Chapter 14
DAMIEN
Iknow that sound.
I know it with the same ancestral, bone-deep familiarity that I know the ragged cadence of her breath when she’s caught in the throes of a nightmare. I know it the way I know the exact frequency of her voice when she’s hovering on the jagged edge of a scream she’s too terrified to release.
A floorboard. In the back.
It’s the same fucking creak it used to make twenty years ago when I was a shadow-child hiding in the crawlspaces, trying to become part of the architecture so the devil wouldn’t notice me.
My fingers twitch, a lethal, instinctive itch for a trigger I haven’t pulled yet. I step in front of her before she can even process the shift in the air. It’s just one step, but it’s a declaration of war.
Because if this is the kind of game I think it is—if the ghosts have finally grown skin and bones—then she’s the prize, and I’m the only fucking obstacle left standing between him and his masterpiece.
I don’t draw my weapon. Not yet. I don’t need to; my body is already a weapon, honed by a decade of looking over my shoulder. The chapel goes unnervingly still, the silence thickening until it feels like pressurised water.
The air warps, a distortion of heat and cold that makes my skin crawl. The candle by the altar flickers sideways, a violent, sudden snap of the flame as if the breath of something invisible just passed through the aisle.
Behind me, I hear her shift. Her heartbeat is a frantic, uneven rhythm against the small of my back—quick, unsteady, echoing the panic of a girl who doesn’t remember this place the way I do.
She doesn’t remember the copper tang of blood soaking into the floorboards or the way these walls echo with prayers that were never answered.
Another sound. Softer this time. Like heavy cloth dragging across ancient, splintered wood.
I scan the pews, my eyes cutting through the gloom. They are empty, skeletal, and rotting. But the confessional isn’t. I track the velvet curtain; it’s open half an inch wider than it was when we stepped into this tomb.
“Don’t move,” I whisper to her. My voice is lower than usual, frayed at the edges, sounding like iron dragged over stone. She doesn’t respond, but I can feel her eyes on my back like a second skin, her trust a weight I’m not sure I deserve to carry.
I walk toward the confessional, my boots hitting the floor with a hollow, rhythmic thud.
I’ve walked this path before. I’ve walked it covered in the bruises he gave me as ‘blessings.’ I’ve walked it after being told that confession was the only thing that would set my soul free from the ‘sin’ of wanting to protect her.
I’ve walked it dragging my own blood behind me like a wedding veil.
The brass handle is ice-cold. I reach out, my hand hovering, when a moth lands on the dark wood. It’s huge, obsidian-black, its wings dusted with a fine, grey powder that looks like human ash. It flutters once, a desperate, silent spasm, and then goes still.
My fingers curl around the heavy velvet of the curtain. I pull.
And there’s nothing. No body. No priest. No ghost.
Just a mirror. A single, jagged shard of glass, larger than my hand, tied with a length of crimson thread to the wooden seat where the penitent would kneel.
My chest goes still. My lungs refuse to expand. Because I know this thread. He used to tie a piece of it around his wrist when he talked to me through the slats, a scarlet reminder. He used to tell me it meant he belonged to God.
I take the shard, the edges biting into my skin. There’s something written on the back, scratched into the silvering with a frantic, precise hand.
“You watched her too.”
My stomach clenches into a hard, cold knot.
Because I did. Before I ever touched her, before I ever learned the sweet, broken music of her name, I was a voyeur of her grief.
I watched her through the chapel slats when she came in late to pray, her small shoulders shaking.
I watched her tuck her rosary into her pocket like a secret.
I watched her light candles with hands that trembled for a god that wasn’t listening.
I watched her the exact same way he watched me.
Suddenly, the world tilts. I don’t know who the fuck this message is from. I hear her step behind me, the floorboard groaning under her slight weight. I turn, just slightly, my pulse hammering in my throat.
Her voice is soft, fractured. “Damien?”
I don’t speak. I can’t. Because if I say one word, the dam will break. She’ll know. She’ll know what I did. She’ll know that my ‘protection’ started as an obsession born in the dark. She’ll know who I used to be and how deep the rot actually goes.
She’ll know I’m not the only one who’s been watching her all this time.
The shard digs into my palm until it cuts, a sharp, clean sting that anchors me to the present. I don’t let go. The pain is a tether; it reminds me what’s real.
