“I was a kid, Damien. I didn’t know.”
“I know.” His hands twitch. “But it still felt like betrayal.”
I flinch. I’ve lived my whole life with fractures I couldn’t explain. Maybe I abandoned him in the one place he needed me most.
“Say it,” he breathes. “Say you remember me.”
I meet his eyes—those eyes I’ve feared and followed. “I remember you, Damien.”
He grabs my face, starving for me. “Don’t ever leave me again.”
“I won’t.”
He pulls me back against a stone column, his mouth crashing into mine. It’s not a kiss; it’s a reckoning. A claim. The stained glass rattles as our bodies collide.
“I’m going to ruin you,” he promises, sinking to his knees on the cold stone, his mouth brushing the lace of my skin.
“You already have,” I whisper.
He drags his tongue up the centre of me, slow and possessive. My head hits the pillar. My body shakes. This isn’t love; it’s something older. Darker.
And then, the memory strikes again.
I see the moths. Beating their wings against cracked glass. I see the priest behind me.“God gave you to me, little lamb.”
I’m very still. Very quiet.
But then—the boy in the window shouts.
“HEY!”
Glass shatters. The boy is barefoot, wild-eyed, holding a rock and a broken rosary. Blood runs down his wrist.
“GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM HER!”
The memory cuts. I’m back in the present, panting, Damien’s hands on my face.
“Raven—what did you just see?”
“You were there,” I whisper. “You threw the rock. You saved me.”
Damien says nothing for a long beat. “Because you weren’t supposed to remember. You were supposed to run. To forget every fucking thing. About that night. About me.”
“And look what it fucking cost you,” he growls, his voice ragged.
“I’m not the fucking hero,” he says. “I saw you weren’t gonna scream. So I threw the rock. I wanted to see him bleed. Because I knew what it felt like.”
And there it is. The reason he’s mine. Because long before I ever knew what it felt like to be taken apart—he already was.
Chapter 16
DAMIEN
She remembered.
Not all of it—not the jagged, stained-glass shards of the whole truth—but enough to crack a foundation I thought I’d buried beneath miles of concrete and years of bloodshed. And now, I can’t breathe without the memory choking me.
The chapel is an icebox, the air stagnant and heavy with the scent of centuries-old rot, but I am burning. My hands still smell like her skin—salt, sin, and the faint, lingering scent of the incense that’s seeped into her pores—and I can feel her breath like a ghost pressed against my chest, a phantom heat that remains even though she’s no longer touching me.
