I pace. I try not to look at the front door, but I keep glancing anyway, waiting for another package, another message, another childhood relic left like a blade on the welcome mat. I press my palm flat to the wall and breathe.
There’s this memory trying to surface. It’s sticky. Flickering. Half-familiar. A chapel. A humming sound. My body knows the tune but not the words. I was so small. So breakable. Knees tucked under a wooden pew. Dust floating through sunlight like gold ash. The scent of wax and something sharper. Metallic. And someone behind me. A boy. Or maybe a shadow.
He never spoke. Not once. But he watched. He listened. And he was angry. I remember that. Not his face. Not his name. Just the rage in the way he sat beside me. Like the air was poison and he was breathing it to survive. And I think—I think—he was the first person who ever noticed that something was wrong.
The first person who looked at me and didn’t flinch. Didn’t lie. Didn’t try to save me with Sunday smiles and silenced hymns. He just sat there. Breathing the same poisoned air.
A whisper pulls from my throat before I know what it means.
“…were you him?”
My voice is barely audible. It ghosts into the hall, fragile and unanswered. I’m not even sure if I want to know.
Because if it was Damien—if he was there—if he saw what was done and still let me forget—then the web is tighter than I thought. Thicker. Blacker. Older.
I turn. And he’s there. Standing in the hallway, half in shadow, like he was carved from the space between blinks. His arms hang at his sides. No tension. No threat. Just that look. Like I said something I wasn’t supposed to.
“Were you him?” I whisper again, louder this time. “In the chapel.”
His jaw clenches, slow and silent. And then he walks toward me. Each step deliberate. Like he’s choosing not to run.
“I watched you before I knew what watching meant,” he says quietly. Not a yes. Not a no.
“But—was it you?” I push, my voice breaking. “Did you sit next to me?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he lifts one hand. Fingers graze the side of my neck, just enough to remind me he’s still the one in control.
“I used to count your ribs when you slept,” he says, voice low, viciously soft. “In that little dorm bed with the sheets that never fit. I’d sit behind the broken wall panel and wait for the priest to leave. Then I’d climb out and press my ear to the floorboards just to hear if you were still breathing.”
I go still. The room tilts.
“Why?” I breathe.
His eyes meet mine. And there’s something there I don’t want to name. Something too soft to be safe. Too broken to be whole.
“Because he wanted you,” Damien says, each word slower than the last. “And I knew if he got to you, he’d never stop.”
My lungs turn to ice.
“You knew what he was doing to you?” I ask. My voice cracks in the middle. “Even then?”
His expression doesn’t change. “I didn’t have a name for it,” he says. “But I knew how it felt.” He leans in closer. Too close. “And I knew I’d rather burn than watch him hurt you the way he hurt me.”
My knees give out. He catches me before I hit the ground, hands gripping my waist like a vice, like an anchor. But I don’t cry. I just stare at him. Because the memories are clicking now. The boy with the moths. The eyes in the dark. The way the candles used to flicker even when the windows were closed.
He was there. He saw me. And maybe that’s why he can’t let go now. Because he never did.
His hands don’t loosen. They stay on my waist like iron, fingers trembling just enough to betray the rest of him.
Up close like this, he doesn’t smell like danger. He smells like soap and gun oil and the faintest trace of candle wax that shouldn’t still be on his skin but is.
He’s looking at me the way he used to in the dark—silent, waiting, hungry—but now there’s something else behind it. Something like guilt. Something like prayer. Something that makes my stomach clench because it feels like a confession without words.
“You’re shaking,” he says quietly.
I don’t tell him I can’t stop. I don’t tell him it’s not from fear. Instead, I stare at the floor where the shadows cut across our feet like black water.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” My voice breaks on the last word. “Why didn’t you tell me you were there?”
