Chapter 13
RAVEN
The door clicks shut before my brain catches up, the heavy, final thud of the deadbolt echoing through the cavernous apartment like a sentence being passed.
One heartbeat he’s in front of me—shirt half-buttoned, the tactical gun strap biting into the broad curve of his chest, eyes full of every dark thing he won’t say out loud. He looked like a man preparing for his own execution and welcoming it.
The next heartbeat he’s gone.
The silence left behind is a blade. It hums against my skin, a cold, vibrating resonance sharp enough to slice through the lingering haze of sex and memory and everything else he’s poured into me.
The room still tastes of him—of sweat, salt, and the metallic tang of obsession—but the air is already beginning to freeze.
I should be shaking. I should be hiding.
Instead, I’m moving.
I cross the floor, my bare feet silent against the polished wood, passing the flickering glow of the monitors to the exact spot where he stood.
The floorboards are still warm with his heat.
He thinks he can leave me behind in this glass-walled cage.
He thinks he can go back to that place alone and fight ghosts with bullets.
He thinks I’m still the girl who hummed under the pew and counted cracks in the plaster to survive the sound of heavy footsteps.
He’s wrong.
Because even if I don’t remember everything, my body does.
It’s written in the white-knuckle grip I have on the table.
My body knows the cloying, suffocating smell of beeswax, dust, and copper-scented blood.
My body knows the boy who counted with me through the drywall.
My body knows the chapel before my mind even dares to name it.
And my body is already moving before I can talk myself out of the madness.
I yank on my jeans, the denim rough against my hypersensitive skin, and shove my feet into boots.
My fingers shake as I pull a jacket over my shoulders, but the tremor isn’t born from fear.
It’s born from a searing anger, from a hunger I don’t recognise, and from the sick, twisting need to see the look on his face when he realises he isn’t the only one who can cross a line into the dark.
On the table, the monitor flickers again, a seizure of static that clears to reveal the chapel interior.
The hooded figure raises his head for the first time, a slow, predatory movement.
The face is still swallowed by shadows, but I feel the weight of his stare through the lens like a physical hand pressing against the back of my neck.
I swallow hard, my throat dry as parchment. I reach under the edge of the table, grab the black-bladed knife Damien left behind, and slide it into my pocket. The weight of it is a grim comfort.
“I’m not a piece of bait,” I whisper to the empty, echoing room. “And I’m not staying.”
My phone buzzes in my palm. A message. No number. No name. Just three words that make the world tilt on its axis.
COME TOO.
My stomach flips, a violent lurch of nausea. My vision blurs for a second, the apartment tilting like a sinking ship. He didn’t just call Damien home. He called me.
Another flicker in my memory—not a clear image, but a sensory assault. The cloying sweetness of incense. A gloved hand over my mouth, smelling of leather and antiseptic. A whisper that felt like a razor against my ear: We’ll finish later.
I press my palms to the table and breathe through the panic until the tremor in my chest steadies into a hard, rhythmic thud.
Then I move.
Out of the apartment. Down the hall, where the fluorescent lights hum like a warning.
Past the elevator, down the stairs two at a time, my boots echoing like a drumbeat.
My heart is pounding against my ribs, but my steps are sure, guided by an instinct that’s been dormant for a decade.
I’m not going to sit here and wait to be saved or stolen like a prize.
If the chapel is where it started, it’s where it ends.
Damien wants to be the monster between me and the dark? Fine.
But tonight, he’s going to find out I’m not the same girl he left behind in the dust.
The streets feel different tonight. Not just quiet. Not just dark. They feel watched, the buildings leaning in like silent witnesses. I keep my hood up and my head down, but I can still feel it—the air is heavier, thicker, like the atmosphere is holding its breath before a storm.
The city lights blur into long, jagged streaks of neon as I move through the outskirts.
I pass shuttered windows and flickering signs that hiss with electricity; I pass the deli with the broken neon cross that stutters in red; I pass the alley where Damien once pressed me up against the cold brick and made me forget how to breathe.
It’s all a memory now. He is a memory now.
But I’m done being a ghost in my own life.
I take the side streets, the narrow, jagged veins of the city. These are the paths I used to run when I was younger, chasing smoke and half-remembered prayers, hoping maybe if I hummed the right song the bad things wouldn’t find me. They did anyway. They always did.
