“Like I was the only thing keeping him human.”
The room goes silent. Damien’s knuckles whiten around the folder. A beat. Two. Then he says, so low I almost miss it?—
“That priest wasn’t the only monster in that place.”
I look up at him. And he’s not talking about the priest anymore. He’s talking about himself.
I don’t know why my throat’s tight. It’s not like anything new was said. Not really. Not like a switch flipped and suddenly I understand. If anything, it’s the opposite. The more I say, the less I’m sure I’m remembering anything at all.
But my body remembers. God, my body remembers things my mind has never had the courage to face. The way my breath gets shallow when the wordchapelis spoken. The sick way I react to candles that smell too much like rose and dust. The hitch in my voice every time someone touches my hair too gently. All of it lives in my skin like rot trapped under silk.
But that boy. That boy wasn’t part of the rot. He was something else. Like a shadow caught praying in the corner. Or a wolf pretending to kneel beside the sheep.
“Did you know him?” I ask suddenly. The words fall out before I can stop them. I don’t even know why I ask. Just that something in Damien’s stillness is too practiced.
He doesn’t flinch. He just… shuts down. One second, he’s Damien—the unstable storm I’ve come to understand in fragments. The next, he’s nothing. A locked vault. He turns back to the monitors like I didn’t speak at all.
“Did you know him?” I repeat, this time firmer. “The boy in the chapel.”
“I knew a lot of boys,” he mutters.
“That’s not an answer.”
His hand hovers over one of the feeds. Not moving. Not scrolling. Just pressing so hard against the mouse it creaks. “I said?—”
“Drop it.”
His voice slices the air. I freeze. Because I’ve seen Damien angry. Violent. Obsessive. But this? This is something else. This is self-protection. This is what someone says when the answer might kill them to say out loud.
My heartbeat stutters. “You did know him,” I whisper.
He doesn’t respond. Just stands there, rigid, like a statue built out of shame and secrets. And that’s when it hits me. Not a memory. Not a flash. Just a question. A horrible, impossible question that lodges itself in my throat like glass:
What if he didn’t just know the boy… What if he was him?
The moths. The silence. The way he watched without ever looking. The way he moved, even now—like someone who’s still carrying the weight of pews and prayers and guilt that doesn’t belong to him.
I don’t say it. Not out loud. But he turns, slowly, like he heard it anyway. His eyes land on mine. And they don’t look shocked. Or angry. Or confused. They look sad. Cracked.
And suddenly I want to run. Not from him. From the truth he’s holding in his mouth like a bullet he hasn’t decided to fire yet. I shake my head.
“Tell me it wasn’t you,” I whisper.
He closes his eyes. Not yes. Not no. Just—silence.
And that’s worse than anything he could say. Because silence is an answer. And my stomach knows it before my brain catches up. He didn’t just see what happened to me in that chapel.
He was there for all of it.
Chapter 11
RAVEN
Idon’t sleep anymore. Not really.
Not in the way that feels safe, or warm, or private. Sleep now is a breath held too long. A blink stretched thin. A strobe of fractured images—candles flickering where they shouldn’t be, footsteps that echo too close, and that same weight pressing down on my chest like something’s watching. Always watching.
The apartment is cold today. Not from temperature. From silence. The kind that creeps under doorways. The kind that waits. Damien’s in the surveillance room again. I know because he hasn’t stepped out in over an hour. Not to drink. Not to speak. Not to touch me. I don’t even think he’s blinked. And still, I feel his presence like a second skin. Like the strings he tied to my limbs are humming beneath the surface.
