Chapter 10
RAVEN
The hallway monitor hasn’t come back online.
It flickers once—just enough to tease a shape, a shadow—but Damien doesn’t react.
He’s crouched by the server tower, knuckles white around a bundle of exposed cables, jaw clenched like his teeth are the only thing keeping him together.
There’s blood on his hand. Just a smear.
Dried. From before. He hasn’t cleaned it.
“I reset the feeds,” he says, voice taut. “They’re still blind.”
I watch him rise slowly, like gravity weighs more in this room. He’s quieter now. Not the terrifying kind of quiet. Not the kind that shouts through silence. This is something worse—the kind that’s calculating.
“Someone knew the blind spot,” he murmurs. “They chose that camera for a reason.”
I step closer, arms wrapped around myself, feeling like I’m ten seconds from unraveling but pretending I’m not. “You said they weren’t watching anymore.”
His eyes meet mine. Sharp. Foggy. Unreadable. “They’re not.” He exhales. “They’re playing.”
The room tilts.
He gestures to the screen. “He left something else. It wasn’t on the footage—but it was here.” He reaches behind the desk, retrieves a small object wrapped in more white cloth. This one’s not tied with a ribbon. Just folded. Plain. Carefully placed.
He unwraps it. It’s a photo. Not of me. Not of him. A chapel. Empty. The pews rotted. The candles burnt down to their stubs. The carpet frayed with ash. I don’t know how I know it’s the same one. The same chapel from the memory I keep buried under layers of breath and denial—but I do.
Damien doesn’t look at me. He looks at the photo like it’s whispering in a voice only he can hear. “He was there,” he mutters. “Long before I was.”
My mouth dries.
He flips the photo over. There’s something scrawled on the back.
Not words. A sketch. Crude. Childlike. A figure with Xs for eyes and something that might be a collar around its neck.
A girl drawn smaller beside it. No features.
Just long hair. And a single drop of red ink where the mouth should be.
Damien drops the photo like it burned him. I bend to pick it up, but he stops me. “Don’t touch it.”
“Why?”
“Because I think that’s the same ink he used in the photo from before.”
“The one above the bed?”
He nods.
“And?”
He hesitates. “It’s blood.”
My skin goes cold.
“We’ve been breathing him in,” Damien whispers. “Every night. Every fucking night we thought we were safe.”
I don’t know what to say. Because every instinct in my body is screaming.
Not just fear. But recognition. Like this isn’t the first time someone watched me sleep.
Like this isn’t the first time I was marked.
But I don’t say that out loud. Because the look in Damien’s eyes is already too close to feral.
He runs both hands through his hair. Paces. Then stops. “We need to go back.”
“What?”
“The chapel. I need to see it. I need—” he breaks off, tongue wetting his lips. “There’s something missing. Something I’m not seeing. And if he’s pulling us back there—”
“You think it’s a trap.”
“I think it’s worse than that.” He lifts his gaze slowly. “I think it’s a memory.”
My stomach caves. “Whose?” I ask.
Damien’s voice is hoarse when he answers. “Mine.”
My fingers brush the edge of the chapel photo. Something cold hits the back of my neck. Not air. Not breath. Memory.
A snap of soundless candlelight. The wooden pew beneath my knees.
The soot beneath my nails. A flicker of movement in the far-left corner.
The boy again. Not a priest. Not a man. Just a boy.
Always half-shadowed, always sitting still.
His knees pulled up. His hands clasped like he was holding something small and precious.
He never looked away. Even when the others spoke. Even when the priest sang in that too-soft voice, the one that made my lungs feel wrong. Even then—he watched me. Not cruelly. Not sexually. Not the way the priest did.
The boy watched me like I was a secret. Like I was made of glass and ash and teeth.
And around him, in the stained-glass light—moths. Just a few. Pale.
Fluttering. Beating against the panes like they were trying to get inside his skin. I used to hum to myself to keep from crying. And one time—only once—I thought I heard him hum back. Not loud. Not in tune. But matching me.
My mouth goes dry. I blink. And the memory is gone.
I blink hard. Try to shake it off. But it clings. Like dust in my lungs. Like candle smoke on skin. That boy. I never put words to him before. Not out loud. Not even in my own head. Maybe because I never thought he was real. Maybe because he wasn’t, not in the way the rest of them were.
The priest’s breath, the belt behind the door, the soft lilt of hymns twisting into threats—those things were real.
But the boy? He never spoke. Never moved.
