It isn’t a loud transition; it’s a silence that feels fundamentally wrong. It’s a space that used to be occupied—vibrating with the heat of her skin and the frantic rhythm of her pulse—that is suddenly, violently empty. It’s as if something sacred was torn out of the chapel’s stone heart, and the walls themselves haven’t yet caught up to the loss. Her breath isn’t there. Her heartbeat is gone.
And mine? Mine spikes. It spikes so hard my chest hollows out, leaving nothing behind but the metallic tang of adrenaline and the taste of cold iron.
I’d only left for a second. Just long enough to scout the perimeter. Just long enough to draw the freezing night air into my lungs and try to exorcise the memory of the words she’d whispered into my mouth—a prayer she hadn’t meant to say out loud, a confession that tasted like salvation and ash.
But the second I step back inside? She’s gone.
The candles still burn low, their flames dancing in a draft that shouldn’t exist. The ropes I’d tossed aside lie coiled near the altar like a discarded offering, mocking me with their limpness. But she isn’t here. She isn’t hiding. She isn’t watching me with those wide, trauma-haunted eyes that she tries so hard to turn into weapons.
The world tilts on its axis.
I turn fast—too fast—my shoulder catching a heavy oak pew and sending it skidding across the stone with a sickening, splintering crack. I don’t care. I don’t care about the sanctity of this place or the holy silence I just shattered. I just had her. I just tasted her. I’d finally touched her as if she belonged to me again.
And now, she doesn’t. Now, someone else has touched her. Someone else has taken her.
I taste blood and realise I’ve bitten through my lip. The pain doesn’t anchor me; it only fuels the transformation. I feel the years peeling away, the polished veneer of the man I became stripping off to reveal the boy chained to the altar—the one who prayed to a god that only listened to the monsters.
I burned him. I know I did. I watched the priest’s flesh curl and melt. I watched every sin on his tongue turn to grey ash. So how the fuck is this happening again?
My vision darkens at the periphery, narrowing into a lethal, tunnel-visioned focus. I move on instinct. I storm out into the freezing night, my boots hitting the gravel like war drums. I’m hunting now. My heart is in my throat, my mind a conflagration.
“Raven,” I hiss. The name is a feral thing, cracked and bleeding.
And then I see it. Something small and white, curled at the base of a weeping stone statue by the gates. A scrap of her dress. It was torn deliberately, snagged on the stone like a breadcrumb—a taunt. I snatch it up, pressing the fabric to my mouth. It stillsmells of her—incense and salt—because I haven’t been gone long enough for her scent to fade.
She didn’t go willingly. She wouldn’t. Not after the altar.
I swallow the scream ripping through my chest. The men who raised me broke what they wanted to keep. I am different. I destroy anything that tries to take what is mine. I pull my knife, gripping the hilt so tightly the cross guard bites into my palm. Let it hurt. Let it ground me in the rage.
Whoever is playing this game forgot one thing. You don’t steal from a monster without bleeding for it.
I tear through the woods like a goddamn storm.
Winter branches whip across my face, leaving stinging welts; brambles claw at my legs, shredding my trousers. The cold doesn’t touch me. I left that capacity for feeling behind in the chapel. All that’s left is the part of me I tried to bury—the part that knows how to track prey through the dark.
She wouldn’t scream—not unless they forced her. And if they forced her? They’ve already signed their own death certificate in blood.
The shadows are no longer quiet. Every rustle of dead leaves sounds like her voice; every snap of a dry twig makes my spine jolt as if a live wire has been shoved down it. I can feel her. It’s a phantom thread pulled taut under my skin, tugging me in directions I can’t follow fast enough.
And the trail? It’s a psychological flaying.
I find one shoe, placed delicately on a moss-covered rock like a sick joke. Further on, a string of pearls from her pocket—the ones I hadn’t even noticed she was clutching—are looped over a broken branch, gleaming like horse teeth in the moonlight.
And then… nothing. The trail vanishes.
Like the earth opened up and swallowed her whole. Like she was never here at all.
I stop. I never stop, but the stillness here is heavy. This feels wrong. It’s too clean, too thoughtful. He’s playing me. He’s watched long enough to know exactly which cuts will slice the deepest. He understands that this isn’t just about Raven—it’s about the way I break. The way I burn.
I clench my fists, my nails carving crescent moons into my palms. I want to scream her name, but I refuse to give him the satisfaction. I won’t let him hear me fall apart in the dark.
But she’ll be cold. She’ll be terrified. She’ll be waiting for the boy who promised he wouldn’t let the fire take her. And here I am, standing over a useless trail with blood in my mouth, feeling seventeen and helpless all over again.
But this time, I’m not in chains. This time, I don’t beg gods that hate me.
I become the god.
I shove the pearls into my pocket. Not because they’re useful, but because they are hers. And if this fucker left them here for me to find, I’ll leave him a pile of his own teeth in return.
