a door standing sentinel in front of me. At least, I think it’s a door. It appears to be forged of pure, blinding light, or perhaps a thousand shivering moths that erupt into a chaotic cloud of grey wings the moment I reach for the handle. I’m not supposed to reach. I’m not supposed to seek the exit. A hand slaps mine down—not with a cruelty that burns, but with a terrifying, absolute command that makes my bones ache. It is the weight of a rule I never knew I was following, a leash I never saw being tied.
“You don’t leave yet.”
That voice. My pulse stutters, a broken rhythm against my ribs. My ears begin to ring with a high, thin whine that sounds like silver wire being stretched to the breaking point. That voice isn’t Damien’s gravelly depth. It isn’t the priest’s hollow sanctimony. It’s?—
No. No, I don’t remember. I refuse to remember. But my body is a traitor; it remembers for me. It curls in on itself before the sound even finishes echoing through the dark, a primal, pathetic flinch that knows exactly what comes next.
A laugh follows, low and intimate, vibrating against the shell of my ear. “You always try to leave before the good part.”
Fingers thread into my hair. They don’t grab, don’t yank with the blunt violence I’ve come to expect—they just weave through the strands, claiming me with a terrifying, silent promise. “I liked you better when you stayed quiet.”
The walls around us flicker. Not the lights—the actual walls, the very architecture of my past. It’s as if the memory itself is made of oil and flame, trying to incinerate its own evidence before I can look too closely at the face in the shadows. I was small then. Or maybe I just felt small because he was the only sun in my sky. I want to scream, to rip my voice out of the silence, but it’s gone. Buried. Broken.
He kneels beside me. Not Damien. Not the priest. Him. The boy with the moths. The boy with the hood. The boy with a voice like velvet soaked in fresh blood.
“You said you wouldn’t leave me. You promised.”
The air in my lungs gets tighter, turning to lead. I shake my head, a desperate denial, but my lips are already moving in the ghost-light. “I didn’t know…”
“You did.” His fingers touch my throat, tracing the line of my windpipe with a reverent, clinical focus, as if he’s remembering the exact pressure needed to stop the world. “You knew, little girl.”
My eyes sting. His breath moves across my face, smelling of winter and woodsmoke, and the world splits open. A crack forms behind my ribs. “I watched you grow,” he whispers. “I watched you cry and fight and smile for other people. But never for me.”
Moths crawl across the ceiling in a living, breathing carpet. One falls, landing in my mouth. I don’t scream. I swallow the dust of its wings. He brushes the hair from my face, a gesture so gentle it feels like a violation. “I would’ve kept you safe, Raven. But you ran.”
Blood on the floor. Blood on his hands. Blood on every memory I’ve ever tried to keep clean. “You ran, and I let them touch you. That was my mistake. And now I get to fix it.”
My body jerks violently. I wake up in a jagged gasp, slamming my spine against the seatbelt as the car swerves slightly. My breath is wild, pupils blown wide enough to swallow the dashboard lights, sweat slick across my skin like a film of oil. I’ve just escaped something that shouldn’t exist. But it does.
Somewhere in the dark of this road, it breathes. And now… I remember just enough to start breaking.
The car keeps moving, but I remain frozen. My body is locked in a stillness that isn’t peace—it’s the paralysis of a rabbit staring at the hawk. I stare at the road, but the asphalt turns into white walls and peeling paint. I smell that sickly, lemon-scented disinfectant they used in the asylum to mop up the emotions that leaked through the cracks.
It wasn’t a clinic; it was a cage. And when I told the doctors about the boy in the vents—the one with the dark eyes and the blood on his hands—they told me he wasn’t real. They told me my brain was conjuring shadows. They upped my dose of Aldol until the walls hummed and I stopped speaking entirely. I lied to get out. I told them I made him up, and they called that “healing.” It wasn’t healing. It was surrender.
And now I’m not so sure he was ever just a hallucination. Because if River is real… then the boy in the vents was just the beginning.
The car eventually stops. I don’t know where we are—somewhere off the grid, stitched into the woods like a wound that never closed. The floorboards of this cabin creak with a deep, structural rot. The wallpaper peels like old, sun-damaged flesh. The only light comes from a flicker of a dying fire Damien started—more acrid smoke than heat.
I sit on the edge of a stained mattress, my wrists sore and my throat dry. Damien is a shadow against the door, guarding the exit like a sentry. Or a jailer.
“You’ve been quiet,” he says, his voice frayed, sinking into me like a slow-acting poison. I don’t answer. My head is too full of River’s eyes and the way the word mine felt like an ancient truth.
Damien moves. No words, just the shift of weight. His shadow swallows the flickering firelight as he stands over me. There is blood on his shirt—someone else’s—and madness in his stare. He kneels, placing a hand on my knee. When I flinch, he flinches too, but he doesn’t withdraw.
“You looked at him,” he murmurs, his voice sounding like gravel being ground into a wound. “You looked at him like he was your goddamn salvation.”
The truth is a heavy thing. I can’t speak it. Damien’s hand climbs higher, pressing into the bruises on my thigh, forcing the air from my lungs. He slides his other hand behind my neck, tilting my head back. “Tell me the truth, little spider.”
“I don’t know who saved me,” I whisper. “I don’t know who broke me either.”
He loses it. The mattress groans as he shoves me back, his mouth devouring mine with a desperate, punishing hunger. It’s all teeth and salt. He yanks my top over my head, stripping me of my clothing and my lies in one violent motion.
