“I know.” His voice cracks. “I know. But it didn’t feel like that. It felt like you left me there to rot while you got saved.”
My heart clenches until it hurts. “I didn’t even know your name,” I whisper.
He laughs once—a sound with no joy in it. “I didn’t have one you could say out loud. I was just the boy behind the wall. The one who watched you hum while he tried not to scream.”
My knees go weak. The room blurs. “I thought you were imaginary,” I choke. “I thought you were a dream I made up to survive.”
His grip tightens just enough to anchor me. “I was real,” he says, low and wrecked. “And every time you hummed, it was the only thing that made me believe I wasn’t.” He leans closer, voice hoarse. “You didn’t mean to leave me,” he whispers. “But I watched you walk out of that place and I stayed. And in my head, it became you leaving me. It became you walking away.”
The ache in his voice is worse than any threat. “And when I found you again,” he says, “I swore you’d never walk away again.”
I swallow hard, the weight of his confession heavy in my chest. “You think that’s what you’re doing now? Keeping me from walking away?” I whisper.
His lips hover by my ear, his breath a tremor. “I think I’m trying to put us back where we should’ve been before the world fucked it up,” he says. “And I don’t know how to do it without breaking you.”
The chain rattles when I shift, metal against skin, and the sound fills the silence between us. “I didn’t leave you,” I say again, softer this time, like I’m trying to give the words back to the boy he used to be. “I didn’t know you were there.”
His eyes close. His forehead presses to mine. His fingers tremble against my neck. “I know,” he whispers. “I just didn’t know how to stop blaming you.”
And for the first time, I feel him crack. Not rage. Not dominance. Just a boy still trapped in the chapel, finally telling the truth.
He doesn’t pull away. Not all the way. His mouth is still close enough to ruin me, his breath warm on my skin, but there’s something raw bleeding out of him now—something unguarded.
“I used to wonder,” he murmurs, “if you forgot me… or if forgetting was how you survived.”
My chest tightens. “Damien?—”
He pulls back just enough to look at me. And then he says it. The words that split something open inside me. “You used to count the cracks in the ceiling. Said it helped when the priest came in.”
My blood runs cold. I blink. But the room tilts. Because I know that voice. Not Damien’s. The other one. The one I used to hear before the footsteps stopped outside the door. Before the air got still. Before my fingers clutched the sheets so hard I thought I’d disappear into them.
“If you count to thirty, he won’t last past fifteen.”
I stagger backward, the memory slamming into me like a fist. A fragment. A whisper. A voice I shouldn’t remember. My knees give. I fall against the wall, sliding down, hands to my ears even though there’s no sound anymore, just silence and numbers and the dull throb of something I buried too deep to name.
“Raven?” Damien’s voice is sharp now—panicked.
But I can’t look at him. Because the numbers won’t stop. One. Two. Three. Cracks in the ceiling. My voice, small. Shaky. Another voice behind the wall, whispering numbers with me. A boy. A boy who counted the seconds so I didn’t count the pain. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen.
He was real. He was real. He was real.
“Fuck,” I gasp. My hands claw at the collar around my throat, like it’s what’s keeping the memory inside. “No, no, no?—”
He’s beside me in an instant, gripping my arms. “What did you remember?” His voice is low, urgent. “Tell me what you saw.”
“I—” My breath catches. “I didn’t see anything.”
He stills. “But you heard something,” he says. And I realise what he’s doing. He’s not asking me to remember for me. He’s trying to confirm if I remember him.
I lift my head slowly. Look him in the eye. “You were there,” I whisper.
He doesn’t answer. But I see it in the way his pupils dilate. In the way his grip tightens. In the way his breath comes harder, sharper, as if just being seen is enough to shake him.
“You counted with me,” I say, voice cracking. “You were the one who whispered through the wall.”
Damien’s jaw clenches. But he doesn’t deny it. He just says: “I counted because I knew if I heard you counting back… you were still alive.”
His words don’t echo—they settle. They seep into the cracks inside me like water through stone until the weight of them is heavier than air. I can still hear the numbers. I can still feel the dust on my knees. I can still taste the metal in my mouth from biting down on fear. And the boy. Not just a shadow. Not just a trick of survival. He was real. He was here. He’s him.
