Chapter 14 #2
I drag her hand lower, past my belt, pressing her palm against the heat of me. “Because I never left you. I stayed in this fucking chapel, Raven. I stayed right here.”
I slam her palm against the altar, covering her hand with mine, pinning her to the wood. “I waited for you to remember me. To come back.”
“I didn’t know—”
“No. You forgot.” I crowd her, my body a wall of heat. She’s trembling, but she doesn’t pull away.
“You think I watched you in that dorm just for fun?” My breath skates over her neck, raising goosebumps. “You think I wanted to ruin you because it was easy?”
She’s breathing hard now, her chest heaving. I graze her throat with my mouth, tasting the salt of her skin.
“I did it because you were already mine. You were always mine.”
I twist her around, pressing her stomach flat against the altar, and yank her hips back into mine. The wood is cold, but the friction between us is a bonfire. “No one else gets to touch what should’ve died here.”
I shove her skirt up, my movements rough, fuelled by twenty years of starvation.
“This place took everything from me,” I whisper, my lips against her ear. “But not you.”
I palm her bare skin, spreading her wide, watching her own slickness coat my fingers with a single, possessive stroke.
“No panties, little spider?”
She can’t answer. I grab her jaw, twisting her head so she’s forced to look at me. “Say it.”
“No…”
“No what?”
“No one else gets to touch me.”
“That’s fucking right.”
I slam into her without warning, a brutal, deep entry that claims every inch of her. She screams, but it isn’t pain—it’s the sound of a soul recognising its owner. It’s relief. It’s release. It’s mine.
I don’t fuck her gently. Not here. Not where he watched me bleed and prayed over me like it was a favour.
I fuck her like she’s the punishment and the prayer, fast and violent.
I bend her forward until her chest hits the wood, one hand tangled in her hair, the other gripping her hip like she might vanish if I let go for a single second.
“I came back because no matter how many girls I touched, none of them screamed like you did in your sleep,” I snarl against her skin.
She arches for me, her body a desperate plea.
“You begged for me back then. You just didn’t know it.”
I yank her up so her spine curves against my chest, and I sink my teeth into the junction of her neck and shoulder, marking her in the flickering light. She cries out, pretty and broken, and I growl, “I’ll never let you leave me again.”
I feel her walls flutter around me, a rhythmic squeezing that threatens my control. I slow down, but not to be kind. I want to torture her with the sensation.
“You want to cum in the house that tried to kill me?” I murmur. “You better bleed for it.”
She whimpers, a broken sound that fuels the fire. I slap her clit once, hard, and she bucks wildly against me. Again. Again. Her whole body spasming in a desperate search for the edge.
But I don’t let her. Not yet.
“Tell me,” I breathe. “Why are you mine?”
“Because—because you saved me,” she sobs, her head lolling back. “You kept me.”
I snap my hips forward, burying myself to the hilt, and growl into her throat. “You think I saved you?”
I kiss her—deep, filthy, my tongue claiming hers.
I sink my teeth into the sensitive curve of her shoulder, my pulse a violent thrum against her skin, and as the chapel shadows stretch like reaching fingers toward us, I lean in.
My lips graze the shell of her ear, my voice dropping into that rhythmic, hypnotic cadence—the one that used to vibrate through the drywall between our rooms when the world was nothing but darkness and fear.
I whisper the words that were once our only tether to reality, the words the priest used to murmur as he walked the halls to ensure we were still “devout” in our silence.
“The moth is silent, the flame is cold, but the counting never stops until the story is told.”
Then, I drop my voice even lower, into a rasping, guttural count that bypasses her ears and goes straight to the trauma buried in her marrow.
“One for the lock. Two for the key. Three for the boy who will never be free.”
The effect is instantaneous.
It’s as if I’ve shoved a live wire into her brain. The arch of her back turns to stone. Her hands, which had been clawing at the altar wood, go limp. The very air around us seems to curdling, the smell of incense suddenly replaced by the sharp, suffocating stench of a basement with no light.
I feel her mind fracture and reset in the span of a single heartbeat. The “Raven” I’ve been hunting—the one who forgot—is gone. In her place is the little girl who used to press her ear to the cold plaster and wait for my voice to save her from the sound of the priest’s footsteps.
She doesn’t just remember the words. She remembers the weight of the hand that used to cover her mouth. She remembers the way I used to cry through the wall when I couldn’t reach her.
She pulls away from me, not in disgust, but in a state of total, soul-shattering shock. Her eyes are wide, glassy, reflecting the flickering candle flames like two dying stars.
“Damien,” she whispers, and for the first time, it’s not a question. It’s a recognition of the monster I became to keep her alive.
Then the first sob breaks, a jagged, raw sound that echoes off the rotted rafters of the chapel.