“Where am I?” I whisper.
He doesn’t turn. “That depends,” he says. His voice is filtered, a low, modulated rasp that makes my stomach turn. It isn’t electronic; it sounds intentional, like a man reshaping his own vocal cords to hide a ghost. “On how much you choose to remember.”
Ice slides through my marrow. “I don’t know who you think I am,” I say, my voice gaining a desperate edge of steel.
A soft sound escapes the hood. Not laughter—something far more chilling. Amusement. “You’re exactly who I think you are, Raven.”
He turns then, slowly. The hood keeps his features in a well of shadow, but I can feel his gaze crawling over me like spiders. He crouches in front of me, close enough that I can smell the scent of his clothes—expensive soap, clean and sharp, an incongruous smell for a dungeon.
“You always were good at playing small,” he says. “The quiet one. The forgettable one.” My heart hammers against my ribs. “You learned that lesson early, didn’t you?”
I shake my head, my hair sticking to the sweat on my forehead. “You have the wrong person.”
“No,” he says softly. “I have the right version.”
He reaches out, not to touch me, but to lift a weathered object from the floor. A notebook.
My stomach drops into a void. It’s old, the corners curled and yellowed, the cover mottled with dark stains. He flips it open, turning the pages so the swinging bulb illuminates the contents.
Drawings. Moths. Hundreds of them. Ragged wings, heavy bodies, over and over in frantic charcoal lines.
My breath stutters. I never told Damien about the drawings. I never told anyone about the things I sketched in the dark when the house was silent and the air felt heavy with eyes.
“You remember these,” he says, watching my face instead of the book. “You used to draw them when you couldn’t sleep. When you were waiting for the door to creak open.”
My mouth opens, but the air in the room has turned to lead. I can’t speak.
He closes the notebook with a softthudand stands, looming over me until his shadow swallows me whole. “Don’t worry. I’m not here to hurt you, Raven.”
My stomach churns. In my experience, that sentence is the herald of a different kind of agony.
“I’m here to finish something.”
The bulb flickers, a brief strobe of light hitting his hands as he adjusts the fit of his gloves. In that second of clarity, I see it—letters stitched into the dark leather of his inner wrist. They are crooked, uneven, the work of a hand that prioritised the message over the craft.
OBEDIENT.
My vision swims. The past is no longer a memory; it’s a living thing, breathing in the corner of the room.
“No,” I whisper. “Please.”
“Pleaseis a memory,” he replies, his voice a velvet threat. “And memories are exactly what we’re working on.”
The metal door behind him groans open, light spilling in from a corridor that looks like it belongs in a hospital or a morgue. He steps back into the glare, leaving me tied and trembling on the cold stone.
“He’s going to remember too,” he says, the filtered voice echoing off the walls.
The door slams shut, the sound final and absolute.
I’m alone. I can feel the ropes biting, the dampness of the floor, and the terrifying realisation that the map of my life has just been redrawn. I know Damien is coming. I can feel the pull of him, the inevitable collision of our twin traumas.
But I also know that when he kicks that door down, he won’t be saving the girl he thinks he knows. He’ll be stepping into the mouth of the same nightmare that broke us both.
Chapter 21
DAMIEN
The air shifts.
