She’s looking for answers but the truth? Fuck, she couldn’t handle it and I can’t say it.
I never left. I never stopped watching. I kept every picture, every scrap of paper, every frame of grainy footage from a club where you looked like you were searching for someone you couldn’t name. Because the sound of your laugh was the only thing that drowned out the priest’s voice in my head.
But the truth is a luxury we can’t afford.
“I came back,” I murmur, “because you’re mine.” Her breath falters, her lips parting. “And I don’t like loose ends.”
She stiffens, the air between us turning to glass. She knows it’s a partial truth—a sanitised version of the rot. I reach out, my fingers curling under her chin with a slow, agonising deliberation.
Tilt. Lift. Look at me.
And what I see there guts me. Because the girl I broke? She’s still fighting. Even now. Even after the altar. Even after the memories.
“You always want the real answer,” I whisper, my thumb dragging across her bottom lip, pressing deep enough to see the blood leave the skin. “But you never stop to think what it’ll cost you.”
I lean closer, my voice brushing her skin like a razor. “I came back because you left me behind.”
The shard. The slip. The truth.
She blinks—once, twice—and I feel the tectonic shift in her head. Something old and rotted just kicked the door open inside her chest. But she doesn’t move. She just stares into the abyss of my eyes.
I could tell her everything right now. I could tell her about the rituals, the rooms, the way he whispered her name like a prayer long before the first candle was lit. I could tell her how I watched her walk away while I was still bleeding out on the floor.
But I don’t. It’s not time. She has to remember it on her own, bit by agonising bit. Otherwise, the break won’t be clean. It won’t be permanent.
“Someone wants us to remember,” I say, finally letting her go and stepping back into the shadows. “But I’m not playing their game.”
She frowns, her voice a fragile thread. “Then whose game are we playing?”
I smile. It’s a slow, crooked, predatory thing that doesn’t reach my eyes.
“Mine.”
And I mean it. Because if I can’t control the flood of her memories… I’ll be the one to decide exactly how she bleeds from them.
Chapter 17
RAVEN
The room disappears.
Not in pieces—in a plunge.
Like my mind just stepped off a cliff and decided the only way out is down.
I don’t remember falling. I just land. Hard. The tile bites into my knees, a cold, clinical sting that vibrates through my bones. Breath hitches in my throat like it’s been gagged by a phantom hand. My fingers twitch—small, frightened, the frantic spasms of a girl I thought I’d outgrown. I know this place. Not from the selective scrapbooks of my memory, but from my nervous system. From the way my skin shrinks to fit the terror of the child I used to be.
The room is smaller now. Sharper. A suffocating hush clings to the air like stale incense. On a stone shelf, thick candles drip slow, wax pooling like white blood. Their flicker warps the shadow of the man behind me, stretching it across the wall until he has too many arms, too many ways to reach for me.
But he doesn’t touch me. Not yet. He circles first, his boots echoing like funeral bells against the floor.
“Good girls are obedient.”
I’m thirteen. My voice is gone.
He crouches beside me, his cassock whispering as he lowers himself with the reverence of a man kneeling in confession. Like I’m the sin he’s about to purge. And then—the worst part—he smiles. That saintly, solemn curve of the lips. The one that always comes just before the pain begins.
“I saw you watching him,” he says, brushing a lock of hair behind my ear. “You and the boy.”
