“They’re trying to kill you,” I murmur, my face inches from hers. I can taste her breath—mint and iron. “They’re trying to bleach you out until there’s nothing left but a blank page.”
“I can’t feel my hands,” she whispers, her eyes welling. “The medicine… everything is blurry.”
“Then feel me.”
I grab her wrists, pulling them toward me, forcing her fingers to curl into the rough fabric of my hoodie. I want to leave marks. I want her to have something to look at when the sun comes up to prove I was there. I sink to my knees between her legs, my head resting on her lap, and for a moment, the asylum disappears. There is no ward. No doctors. No Damien waiting in the wings to play the hero.
“Tell me to stay,” I growl into the fabric of her gown. “Tell me to burn this place down with us inside.”
She doesn’t answer with words. She sinks her fingers into my hair, pulling my head back until I have to look at her. Her expression is a jagged mess of terror and worship. She reaches out, her trembling fingers tracing the scar on my lip, and then she does it—she kisses me. It’s not soft. It’s a collision. It tastes of desperate, dying things. It’s the taste of a pact signed in the dark.
I remember the way her heart hammered against mine—that panicked, beautiful rhythm I’m still chasing. I remember the way she looked at me right before the heavy steel door at the end of the hall groaned, the signal that the night nurse was coming.
“Go,” she whispered, her eyes burning with a sudden, sharp clarity. “Don’t let them catch you.”
“I’ll never leave you,” I promised. “Even when you forget, I’ll be the shadow you can’t shake.”
I open my eyes.
The asylum is gone. The white walls have turned back into the obsidian night of the woods. My hand is gripping the rough bark of the pine so hard the wood is biting into my palm, drawing blood.
The memory isn’t enough anymore. It’s a starvation ration.
I look at the cabin, the light in the window flickering as a shadow passes across it. Damien. He’s in there, touching her, trying to overwrite the pact we made in that padded room. He thinks he can fuck the memory of me out of her. He thinks he can be the light that heals her.
He doesn’t understand. Raven doesn’t need light. She was forged in the dark, and she’ll return to it.
I pull the burner phone from my pocket. The screen glows, a small, artificial star in the wilderness. I look at the message I sent. The hook is in. Now, I just have to wait for her to pull the line.
I start to move toward the cabin, silent as a moth, my boots finding the softest patches of moss. I’m not going in. Not yet.I just want to be close enough to hear the moment the doubt breaks her.
I want to be there when she realises that her “protector” was the one who signed the commitment papers.
Chapter 37
RAVEN
I wake up knowing something is wrong.
Not in the big, scream-worthy way — not the kind that slaps you with panic and throws you straight into survival mode.
No, this is quieter.
Colder.
It’s the kind of wrong that seeps under your skin and curls there, tight and still, like a secret waiting to be remembered.
Damien isn’t in the bed.
I sit up slowly, the blanket still warm around me, my eyes flicking across the room like I’m expecting to see a shadow that shouldn’t be there.
But there’s nothing.
Just the woods outside. Just the half-shut door. Just the cabin breathing around me, floorboards shifting under ghosts.
My phone buzzes on the table.
I don’t want to check it.
