“Let her go, you fucking coward?—”
Damien. His voice is a cocktail of rage, gravel, and bleeding devotion.
But it’s already too late. The hooded man is behind me again. I feel his cold breath on the nape of my neck. His hand settles on my shoulder with terrifying possessiveness.
“It’s not time yet,” he whispers.
Then—the sharp, icy bite of a syringe. A rush of liquid fire through my veins.
And the dark swallows me whole before Damien can reach the door.
Chapter 23
STALKER
She doesn’t remember me. Not yet.
But she will. God, she will. She was never meant to forget—not the window, not the white dress, and especially not the moths. They were the first gift. My calling card. My warning. My promise.
I saw her through that cracked pane before she ever knew what it meant to beseen. I watched the man in the collar tell her lies and write sins in the shape of salvation. I knew he’d try to claim her eventually; that’s what parasites do—they sense the soft ones.
The quiet ones. The ones who try to disappear in plain sight. But she didn’t disappear from me. Even when she tried to. Even when he took her and painted her in chains and called it affection.
I let her go once.Once. And look what he did to her.
I drag the blindfold from her face now, slowly, carefully, as if I’m peeling back a veil that never should have existed. Her lashes flutter against her cheeks, dark fans against pale skin. Herlips part on a ghost of a whimper, the sound lost in the thick, stagnant air of the cellar. She’s drugged, but not gone. Good. I want her to feel the echo of this moment when it returns to her later, when the memory blooms in the back of her throat and chokes her with its familiarity.
She’ll ask herself:Was it real?
She’ll answer herself:It was him.
But she’ll be wrong. Because I’m not the man in her bed. I’m the one who waited. The one who watched her slip through the cracks and held my breath every fucking time she almost shattered. The one who saw whathewas becoming and knew—knew—I had to bide my time.
Obsession isn’t about impulse; it’s about timing. And now? The clock is bleeding.
I pace in front of her, hands clasped behind my back. My black combat boots echo off the stained floors of this forgotten room beneath the old seminary. He doesn’t know about this place. He thinks he burned it all, buried the past in ash and fire, but all he did was scorch the surface. I was underneath. And I’ve been building ever since.
Raven twitches on the mattress. Her fingers curl into the rough fabric.
“Shh, little moth,” I whisper, the sound soft as silk. My fingers hover over her cheek, inches from the skin, but I don’t touch. Not yet. “You’re almost ready.”
She groans, and something deep in me snaps like a violin string tuned too tight. He touched her too soon. He ruined the pacing, cracked her open before she knew what she was made of. He turned the slow-burn into a wildfire, and I’m the only one who sees she’s burning.
But I can still fix this. I can still fix her.
There’s a sound above. Distant. A door slamming. His voice—shouting, searching, feral.
Too late, Damien.
I run a hand over the wall, tapping a sequence into the stone. A hidden panel slides open with a grind of ancient gears. “Don’t worry,” I murmur to her dazed face. “When you wake up… you’ll remember everything.”
And then I disappear into the dark with her.
She weighs nothing. Or maybe I’m just that strong. Either way, she doesn’t fight me as I descend the spiral staircase beneath the chapel floor. The lantern swinging in my grip casts halos of gold across the weeping stone. The air thickens—tasting of mildew and prayers that never got answered.
I lay her down on the narrow cot. The one I prepared. The one she doesn’t remember screaming in, years ago, after the priest dragged her here. He never touched her then—not because he didn’t want to, but because I was there. I left the moths in his collar that night. Crushed wings and a broken rosary. A promise.
I pace a slow circle around the cot, watching her chest rise and fall. She whimpers. Not from pain, but from the edge of remembrance.
