Chapter 11
RAVEN
Idon’t sleep anymore. Not really.
Not in the way that feels safe, or warm, or private.
Sleep now is a breath held too long. A blink stretched thin.
A strobe of fractured images—candles flickering where they shouldn’t be, footsteps that echo too close, and that same weight pressing down on my chest like something’s watching. Always watching.
The apartment is cold today. Not from temperature.
From silence. The kind that creeps under doorways.
The kind that waits. Damien’s in the surveillance room again.
I know because he hasn’t stepped out in over an hour.
Not to drink. Not to speak. Not to touch me.
I don’t even think he’s blinked. And still, I feel his presence like a second skin.
Like the strings he tied to my limbs are humming beneath the surface.
I pace. I try not to look at the front door, but I keep glancing anyway, waiting for another package, another message, another childhood relic left like a blade on the welcome mat. I press my palm flat to the wall and breathe.
There’s this memory trying to surface. It’s sticky.
Flickering. Half-familiar. A chapel. A humming sound.
My body knows the tune but not the words.
I was so small. So breakable. Knees tucked under a wooden pew.
Dust floating through sunlight like gold ash.
The scent of wax and something sharper. Metallic.
And someone behind me. A boy. Or maybe a shadow.
He never spoke. Not once. But he watched.
He listened. And he was angry. I remember that.
Not his face. Not his name. Just the rage in the way he sat beside me.
Like the air was poison and he was breathing it to survive.
And I think—I think—he was the first person who ever noticed that something was wrong.
The first person who looked at me and didn’t flinch. Didn’t lie. Didn’t try to save me with Sunday smiles and silenced hymns. He just sat there. Breathing the same poisoned air.
A whisper pulls from my throat before I know what it means.
“…were you him?”
My voice is barely audible. It ghosts into the hall, fragile and unanswered. I’m not even sure if I want to know.
Because if it was Damien—if he was there—if he saw what was done and still let me forget—then the web is tighter than I thought. Thicker. Blacker. Older.
I turn. And he’s there. Standing in the hallway, half in shadow, like he was carved from the space between blinks. His arms hang at his sides. No tension. No threat. Just that look. Like I said something I wasn’t supposed to.
“Were you him?” I whisper again, louder this time. “In the chapel.”
His jaw clenches, slow and silent. And then he walks toward me. Each step deliberate. Like he’s choosing not to run.
“I watched you before I knew what watching meant,” he says quietly. Not a yes. Not a no.
“But—was it you?” I push, my voice breaking. “Did you sit next to me?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he lifts one hand. Fingers graze the side of my neck, just enough to remind me he’s still the one in control.
“I used to count your ribs when you slept,” he says, voice low, viciously soft.
“In that little dorm bed with the sheets that never fit. I’d sit behind the broken wall panel and wait for the priest to leave.
Then I’d climb out and press my ear to the floorboards just to hear if you were still breathing. ”
I go still. The room tilts.
“Why?” I breathe.
His eyes meet mine. And there’s something there I don’t want to name. Something too soft to be safe. Too broken to be whole.
“Because he wanted you,” Damien says, each word slower than the last. “And I knew if he got to you, he’d never stop.”
My lungs turn to ice.
“You knew what he was doing to you?” I ask. My voice cracks in the middle. “Even then?”
His expression doesn’t change. “I didn’t have a name for it,” he says. “But I knew how it felt.” He leans in closer. Too close. “And I knew I’d rather burn than watch him hurt you the way he hurt me.”
My knees give out. He catches me before I hit the ground, hands gripping my waist like a vice, like an anchor.
But I don’t cry. I just stare at him. Because the memories are clicking now.
The boy with the moths. The eyes in the dark.
The way the candles used to flicker even when the windows were closed.
He was there. He saw me. And maybe that’s why he can’t let go now. Because he never did.
His hands don’t loosen. They stay on my waist like iron, fingers trembling just enough to betray the rest of him.
Up close like this, he doesn’t smell like danger. He smells like soap and gun oil and the faintest trace of candle wax that shouldn’t still be on his skin but is.
He’s looking at me the way he used to in the dark—silent, waiting, hungry—but now there’s something else behind it. Something like guilt. Something like prayer. Something that makes my stomach clench because it feels like a confession without words.
