I set her down gently, my hands sliding off her skin, the loss of her warmth like a blade in my chest. I grab my shirt, my gun, the black knife hidden under the table. My movements are calm, deliberate, but my head is a roar.
I glance back at her one more time. She’s still against the wall, hair messy, lips swollen, eyes huge. She looks like sin and salvation at once. She looks like everything I’ve been trying not to break.
“You’re not coming with me,” I tell her. “Not this time.”
Her jaw sets. “You can’t leave me?—”
“I can. And I will.” My voice drops, dark. “If he’s in that chapel, this ends tonight.”
She takes a shaky step toward me. “What if it’s a trap?”
I smile without humour. “Then it’s the last one he ever sets.”
Her hand lifts, almost like she’s going to reach for me again, but she stops herself.
“I don’t even know who you are,” she whispers.
I sling the strap of the gun over my shoulder. “You will.”
And then I’m moving, out of the room, down the hall, every nerve in my body on fire, every step a countdown to whatever waits for me in the place where this all began.
Chapter 13
RAVEN
The door clicks shut before my brain catches up, the heavy, final thud of the deadbolt echoing through the cavernous apartment like a sentence being passed.
One heartbeat he’s in front of me—shirt half-buttoned, the tactical gun strap biting into the broad curve of his chest, eyes full of every dark thing he won’t say out loud. He looked like a man preparing for his own execution and welcoming it.
The next heartbeat he’s gone.
The silence left behind is a blade. It hums against my skin, a cold, vibrating resonance sharp enough to slice through the lingering haze of sex and memory and everything else he’s poured into me. The room still tastes of him—of sweat, salt, and the metallic tang of obsession—but the air is already beginning to freeze.
I should be shaking. I should be hiding.
Instead, I’m moving.
I cross the floor, my bare feet silent against the polished wood, passing the flickering glow of the monitors to the exactspot where he stood. The floorboards are still warm with his heat. He thinks he can leave me behind in this glass-walled cage. He thinks he can go back to that place alone and fight ghosts with bullets. He thinks I’m still the girl who hummed under the pew and counted cracks in the plaster to survive the sound of heavy footsteps.
He’s wrong.
Because even if I don’t remember everything, my body does. It’s written in the white-knuckle grip I have on the table. My body knows the cloying, suffocating smell of beeswax, dust, and copper-scented blood. My body knows the boy who counted with me through the drywall. My body knows the chapel before my mind even dares to name it.
And my body is already moving before I can talk myself out of the madness.
I yank on my jeans, the denim rough against my hypersensitive skin, and shove my feet into boots. My fingers shake as I pull a jacket over my shoulders, but the tremor isn’t born from fear. It’s born from a searing anger, from a hunger I don’t recognise, and from the sick, twisting need to see the look on his face when he realises he isn’t the only one who can cross a line into the dark.
On the table, the monitor flickers again, a seizure of static that clears to reveal the chapel interior. The hooded figure raises his head for the first time, a slow, predatory movement. The face is still swallowed by shadows, but I feel the weight of his stare through the lens like a physical hand pressing against the back of my neck.
I swallow hard, my throat dry as parchment. I reach under the edge of the table, grab the black-bladed knife Damien left behind, and slide it into my pocket. The weight of it is a grim comfort.
“I’m not a piece of bait,” I whisper to the empty, echoing room. “And I’m not staying.”
My phone buzzes in my palm. A message. No number. No name. Just three words that make the world tilt on its axis.
COME TOO.
My stomach flips, a violent lurch of nausea. My vision blurs for a second, the apartment tilting like a sinking ship. He didn’t just call Damien home. He called me.