I close my fingers around the glass, feeling the warm slick of my own blood, and slip it into my jacket pocket before she can see the jagged script.
If she reads those words now, she’ll start asking questions I’m not ready to answer—questions that would burn this place down before I’m finished with it.
Her footsteps creak closer. She’s approaching me like I’m a wild animal she isn’t sure she can tame.
“Damien?” Her voice is softer, a plea for the man she thinks she knows. “What did you find?”
“Nothing,” I lie. The word tastes like ash. My voice doesn’t sound like the man who pinned her to the table an hour ago; it sounds like the boy behind the wall, whispering so the priest couldn’t hear. Thin. Raw. Broken.
I can feel her eyes boring into my spine. She doesn’t believe me, but she doesn’t push. The air shifts again, bringing that stagnant smell of wax, iron, and ancient, unwashed sin. This chapel is a trap built of our own memories, a machine designed to grind us back into the children we were.
I move to the center aisle, my eyes darting between the pews, looking for the other watcher—the one who left the moth, the shard, the red thread. He isn’t here now. I can feel the void where a presence should be. This was a calling card. A dare.
Raven moves until she’s at my side. Her fingers brush my sleeve, a whisper of contact that shoots through me like a high-voltage current.
“Tell me the truth,” she says quietly.
I stare at the altar, at the moth nailed there like a pinned, silent prayer.
“I’ve been here before,” I say, the confession tearing out of me.
“I know,” she whispers.
“No.” My voice is flat, devoid of emotion to keep the rage from leaking out. “Not the way you think.”
Her brows knit together, her face a mask of beautiful confusion. “Then how?”
I finally look at her, and the snap happens—that violent jolt in my chest, the breaking of a seal I’ve kept for ten years.
“I watched you through the wall.”
Her lips part, but no sound comes out.
“I counted with you,” I continue, my voice rough, sounding like glass scraping against a rusted pipe.
“Every night he came near you, I whispered numbers through the drywall to keep you breathing. I passed you food when he wasn’t looking.
I tried to stop him, Raven. I thought if I could just keep you hidden long enough, someone would come for us. ”
I drag a hand down my face, my skin cold. “No one came.”
The tremor in my hands is visible now. The mask is gone, shattered on the floor of this godforsaken place.
“I wanted to take you away,” I murmur, the words a confession I never meant to make. “But they dragged me back. They locked me in the basement for trying to reach you. I thought you left me. I thought you chose to walk out that door and leave me in the dark.”
Her eyes glisten with unshed tears. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know you were even—”
“I know,” I cut in, my voice sharp but trembling. “I know you didn’t know. But back then, it didn’t feel like a mistake. It felt like you walked away.”
I step closer, crowding her until she’s backed up against the cold, hard edge of the altar. I bracket her hips with my hands—not to restrain her, but to anchor myself before I spin out of control.
“That’s why I came back for you,” I whisper, my breath hot against her forehead. “Because even if you forgot me, I never fucking forgot you.”
Her breath catches, a small, hitching sound.
“I’m not letting him take you,” I growl. “Not him. Not anyone. Not again.”
I lean in until our foreheads touch, the world narrowing down to the scent of her and the rot of the chapel.
“He’s in these walls somewhere, Raven. And I’m going to tear this place apart until I drag him out.”
She shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t be touching the air I used to breathe when I was nothing but a boy with scraped knees and a heart full of terror.
She shouldn’t be running her fingers along the rotted wood of the pew like it means something—like this place isn’t soaked in every scream I never let out.
I watch her, backlit by the jagged stained glass, bathed in the soft, sickly rot of incense and mildew. And I think: Mine. Not with the clinical restraint I used to practice. This is different. This is unhinged.
Because she remembers the smell. Because she stood in this same corner when we were children, and she doesn’t even know it. Because she lit the candles when I was too broken to move. Because the priest looked at her too—but I took her first.
My jaw clenches until it clicks. She doesn’t notice; she’s staring at the secret altar the priest built behind the main one. The one intended for a different kind of sacrifice.
She tilts her head. “Why is there a second—”
“Don’t.” My voice is a whip-crack. She flinches.
I move like a monster taught manners, closing the space in three predatory steps. I grab her wrist and press it against my chest, hard, so she can feel the war-drum rhythm of my heart.
“You want to know why I came back?” I murmur, my voice a gravelly rasp.
She swallows, her pulse visible in her neck. “Yes.”