“You’re shaking,” he says quietly.
I don’t tell him I can’t stop. I don’t tell him it’s not from fear. Instead, I stare at the floor where the shadows cut across our feet like black water.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” My voice breaks on the last word. “Why didn’t you tell me you were there?”
His thumb brushes a line across my hipbone, a slow, absent stroke that feels too intimate to be an accident.
“Because you didn’t remember,” he says. “And if you didn’t remember, then you were safe from it.”
I choke on a laugh that isn’t really a laugh. “Safe?”
He leans in until his forehead almost touches mine, his breath a shudder against my lips. “Safer than me,” he whispers.
The room tilts. I want to ask what he means.
I want to ask what he did. But the look in his eyes stops me.
It’s not just hunger. It’s history. It’s something feral that’s been starving for years and finally found food.
He strokes a thumb along my throat and I hate that my body still arches into it, still opens for him, still responds even as my brain flashes with images I can’t quite place.
“I used to watch you hum,” he murmurs. “You were so small you couldn’t even reach the candle wicks but you still tried to light them. You didn’t know it, but the sound kept me from…from breaking.” He swallows hard. “I was already gone,” he says. “But you made me wait to disappear.”
My chest tightens until it hurts. I press my hands against his shoulders but don’t push him away.
“I don’t remember,” I whisper.
“I know,” he says, and there’s no triumph in it. Only a low, aching resignation. “But your body does.”
The words land like a slap. Because it’s true.
Every time he touches me, something in me reacts before I think.
I close my eyes. Images flicker—dusty stained glass, moth wings beating against old wood, a hand reaching through a hole in the wall, a breath on the back of my neck. But the faces stay blank. Always blank.
When I open my eyes, Damien’s still watching me. “You’re not crazy,” he says softly. “You just don’t remember what we crawled out of.”
My heart stutters. “What did we crawl out of?”
He doesn’t answer. He just looks at me like the question is a blade pressed to his tongue. And for the first time since I met him, I think I see the boy again. Not the man. Not the monster. Just the boy. The one who watched me hum to keep himself alive.
I reach up, fingertips grazing his jaw. He flinches. Not away. Just a twitch, like a reflex he can’t suppress.
“You don’t have to be him anymore,” I whisper.
His eyes close. “I don’t know how to stop,” he says, voice raw. “I don’t know who I am without it.”
The admission cuts through me deeper than any threat. And in the silence that follows, I realise something else: The real danger isn’t just the man at our door. It’s the past Damien dragged inside with him.
“Why did you come back for me?”
The question slips out like a secret, too quiet, too slow, like I’m afraid of what it might open. He stills. Completely. His hand pauses mid-stroke against my waist, breath caught, shoulders tensed like I just asked him to dig up a body he swore he’d buried.
I don’t fill the silence. I let it stretch—taut, electric, unbearable—until it hurts to breathe. Because I need to know. Because I have to know. Because I can’t keep letting him touch me like I belong to him if I don’t understand why the fuck he came back to ruin me.
“Damien.” My voice cracks. “Why now?”
He lifts his head, and something in his eyes fractures. Not a crack. A shatter.
“I didn’t come back for you,” he says hoarsely. “I never left.”
My stomach drops. “What?”
“I watched you graduate. I followed you when you moved. I’ve been in every city. Every street. I stood across the road while you kissed men who didn’t know your name, who didn’t deserve to fucking breathe the same air as you.”
I go cold. My lips part—but no sound comes out.
“I waited,” he says, the words grinding from his throat like they cost blood.
“I waited until you smiled without looking over your shoulder. Until you slept without locking the closet door. Until I thought maybe you’d forgotten what it felt like to be hunted.
” He leans closer. His voice drops to a growl. “But you were still humming.”
The back of my neck prickles.
“I heard it,” he breathes. “In a video. In the background, barely audible. The same tune. Same cadence. You didn’t even know you were doing it.
” His voice lowers like he’s ashamed of what he’s about to admit.
“That’s when I knew you weren’t safe. Because you only ever hummed like that when you were trying to drown something out. ”
My throat tightens.
“And I knew,” he says, “that if he found you first, he’d take what I’d never forgive myself for losing.”