“I came back because no matter how many girls I touched, none of them screamed like you did in your sleep,” I snarl against her skin.
She arches for me, her body a desperate plea.
“You begged for me back then. You just didn’t know it.”
I yank her up so her spine curves against my chest, and I sink my teeth into the junction of her neck and shoulder, marking her in the flickering light. She cries out, pretty and broken, and I growl, “I’ll never let you leave me again.”
I feel her walls flutter around me, a rhythmic squeezing that threatens my control. I slow down, but not to be kind. I want to torture her with the sensation.
“You want to cum in the house that tried to kill me?” I murmur. “You better bleed for it.”
She whimpers, a broken sound that fuels the fire. I slap her clit once, hard, and she bucks wildly against me. Again. Again. Her whole body spasming in a desperate search for the edge.
But I don’t let her. Not yet.
“Tell me,” I breathe. “Why are you mine?”
“Because—because you saved me,” she sobs, her head lolling back. “You kept me.”
I snap my hips forward, burying myself to the hilt, and growl into her throat. “You think I saved you?”
I kiss her—deep, filthy, my tongue claiming hers.
I sink my teeth into the sensitive curve of her shoulder, my pulse a violent thrum against her skin, and as the chapel shadows stretch like reaching fingers toward us, I lean in. My lips graze the shell of her ear, my voice dropping into that rhythmic, hypnotic cadence—the one that used to vibrate through the drywall between our rooms when the world was nothing but darkness and fear.
I whisper the words that were once our only tether to reality, the words the priest used to murmur as he walked the halls to ensure we were still “devout” in our silence.
“The moth is silent, the flame is cold, but the counting never stops until the story is told.”
Then, I drop my voice even lower, into a rasping, guttural count that bypasses her ears and goes straight to the trauma buried in her marrow.
“One for the lock. Two for the key. Three for the boy who will never be free.”
The effect is instantaneous.
It’s as if I’ve shoved a live wire into her brain. The arch of her back turns to stone. Her hands, which had been clawing at the altar wood, go limp. The very air around us seems to curdling, the smell of incense suddenly replaced by the sharp, suffocating stench of a basement with no light.
I feel her mind fracture and reset in the span of a single heartbeat. The “Raven” I’ve been hunting—the one who forgot—is gone. In her place is the little girl who used to press her ear to the cold plaster and wait for my voice to save her from the sound of the priest’s footsteps.
She doesn’t just remember the words. She remembers the weight of the hand that used to cover her mouth. She remembers the way I used to cry through the wall when I couldn’t reach her.
She pulls away from me, not in disgust, but in a state of total, soul-shattering shock. Her eyes are wide, glassy, reflecting the flickering candle flames like two dying stars.
“Damien,” she whispers, and for the first time, it’s not a question. It’s a recognition of the monster I became to keep her alive.
Then the first sob breaks, a jagged, raw sound that echoes off the rotted rafters of the chapel.
Chapter 15
RAVEN
The chapel is too quiet.
It isn’t a peaceful silence, the kind that invites prayer or contemplation; it’s a predatory stillness. The kind of silence that doesn’t settle—it stalks, pacing the aisles and clinging to the shadows of the vaulted ceiling like a physical weight.
I should be cold. I should be afraid. Every survival instinct I own should be screaming at me to run, to vanish into the night before the stone walls finish swallowing me whole. But instead, I watch him.
Damien.
