Then, silence. He leaves me in the dark, but the knowing stays. This isn’t a random kidnapping. This isn’t just about Damien. This man has known me for a long time. Longer than I ever knew I existed.
My breath comes in shallow, staggered gulps that burn my throat. I twist against the ropes—my wrists are raw, my thighs trembling—but the knots are a masterpiece of calculation. He didn’t just tie me; he measured me. He gauged exactly how hard I would fight and how long it would take for the rot of surrender to set in.
But I don’t surrender. Not when I have his hands to remember.
I think of Damien. The chapel. The way he pinned me to the altar as if I were something holy and damned all at once. His voice, starved and broken: Don’t you dare die on me again.
He’s going to find me. He has to.
But even that hope feels like a fraying rope. Because of that other voice—the silk soaked in gasoline. You wore white that night.
How could he know? The memory rises like smoke. A summer night. Moths beating their suicidal wings against the glass of my bedroom window. The unshakable sense of a shadow watching me. A boy? Or something worse?
Something clicks—too soft for a lock, but loud enough to send my pulse into a frenzy. I go still. The air in the room changes. Someone is here.
I hear the scrape of metal on concrete. Purposeful. Then a heavy drag.
He never left. He’s been here the whole time, perched in the dark, listening to my heart try to beat its way out of my chest. He’s treating me like a specimen.
The voice returns, right against my ear. “You remembered something, didn’t you?”
I don’t answer. I can’t. Because I did. But the memory is slippery, half-formed, a jagged piece of glass that doesn’t want to be touched.
“You don’t know what it is yet, but you will,” he says, his gloved fingers brushing the sensitive skin of my inner knee. “And when you do—when it all comes rushing back—I wonder if you’ll still scream for him… or for me.”
His touch vanishes. I hear his footsteps fade—slow, casual, utterly unconcerned. He isn’t worried about me escaping because he knows he’s already won. He planted a landmine in my head, and now he’s just waiting for the countdown to hit zero.
I stare into the blackness of the blindfold.
Even with my eyes shut, I see it. That window. The moths slamming into the glass like they were trying to warn me—or break in. Something is crawling up my spine, and it isn’t the cold. It’s the realisation that I wasn’t just watched once.
I was watched for years.
A shiver rolls through me, a primal, bone-deep memory that my brain buried for a reason.
“You wore white that night.”
A hallway. Not the chapel. Somewhere older. Flickering fluorescent lights. A door that never quite shut, with scratch marks at the base. My white dress. And behind me… footsteps.
I try to scream, but I’m back in the now. My wrists burn as I clench my fists. He’s in my head, and the worst part is that Damien is there too. Because when I think of those footsteps in the hall… I don’t know whose they were.
The stalker’s? Damien’s? Both?
My memory isn’t a line; it’s a fracture. I’m crawling across the shards on bare knees.
“Not yet,” I whisper through the blood in my mouth. Not until I remember.
I try to count my breaths. Ten… nine…
Something shifts outside the door. A soft thud.
Eight… seven… six…
I hold my breath until my lungs ache. Another sound. Louder. The sound of a world breaking open.
Five…
Then I hear it. The voice that belongs to my soul. Not the stalker. The one who broke for me.
