Chapter 15
RAVEN
The chapel is too quiet.
It isn’t a peaceful silence, the kind that invites prayer or contemplation; it’s a predatory stillness. The kind of silence that doesn’t settle—it stalks, pacing the aisles and clinging to the shadows of the vaulted ceiling like a physical weight.
I should be cold. I should be afraid. Every survival instinct I own should be screaming at me to run, to vanish into the night before the stone walls finish swallowing me whole. But instead, I watch him.
Damien.
He is kneeling at the altar like the beautiful, fractured sinner he is, his spine a rigid line of tension that threatens to snap.
His hands are trembling where they rest against the weathered edge of the wood, his veins flexed and pulsing like he’s physically holding something in—some ancient, tectonic scream he never got to release.
His shirt is undone, the fabric slipping off one shoulder to reveal the topographical map of his history; scarred skin catches the flickering amber light like old wounds are still whispering their secrets to the dark.
He looks like a fallen angel waiting for the floor to open up and drag him back to hell.
And I want to follow him there. I want to burn in whatever fire he’s stoking.
I take a single step forward, and the creak of the ancient chapel floorboards is an explosion in the stillness—far louder than it should be. It startles both of us, a jagged tear in the fabric of the night.
His head turns slightly, the movement sharp and bird-like, but he doesn’t look at me. Not yet.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he mutters, his voice sounding like it was dragged over gravel.
“But you came back for me.” I say it like an accusation. Like a challenge. Like a prayer whispered in a language only we speak.
He breathes out through his nose, a slow, dangerous exhale. “Don’t confuse that with mercy, Raven.”
“I’m not.” I take another step, closing the distance until I can smell the smoke and the salt on him. “I’m confusing it with obsession.”
That gets his attention.
He rises slowly, a predator uncoiling, and when his eyes finally find mine, they don’t soften.
They burn with a dark, suffocating intensity.
I know that look now. I know what it means when his pupils dilate until the iris is just a thin ring of fire.
I know what it means when his jaw sets and his tongue slips over his bottom lip like he’s already imagining the metallic tang of my skin if I bled for him.
“You think I’m obsessed?” he asks, his voice hoarse, the words dragging heavy chains of confession behind them.
“I know you are.”
He stalks forward—measured, quiet, terrifying. He moves like a wolf in a sanctuary, too aware of the holy rules he is about to desecrate.
“You want me to fuck you on this altar, little spider?” he whispers. His hand curls around the side of my throat—not choking, not yet, just there. A possessive, unapologetic brand. “You want to make this place even more cursed than it already is?”
“I want to know what you came back for.”
“I told you.” His breath hits my lips, hot and smelling of desperate truths. “I burned for you.”
He pulls me in, his mouth crashing into mine with a violence that feels like punishment. He’s punishing me for ever leaving. For ever forgetting the boy in the shadows. For making him need me this much.
His hands are under my shirt before I can even draw a full breath.
Fabric tears—a sharp, shrill sound—and the wood of the altar creaks behind me as he lifts me, laying me flat against the cold stone.
It’s all too fast, a blur of heat and muscle, but I don’t stop him. I never do. I crave the ruin he offers.
“You think I came back for closure?” he growls against my throat, dragging his teeth down the sensitive line of my collarbone. “You think I’m here to give you answers, Raven?”
“I think you’re here to ruin me.”
He rips the rest of my clothes away, the silk falling like discarded skin.
“Not ruin,” he whispers, his mouth hovering at my hip. “Claim.”
And when his body presses over mine—heat and iron and violence barely caged—I know we’re not praying anymore. We’re sinning. Loudly. Desperately. And I’m going to let him tear the world down around us.
His mouth is everywhere. Sinful. Unholy. Reverent.
He kisses like a curse, like my skin is stained with every fucked-up fantasy he’s buried in the dark corners of his mind. The altar beneath my back is ice-cold, a stark contrast to the furnace of his body pressing down on me—a heat that feels like it’s going to char me from the inside out.