Just watched me hum like I was the only sound in the chapel that didn’t make him flinch.
I think I called him the Moth Boy. In my head.
Just once. Because that’s what I remember.
The way the moths always fluttered around him—drawn to something no one else could see. Something just as broken.
God, why now?
I grip the edge of the desk and try to steady my breath. Damien’s still in the surveillance room, flipping through file folders like if he turns enough pages, the truth will snap into focus. He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t need to. His energy’s loud enough to make the air ache.
My voice barely makes it out. “There was someone else there.”
He pauses.
I keep going before I lose the nerve. “Not… part of it. Not like the priest. Just a boy. He never did anything. He was just… there.”
Damien turns to me slowly. His face doesn’t change. Not at first. But something shudders behind his eyes. Like the mention of the boy hits him harder than it should. Like he knows.
But then, he nods. A beat too slow. “Could’ve been another orphan,” he says flatly. “Some of the kids weren’t listed.”
“No,” I say, sharper than I mean to. “He didn’t belong there. He didn’t look at me like the others did. He didn’t… breathe the same.” I don’t know what I mean until the words are already out.
Damien doesn’t move. Just stares at me. His throat works around a swallow. And when he finally speaks, it’s soft. Barely audible. “What did he look like?”
My stomach coils. I try to picture the boy’s face—but it’s hazy. Like the memory refuses to sharpen, as if the image was smeared in ash before I ever saw it clearly.
“I don’t know. Brown hair, maybe? Pale. Always hunched like he didn’t want to be seen. But I always… felt him. Watching me. Like I was…”
I stop. Damien tilts his head. “Like you were what?”
“Like I was the only thing keeping him human.”
The room goes silent. Damien’s knuckles whiten around the folder. A beat. Two. Then he says, so low I almost miss it—
“That priest wasn’t the only monster in that place.”
I look up at him. And he’s not talking about the priest anymore. He’s talking about himself.
I don’t know why my throat’s tight. It’s not like anything new was said. Not really. Not like a switch flipped and suddenly I understand. If anything, it’s the opposite. The more I say, the less I’m sure I’m remembering anything at all.
But my body remembers. God, my body remembers things my mind has never had the courage to face.
The way my breath gets shallow when the word chapel is spoken.
The sick way I react to candles that smell too much like rose and dust. The hitch in my voice every time someone touches my hair too gently.
All of it lives in my skin like rot trapped under silk.
But that boy. That boy wasn’t part of the rot. He was something else. Like a shadow caught praying in the corner. Or a wolf pretending to kneel beside the sheep.
“Did you know him?” I ask suddenly. The words fall out before I can stop them. I don’t even know why I ask. Just that something in Damien’s stillness is too practiced.
He doesn’t flinch. He just… shuts down. One second, he’s Damien—the unstable storm I’ve come to understand in fragments. The next, he’s nothing. A locked vault. He turns back to the monitors like I didn’t speak at all.
“Did you know him?” I repeat, this time firmer. “The boy in the chapel.”
“I knew a lot of boys,” he mutters.
“That’s not an answer.”
His hand hovers over one of the feeds. Not moving. Not scrolling. Just pressing so hard against the mouse it creaks. “I said—”
“Drop it.”
His voice slices the air. I freeze. Because I’ve seen Damien angry. Violent. Obsessive. But this? This is something else. This is self-protection. This is what someone says when the answer might kill them to say out loud.
My heartbeat stutters. “You did know him,” I whisper.
He doesn’t respond. Just stands there, rigid, like a statue built out of shame and secrets. And that’s when it hits me. Not a memory. Not a flash. Just a question. A horrible, impossible question that lodges itself in my throat like glass:
What if he didn’t just know the boy… What if he was him?
The moths. The silence. The way he watched without ever looking. The way he moved, even now—like someone who’s still carrying the weight of pews and prayers and guilt that doesn’t belong to him.
I don’t say it. Not out loud. But he turns, slowly, like he heard it anyway. His eyes land on mine. And they don’t look shocked. Or angry. Or confused. They look sad. Cracked.
And suddenly I want to run. Not from him. From the truth he’s holding in his mouth like a bullet he hasn’t decided to fire yet. I shake my head.
“Tell me it wasn’t you,” I whisper.
He closes his eyes. Not yes. Not no. Just—silence.
And that’s worse than anything he could say. Because silence is an answer. And my stomach knows it before my brain catches up. He didn’t just see what happened to me in that chapel.
He was there for all of it.