And now I’m going back to the source.
The chapel isn’t on any map. It never was. You don’t find it. It finds you. It’s tucked between the bones of the city, down a path only the broken remember, buried in the rot like a secret God tried to forget.
I see the gate first. Rust-eaten and jagged, bent at the top where someone once tried to climb over and didn’t make it. The lock is gone now, hanging loose and useless. I push it open, the metal shriek piercing the silence, and step through.
The cold hits me instantly. It’s not wind. It’s not the weather. It’s memory. It curls around my ankles and slides up my spine like icy smoke. The further I walk, the more my head spins—like the world is folding time, pressing this moment into every other nightmare I’ve ever had.
The candles. The wood. The whispers. The shoes.
I take one step closer, and the chapel rises in front of me, a skeletal silhouette against the bruised sky. Still standing. Still waiting. Still profoundly wrong.
It’s smaller than I remember. Or maybe I’m just bigger now. Not in height, but in rage. In the hunger to make sense of the carnage. The door is slightly open, a dark mouth waiting to swallow me. My heart stutters, a frantic, uneven rhythm.
I shouldn’t go in. I do anyway.
The hinges moan, a long, drawn-out sound of grief, as I push it open. The smell hits me first—a suffocating mix of dust, old wax, and something sharp, metallic, and old.
I step inside, and the silence screams.
Everything is exactly as I left it in the dark corners of my mind. The pews are scarred, the candle stubs are melted into puddles of grey fat, the stained glass is cracked and weeping.
And on the far side—the altar.
There’s something on it.
I move slow, my breath catching in my throat as I get closer. A moth. Not dead. Not moving. Pinned through the centre of its wings with a rusted, jagged nail.
My knees go weak. Because I know this moth. I remember the pattern on the wings, like a distorted face. He used to catch them for me in the crawlspaces.
Before he whispered my name behind the pew. Before he taught me how to count to keep the shadows away. Before he begged me not to leave.
A sound behind me. Footsteps.
I spin, my hand diving for the knife. “Damien?”
But it’s not him.
It’s a boy. A boy who isn’t a boy anymore. A figure standing in the aisle—taller now, broader, a hoodie pulled low to hide his features. His face is half-shadowed by the flickering light of the few candles still burning.
I know that shape. That heavy, weighted silence. That stare that feels like a physical brand.
My hand moves to my pocket, gripping the hilt. Knife. Just in case.
The figure tilts his head, a bird-like, inquisitive movement. And then—he laughs.
Not loud. Not manic. Just soft. Cruel. Like he’s been waiting for me to catch up to the punchline.
My blood goes cold. Because in the flicker of the candlelight… he looks exactly like Damien. But not the man I just left. Not the monster who fucks me like he wants to break me. Not the protector. Not the predator.
This one is younger. This one is something else entirely.
I blink, stepping back, the wood of the pew biting into my hip. The moth on the altar shifts as a draft hits it. And I remember. A hand over my mouth. A whisper against my ear. You can’t leave if I keep you.
The boy steps forward. And I finally understand—I didn’t just forget him.
I left him here to rot.
The air tastes like dust and iron. Every breath is a scrape down my throat.
He takes another step toward me and the floorboards creak under his weight, a sound so small it shouldn’t be terrifying, but it is, because it’s the same rhythm from my nightmares—step, pause, whisper, step.
I want to run. I want to scream. But my feet stay planted and my voice stays caught somewhere behind my teeth.
“You’re not real,” I say, but the words are too quiet, too unsure to hold any power.
The hooded head tilts a little more, like a predator listening for the heartbeat of its prey.
Candlelight slides across a sharp jawline, a mouth, a flash of pale skin, and my stomach turns because it’s so wrong and yet so right at the same time.
Damien’s shape, Damien’s stillness, but not Damien’s eyes.
The figure stops a few paces away. Hands in the pockets of the hoodie. Shoulders relaxed. Like he’s been standing in this aisle for twenty years.
“You left me,” he says. Not a shout. Not a growl. Just a statement. Calm. Flat. Devastatingly young.
My fingers curl tighter around the knife in my pocket until the hilt bites into my palm. I don’t remember putting it there. I don’t remember taking it out.
“I don’t know who you are,” I whisper.
“You do.” A slight, chilling smile. “You just don’t want to.”