Damien doesn’t touch me like a man. He touches me like something ancient, something that pre-dates the stone and the incense. Like the church never saved him, it only caged him. Like I’m the only god he’s ever truly worshipped.
He slides my legs apart with one hand, his breath catching as he takes in the sight of me laid bare for him on the sacred wood. His thumb grazes the centre of me, where I’m already soaked and trembling, and the sound he makes is low and wrecked—more beast than man.
“All this for me?” he growls, his fingers dragging slow, torturous circles that make my thighs shake uncontrollably. “I haven’t even done anything yet.”
“You came back,” I whisper, my lungs struggling for air. “That was enough.”
His laugh is bitter and beautiful, a jagged shard of sound.
“No,” he says. “It’s not enough. You still don’t fucking remember, do you?”
My heart stutters, missing a beat.
He shifts lower, his lips tracing the sensitive skin of my inner thigh, and I feel his obsession like a brand searing itself into my marrow. Every kiss, every filthy whisper, is a promise to pull me under the waves with him.
“I should leave you here,” he murmurs. “I should walk away. Let whoever’s coming for you have you.”
“You won’t.” My voice cracks, high and fragile. “You can’t.”
“I should.”
But then he pauses—his fingertips still on me, his breath ghosting over the places I need him most—and his eyes flicker with something… haunted. Something old.
“I told you,” he says, his voice distant. “I thought I burned him. Thought the screams meant it was over.”
Screams. Flames. A memory too blurred to grasp, like trying to see through thick smoke.
My breath catches. “You said you were alone.”
“I was. Until you.” His gaze snaps back to mine, wildfire and fury and need all twisted into one. “Until he looked at you.”
My spine arches off the altar, the air stolen from my lungs.
“He looked at me?”
Damien doesn’t answer with words. He answers with teeth. He bites the inside of my thigh—not gentle, not soft—just enough to make me flinch and gasp, to make the sharp edge of pain feel like the ultimate pleasure.
Then his mouth is on me. Hot. Filthy. Relentless.
His tongue moves like it’s trying to erase every trace of the world outside these walls.
Slow at first—teasing, cruel—then fast, devouring, brutal.
One arm wraps tight around my hip, pinning me to the wood as I writhe beneath him, my fingers clawing at the edge of the altar like it’s the only thing tethering me to reality.
I can’t think. I can’t breathe. The moan that rips from my throat doesn’t sound human; it sounds like the chapel itself is crying out.
He groans into me, the vibration rumbling through my bones. “That’s it. Let them fucking hear who you belong to.”
I don’t realise I’m begging until I hear the words spilling out of me—“Please, Damien, please—”
He doesn’t let up. Not when I break. Not when I scream. Not when my back bows so violently my head knocks against the hard stone beneath the wood. He only pulls away once I’m shaking, sweat-slick, and completely unraveled.
He climbs up my body, his mouth glistening in the candlelight, his gaze feral. He kisses me, filthy and deep, letting me taste my own surrender on his tongue.
Then he whispers, “He wanted you, too. That’s why I had to stop him.”
My blood turns to ice. “What?”
His lips brush my ear, his voice a weapon now—sharp, dragging me back through time. “You think you were just another girl in that church? He told me… if I was good, if I let him—watch—then maybe I could have you next.”
My whole body locks. My vision warps. The world begins to tilt.
“No,” I whisper. “That’s not—”
“You don’t remember.” His smile is cracked and cruel. “But your body does.”
And I don’t know if I’m crying or gasping or choking. All I know is that something inside me breaks. Because suddenly, I’m not in the chapel anymore.
I’m there. And he’s watching me remember.
The chapel vanishes. Not in fire or smoke, but in a slow, terrifying pull of a curtain.
Suddenly I’m there again. A hallway, flickering with the ghosts of candlelight. Cold tile biting at my bare feet. That sickly-sweet smell of burning incense and something worse—something rotten, like spoiled wine and dried blood.
I blink, but I can’t wake up. My chest rises in short, sharp bursts. This is a door I locked years ago… and it’s swinging wide.
