I remember how easy it was for them to make her compliant once she stopped trusting her own mind. They told her the boy with the moths wasn’t real. They told her I was a glitch in her hardware.
Damien is doing the same thing. He’s just doing it prettier. He’s doing it louder.
I pull another phone from my pocket—not the one he’s tracked, not the one that exists on any record. This one is older, cracked, a relic of a past I never truly left. I scroll through photos I shouldn’t have, files I don’t need anymore but can’t bring myself to delete. Blueprints. Floor plans of the psychiatric wing. Scanned medical records with redacted names.
I stop on one image and feel my mouth curve into a jagged, cold line. Perfect.
I type slowly this time. Carefully. I want the words to feel like a needle sliding into a vein.
You remember the place with the white walls.
They lied to you there.
Ask him what he did the night you stopped talking.
I don’t send it to Damien. Not yet. A warning to him would be a mercy, a chance for him to spin another lie. This one goes to her. Because if he wants to drown me out with touch, I’ll drown him with doubt. I want her awake in the dark. I want her questioning the hands that just held her. I want her looking at him the way she looked at me in the chapel—like the story she’s been told has a missing, violent chapter.
I lean my forehead against the rough, freezing bark of the tree and close my eyes. Breathe. Control the fire. This isn’t about a simple abduction. This is about reclaiming the time he stole.
Every hour she spends doubting him is an hour she drifts back to the truth. Back to me.
And he won’t hurt her. Not the way he wants to. Because I’m watching now. Because if Damien crosses the wrong line—if he pushes too far, tries to erase too much, or tries to cage her completely—I won’t offer a second warning.
I straighten, melting back into the obsidian shadows of the forest, already moving, already calculating the next move. He thinks he’s her sanctuary. She thinks she chose a protector. They’re both profoundly wrong.
The next thing I take won’t be subtle. It’ll be something he can’t ignore and something she can’t forget. Because escalation isn’t loud.
It’s inevitable.
I don’t just watch her; I inhabit the space around her. I am the cold air that makes the hair on her arms stand up. I am the floorboard that doesn’t creak because I know exactly where the nails are rusted through.
I lean my head back against the jagged bark of a towering Scots Pine, closing my eyes, and the present begins to bleed, the dark woods of the now dissolving into the sterile, fluorescent hum of the then.
The asylum.
The air there didn’t move; it stagnated, smelling of industrial bleach and the metallic tang of unwashed fear. I’m back in the crawlspace, the narrow, galvanised steel throat of the ventilation shaft above her room.
My chest is pressed against the vibrating metal, my heartbeat echoing off the tin walls, syncopated with hers. I am eighteen, and my world is exactly twelve inches wide—the size of the vent grate looking down into her cell.
I can see her. Right now.
She’s sitting on the edge of that pathetic, bolted-down cot, her spine curved like a question mark. She’s eighteen, too, but she looks like a ghost that hasn’t realised it’s dead yet. Her hair is a tangled crown of dark silk, and her fingers are raw, picking at the hem of the heavy, institutional gown they forced her into.
The “Quiet Room.” That’s what they called it. A place where the walls were padded so thick no one could hear you shatter.
“Raven,” I whisper.
It’s barely a breath, a vibration sent through the steel, but in the silence of that tomb, it’s a thunderclap. She freezes. Her head tilts, her eyes tracking upward, wide and glassy from the chemical cocktail of Risperidone they’ve been pumping into her veins. She looks for me, but she only sees the shadows behind the grate.
I slide the grate aside. The screech of metal on metal is a love song.
I drop down. My boots hit the linoleum with a soft thud, a sound that shouldn’t exist in a locked ward. She doesn’t scream. She never screams for me. She just watches as I emerge from the dark, a shadow taking human shape. I’m covered in the grey dust of the attic, cobwebs clinging to my black hoodie like lace, and I look like the monster they told her lived only in her head.
“You’re real,” she breathes, her voice a fragile, papery thing.
“I’m the only thing that’s real,” I say, stepping into the pool of sickly yellow light.
I reach out. My hand is shaking—not from fear, but from the sheer, agonising voltage of being this close to her. I press my palm against her cheek. Her skin is clammy, pale as bone, and she leans into me. She leans into the monster. My thumb traces the dark circles under her eyes, the bruises left by the system, and I feel a possessiveness so violent it threatens to tear my ribs open.
