The air tastes of iron and old, exhaled prayers.
I don’t know how long I’ve been under, but the moment consciousness begins to claw its way back, something snaps. It isn’t a sound from the vaulted ceiling above, but a fracture inside my own ribs. My body understands the threat before my brain can find the words for it; instinct is a live wire screaming through my blood, sparking against the cold.
Damien isn’t here.
I sit up, the movement too fast, sending a dizzying surge of vertigo through my skull. My heartbeat is a thunderous, erratic percussion in my ears. My fingers graze the velvet of the pew—I can still feel the ghost of his heat lingering in the fabric, a vanishing thumbprint of safety that makes the encroaching cold feel like a stranger slipping through a cracked door.
He wouldn’t leave me. Not after the altar. Not after the way he looked at me, like I was the only thing keeping him anchored to the earth. Not again.
“Damien?” I whisper. The name is brittle, a hollow thing that the chapel’s silence devours instantly.
I stand, my legs feeling like they’re made of glass. The floorboards creak beneath my bare feet, a sharp, accusing sound in the gloom. That’s when the reality of the lapse hits me: I never put my shoes back on. I never intended to fall asleep. In this place, sleep isn’t rest—it’s a surrender.
I move toward the centre aisle, but a flicker of light catches the corner of my eye. A single candle is burning on a cracked pillar near the transept. It’s tall, tallow-thick, and we didn’t light it. Crimson wax drips down the stone like slow, arterial trails, and tucked into the cooling pool at its base is a white moth. Its wings are spread wide—perfect, still, and dead. A pinned specimen for a god who stopped listening a long time ago.
I take a frantic step back.
The Great Doors slam shut.
The boom rips through the nave, vibrating in my marrow like a gunshot. Before the echo can die, hands find me. They are rough, encased in heavy leather gloves. One palm clamps over my mouth, stifling the scream before it can leave my throat, while the other arm wraps around my waist like an iron band. He yanks me backward, hauling me against a chest that is broader than Damien’s, taller, and entirely wrong.
This isn’t him. This is a mountain of shadow and malice.
I thrash, my heels catching on the stone, my teeth searching for skin through the leather, but I’m being dragged. I catch a final, strobe-light glimpse of the altar—the flickering flame, the dead moth, the velvet where I’d felt safe—and then the world narrows.
The scream dies against his palm. My breath comes in short, stabbing bursts as I’m hauled through a side exit I didn’t know existed—a priest’s hole hidden behind the pulpit. We descend into a corridor carved directly into the damp earth beneath thefoundation. It smells of ancient mildew and the sharp, cloying rot of things that have never seen the sun.
His grip is a vice. My head slams against the low stone lintel as we emerge, and the world begins to swim in shades of grey.
When I blink again, the biting winter air hits my skin like a slap. Moonlight flashes against a sliver of glass and steel in his free hand. Not a blade. A syringe.
I try to scream again, a muffled, useless vibration against his hand.
“Shhh.”
The voice is low. Calm. It has the cadence of something familiar, but the pitch is warped, like an actor struggling to imitate a role they haven’t played in years. The needle plunges into the side of my neck, a cold invasion of my veins.
And then, the dark.
Darkness doesn’t arrive with a shutter-click; it leaks in. It presses at the edges of my vision like rising water finding the cracks in a levee. Even as my mind slips, my body continues the fight, my muscles twitching in a futile protest against the sedation.
I come back in pieces. Sound arrives first—the rhythmic, hollow drip of water on stone. Then sensation—the agonising burn in my wrists.
I’m tied. Not with the heavy steel of Damien’s cuffs, but with old, abrasive rope that bites into the skin already sensitised by the altar. My head throbs with a deep, nauseating pulse that makes the world tilt.
I breathe. The air is damp and stagnant. Underground.
The stone floor presses into my spine, and the smell is an assault—mildew, dust, and a sharp chemical undertone that stings the back of my throat. I try to shift my weight, but the ropes are unyielding. Panic surges, hot and frantic, clawing at my chest, but I force it down. I learned the geometry of a cage a long time ago. Panic makes noise. Noise invites the monster.
I open my eyes.
The room is a tomb of grey stone, lit by a single, naked bulb hanging from a frayed wire. It sways in a phantom draft, casting distorted shadows that stretch across the walls like grasping fingers. No windows. One heavy metal door.
And him.
He is standing a few feet away, his back to me. His shoulders are a broad silhouette beneath a dark hood that swallows his head. Black fabric, gloved hands, no skin visible. He moves with a terrifying, clinical calm, as if time has ceased to exist outside these walls. As if he knows the world has already forgotten I’m here.
My throat constricts. I don’t scream. I refuse to give him the satisfaction of my terror.
