I freeze. The air feels thick again. My skin crawls like there are insects under it. “Then why can’t we see him?”
“Because he’s not a man who stands in the open,” Damien says. “He’s a man who hides in walls.” His hand slides around the back of my neck, his thumb brushing the base of my skull. And then he leans in, voice low and dark. “The way I used to.”
A shiver runs through me so hard it feels like my bones are vibrating. My fingers twitch around the knife. The chapel feels smaller, closer, like it’s folding around us.
Somewhere, a floorboard creaks. Not under Damien. Not under me. From the shadows behind the last row of pews.
We both turn toward the sound at the same time.
Chapter 14
DAMIEN
Iknow that sound.
I know it with the same ancestral, bone-deep familiarity that I know the ragged cadence of her breath when she’s caught in the throes of a nightmare. I know it the way I know the exact frequency of her voice when she’s hovering on the jagged edge of a scream she’s too terrified to release.
A floorboard. In the back.
It’s the same fucking creak it used to make twenty years ago when I was a shadow-child hiding in the crawlspaces, trying to become part of the architecture so the devil wouldn’t notice me.
My fingers twitch, a lethal, instinctive itch for a trigger I haven’t pulled yet. I step in front of her before she can even process the shift in the air. It’s just one step, but it’s a declaration of war.
Because if this is the kind of game I think it is—if the ghosts have finally grown skin and bones—then she’s the prize, and I’m the only fucking obstacle left standing between him and his masterpiece.
I don’t draw my weapon. Not yet. I don’t need to; my body is already a weapon, honed by a decade of looking over my shoulder. The chapel goes unnervingly still, the silence thickening until it feels like pressurised water.
The air warps, a distortion of heat and cold that makes my skin crawl. The candle by the altar flickers sideways, a violent, sudden snap of the flame as if the breath of something invisible just passed through the aisle.
Behind me, I hear her shift. Her heartbeat is a frantic, uneven rhythm against the small of my back—quick, unsteady, echoing the panic of a girl who doesn’t remember this place the way I do. She doesn’t remember the copper tang of blood soaking into the floorboards or the way these walls echo with prayers that were never answered.
Another sound. Softer this time. Like heavy cloth dragging across ancient, splintered wood.
I scan the pews, my eyes cutting through the gloom. They are empty, skeletal, and rotting. But the confessional isn’t. I track the velvet curtain; it’s open half an inch wider than it was when we stepped into this tomb.
“Don’t move,” I whisper to her. My voice is lower than usual, frayed at the edges, sounding like iron dragged over stone. She doesn’t respond, but I can feel her eyes on my back like a second skin, her trust a weight I’m not sure I deserve to carry.
I walk toward the confessional, my boots hitting the floor with a hollow, rhythmic thud. I’ve walked this path before. I’ve walked it covered in the bruises he gave me as ‘blessings.’ I’ve walked it after being told that confession was the only thing that would set my soul free from the ‘sin’ of wanting to protect her. I’ve walked it dragging my own blood behind me like a wedding veil.
The brass handle is ice-cold. I reach out, my hand hovering, when a moth lands on the dark wood. It’s huge, obsidian-black,its wings dusted with a fine, grey powder that looks like human ash. It flutters once, a desperate, silent spasm, and then goes still.
My fingers curl around the heavy velvet of the curtain. I pull.
And there’s nothing. No body. No priest. No ghost.
Just a mirror. A single, jagged shard of glass, larger than my hand, tied with a length of crimson thread to the wooden seat where the penitent would kneel.
My chest goes still. My lungs refuse to expand. Because I know this thread. He used to tie a piece of it around his wrist when he talked to me through the slats, a scarlet reminder. He used to tell me it meant he belonged to God.
I take the shard, the edges biting into my skin. There’s something written on the back, scratched into the silvering with a frantic, precise hand.
“You watched her too.”
My stomach clenches into a hard, cold knot. Because I did. Before I ever touched her, before I ever learned the sweet, broken music of her name, I was a voyeur of her grief. I watched her through the chapel slats when she came in late to pray, her small shoulders shaking. I watched her tuck her rosary into her pocket like a secret. I watched her light candles with hands that trembled for a god that wasn’t listening.
I watched her the exact same way he watched me.
Suddenly, the world tilts. I don’t know who the fuck this message is from. I hear her step behind me, the floorboard groaning under her slight weight. I turn, just slightly, my pulse hammering in my throat.