I see a girl walking ahead of me. Me. A younger version of myself with tangled hair and hollow eyes, wearing a white dress that became seductive only because they told us purity meant obedience. She walks stiffly, trying to disappear inside her own skin so the darkness won’t notice her.
But it always did. He always did.
A hand reaches from a cracked-open door. Thin, dry-skinned fingers curling in a beckoning gesture. I watch my younger self freeze. Her eyes scream.
And then—a shadow. A boy. Damien.
Not the man I know now, but the child he used to be—shoulders tense, jaw locked, fury in his expression. I watch him lunge forward. I watch him shove the man’s arm back and slam the door shut. His voice cracks when he screams, but he fights like he’s made of pure vengeance.
And then he’s dragging me away.
Just before the memory blurs, I see his eyes flick to the candle flames. I see his door. The one the priest used to keep him in. And I know.
He didn’t just burn the man. He tried to burn the memory out of the world.
The vision snaps away like a whip.
I jolt upright with a gasp that tears through my throat. My body is soaked in sweat, the cold air hitting my raw skin.
“Raven.” His voice is tight. I can’t look at him yet.
“He wanted me too,” I whisper, the realisation carving itself into my lungs. “He said I was… special.”
Damien’s silence is an answer.
“You knew,” I say, turning to him.
He looks shattered. Not the obsessive stalker, but just Damien. A boy who grew up in hell and dragged me out before I knew I’d been swallowed.
“I saved a ghost,” he murmurs, his voice splinters. “You weren’t you anymore. And I… I wasn’t me either.”
I reach for him, and his body crumbles against mine.
“Why did you find me again?”
“Because I couldn’t live in a world where you didn’t remember me.”
His confession wraps around my spine like a noose. He’s been drowning in this while I lived a lie.
“Damien, how much do you remember?”
“I remember everything, Raven. I remember the way he looked at you—like he already owned you. I remember the night I set him on fire. I remember thinking if I could just get you out—if I could just keep you safe—I’d survive anything.”
I press my palm to his chest. His heart is racing.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you were already broken. I didn’t want to be the one to remind you of what did it.”
I step closer. “You said I left you. That I walked away.”
“I was a kid, Damien. I didn’t know.”
“I know.” His hands twitch. “But it still felt like betrayal.”
I flinch. I’ve lived my whole life with fractures I couldn’t explain. Maybe I abandoned him in the one place he needed me most.
“Say it,” he breathes. “Say you remember me.”
I meet his eyes—those eyes I’ve feared and followed. “I remember you, Damien.”
He grabs my face, starving for me. “Don’t ever leave me again.”
“I won’t.”
He pulls me back against a stone column, his mouth crashing into mine. It’s not a kiss; it’s a reckoning. A claim. The stained glass rattles as our bodies collide.
“I’m going to ruin you,” he promises, sinking to his knees on the cold stone, his mouth brushing the lace of my skin.
“You already have,” I whisper.
He drags his tongue up the centre of me, slow and possessive. My head hits the pillar. My body shakes. This isn’t love; it’s something older. Darker.
And then, the memory strikes again.
I see the moths. Beating their wings against cracked glass. I see the priest behind me. “God gave you to me, little lamb.”
I’m very still. Very quiet.
But then—the boy in the window shouts.
“HEY!”
Glass shatters. The boy is barefoot, wild-eyed, holding a rock and a broken rosary. Blood runs down his wrist.
“GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM HER!”
The memory cuts. I’m back in the present, panting, Damien’s hands on my face.
“Raven—what did you just see?”
“You were there,” I whisper. “You threw the rock. You saved me.”
Damien says nothing for a long beat. “Because you weren’t supposed to remember. You were supposed to run. To forget every fucking thing. About that night. About me.”
“And look what it fucking cost you,” he growls, his voice ragged.
“I’m not the fucking hero,” he says. “I saw you weren’t gonna scream. So I threw the rock. I wanted to see him bleed. Because I knew what it felt like.”
And there it is. The reason he’s mine. Because long before I ever knew what it felt like to be taken apart—he already was.