The memory slams into the present so hard I scream.
My body folds in the tub, water sloshing violently as raw sobs tear out of me. I’m drowning in the truth.
The bathroom door explodes open. “RAVEN.”
Damien skids to a stop, dropping to his knees. “What did he do? What did River say?”
I lift my head. My face is wrecked. Red. Wet. Bare. I look straight at him.
“You met me before I knew your name. I was fifteen. Intake. You told me how to disappear.”
He freezes.
“You taught me how to survive,” I whisper. “And then you spent years pretending you were the one who saved me.”
The silence is violent. Damien’s mouth opens, but nothing comes out. And for the first time, I see it—real fracture. Not obsession. Recognition.
Because the most devastating part isn’t that he caged me. It’s that he recognised me because he helped build the cage.
And neither of us knows what survives that truth.
Chapter 44
DAMIEN
Ican’t hear anything except my own pulse.
It is a rhythmic, violent thudding that drowns out the world. It silences the water sloshing against the tub, the guttering of the candles, and the ragged sound of her breathing as she tears in and out of her chest. I am on my knees beside the bath, and I have no memory of how I got here. One second I was splintering the door frame with my shoulder; the next, the entire universe narrowed down to the wrecked beauty of her face and the thing she just said.
You taught me how to disappear.
The room tilts, the steam-heavy air suddenly feeling too thin to support my lungs.
“No,” I say, and the word comes out wrong. Too fast. Too sharp. It is the sound of a man trying to outrun a shadow that is already tethered to his heels. “That wasn’t— I wouldn’t?—”
She laughs.
It isn’t a sound of amusement. It isn’t kind. It is a wrecked, hysterical peal of truth that guts me more thoroughly than if she had screamed until her throat bled.
“You did,” she says, her voice trembling, her eyes glassy and impossibly bright. “You sat next to me in that room. You told me exactly how to survive them. You looked at me, Damien, like you already knew what I was.”
I press my hands flat against the cool, slick edge of the porcelain to steady the world. My knuckles are white, my arms vibrating with a tremor that makes me feel as though I’m made of glass.
“I was following protocol,” I say, the lie sounding like lead in my mouth. “I was told?—”
Her smile turns sharp enough to draw blood. “Of course you were.”
That is the moment something fractures clean through my skull. It isn’t the memory itself that breaks me—it’s the sudden, violent death of the absolution I’ve been hiding behind for years. Protocol. Procedure. Training. All the clinical, cold words that allow a man to pretend he isn’t making a choice while he is actively shaping the soul of another human being.
I remember it now.
The intake room. The way she sat. Too still. Too quiet. I remember the way my chest tightened because I recognised the shape of her misery immediately—not her name, not yet, but the frequency she was vibrating on. I saw a girl who had already learned that noise was an invitation for pain.
I remember thinking she would survive. I remember deciding to help her do it. I just never let myself finish the thought that follows.
At what cost?
“I didn’t know it was you,” I say, my voice sounding like a rusted hinge.
