Another flicker in my memory—not a clear image, but a sensory assault. The cloying sweetness of incense. A gloved hand over my mouth, smelling of leather and antiseptic. A whisper that felt like a razor against my ear:We’ll finish later.
I press my palms to the table and breathe through the panic until the tremor in my chest steadies into a hard, rhythmic thud.
Then I move.
Out of the apartment. Down the hall, where the fluorescent lights hum like a warning. Past the elevator, down the stairs two at a time, my boots echoing like a drumbeat. My heart is pounding against my ribs, but my steps are sure, guided by an instinct that’s been dormant for a decade. I’m not going to sit here and wait to be saved or stolen like a prize. If the chapel is where it started, it’s where it ends.
Damien wants to be the monster between me and the dark? Fine.
But tonight, he’s going to find out I’m not the same girl he left behind in the dust.
The streets feel different tonight. Not just quiet. Not just dark. They feel watched, the buildings leaning in like silent witnesses. I keep my hood up and my head down, but I can still feel it—the air is heavier, thicker, like the atmosphere is holding its breath before a storm.
The city lights blur into long, jagged streaks of neon as I move through the outskirts. I pass shuttered windows and flickering signs that hiss with electricity; I pass the deli with the broken neon cross that stutters in red; I pass the alley where Damien once pressed me up against the cold brick and made me forget how to breathe.
It’s all a memory now. He is a memory now.
But I’m done being a ghost in my own life.
I take the side streets, the narrow, jagged veins of the city. These are the paths I used to run when I was younger, chasing smoke and half-remembered prayers, hoping maybe if I hummed the right song the bad things wouldn’t find me. They did anyway. They always did.
And now I’m going back to the source.
The chapel isn’t on any map. It never was. You don’t find it. It finds you. It’s tucked between the bones of the city, down a path only the broken remember, buried in the rot like a secret God tried to forget.
I see the gate first. Rust-eaten and jagged, bent at the top where someone once tried to climb over and didn’t make it. The lock is gone now, hanging loose and useless. I push it open, the metal shriek piercing the silence, and step through.
The cold hits me instantly. It’s not wind. It’s not the weather. It’s memory. It curls around my ankles and slides up my spine like icy smoke. The further I walk, the more my head spins—like the world is folding time, pressing this moment into every other nightmare I’ve ever had.
The candles. The wood. The whispers. The shoes.
I take one step closer, and the chapel rises in front of me, a skeletal silhouette against the bruised sky. Still standing. Still waiting. Still profoundly wrong.
It’s smaller than I remember. Or maybe I’m just bigger now. Not in height, but in rage. In the hunger to make sense of the carnage. The door is slightly open, a dark mouth waiting to swallow me. My heart stutters, a frantic, uneven rhythm.
I shouldn’t go in. I do anyway.
The hinges moan, a long, drawn-out sound of grief, as I push it open. The smell hits me first—a suffocating mix of dust, old wax, and something sharp, metallic, and old.
I step inside, and the silence screams.
Everything is exactly as I left it in the dark corners of my mind. The pews are scarred, the candle stubs are melted into puddles of grey fat, the stained glass is cracked and weeping.
And on the far side—the altar.
There’s something on it.
I move slow, my breath catching in my throat as I get closer. A moth. Not dead. Not moving. Pinned through the centre of its wings with a rusted, jagged nail.
My knees go weak. Because I know this moth. I remember the pattern on the wings, like a distorted face. He used to catch them for me in the crawlspaces.
Before he whispered my name behind the pew. Before he taught me how to count to keep the shadows away. Before he begged me not to leave.
A sound behind me. Footsteps.
I spin, my hand diving for the knife. “Damien?”
But it’s not him.
