Chapter 20
RAVEN
The air tastes of iron and old, exhaled prayers.
I don’t know how long I’ve been under, but the moment consciousness begins to claw its way back, something snaps.
It isn’t a sound from the vaulted ceiling above, but a fracture inside my own ribs.
My body understands the threat before my brain can find the words for it; instinct is a live wire screaming through my blood, sparking against the cold.
Damien isn’t here.
I sit up, the movement too fast, sending a dizzying surge of vertigo through my skull.
My heartbeat is a thunderous, erratic percussion in my ears.
My fingers graze the velvet of the pew—I can still feel the ghost of his heat lingering in the fabric, a vanishing thumbprint of safety that makes the encroaching cold feel like a stranger slipping through a cracked door.
He wouldn’t leave me. Not after the altar. Not after the way he looked at me, like I was the only thing keeping him anchored to the earth. Not again.
“Damien?” I whisper. The name is brittle, a hollow thing that the chapel’s silence devours instantly.
I stand, my legs feeling like they’re made of glass. The floorboards creak beneath my bare feet, a sharp, accusing sound in the gloom. That’s when the reality of the lapse hits me: I never put my shoes back on. I never intended to fall asleep. In this place, sleep isn’t rest—it’s a surrender.
I move toward the centre aisle, but a flicker of light catches the corner of my eye.
A single candle is burning on a cracked pillar near the transept.
It’s tall, tallow-thick, and we didn’t light it.
Crimson wax drips down the stone like slow, arterial trails, and tucked into the cooling pool at its base is a white moth.
Its wings are spread wide—perfect, still, and dead.
A pinned specimen for a god who stopped listening a long time ago.
I take a frantic step back.
The Great Doors slam shut.
The boom rips through the nave, vibrating in my marrow like a gunshot.
Before the echo can die, hands find me. They are rough, encased in heavy leather gloves.
One palm clamps over my mouth, stifling the scream before it can leave my throat, while the other arm wraps around my waist like an iron band.
He yanks me backward, hauling me against a chest that is broader than Damien’s, taller, and entirely wrong.
This isn’t him. This is a mountain of shadow and malice.
I thrash, my heels catching on the stone, my teeth searching for skin through the leather, but I’m being dragged. I catch a final, strobe-light glimpse of the altar—the flickering flame, the dead moth, the velvet where I’d felt safe—and then the world narrows.
The scream dies against his palm. My breath comes in short, stabbing bursts as I’m hauled through a side exit I didn’t know existed—a priest’s hole hidden behind the pulpit.
We descend into a corridor carved directly into the damp earth beneath the foundation.
It smells of ancient mildew and the sharp, cloying rot of things that have never seen the sun.
His grip is a vice. My head slams against the low stone lintel as we emerge, and the world begins to swim in shades of grey.
When I blink again, the biting winter air hits my skin like a slap. Moonlight flashes against a sliver of glass and steel in his free hand. Not a blade. A syringe.
I try to scream again, a muffled, useless vibration against his hand.
“Shhh.”
The voice is low. Calm. It has the cadence of something familiar, but the pitch is warped, like an actor struggling to imitate a role they haven’t played in years. The needle plunges into the side of my neck, a cold invasion of my veins.
And then, the dark.
Darkness doesn’t arrive with a shutter-click; it leaks in. It presses at the edges of my vision like rising water finding the cracks in a levee. Even as my mind slips, my body continues the fight, my muscles twitching in a futile protest against the sedation.
I come back in pieces. Sound arrives first—the rhythmic, hollow drip of water on stone. Then sensation—the agonising burn in my wrists.
I’m tied. Not with the heavy steel of Damien’s cuffs, but with old, abrasive rope that bites into the skin already sensitised by the altar. My head throbs with a deep, nauseating pulse that makes the world tilt.
I breathe. The air is damp and stagnant. Underground.
The stone floor presses into my spine, and the smell is an assault—mildew, dust, and a sharp chemical undertone that stings the back of my throat.
I try to shift my weight, but the ropes are unyielding.
Panic surges, hot and frantic, clawing at my chest, but I force it down.
I learned the geometry of a cage a long time ago.
Panic makes noise. Noise invites the monster.
I open my eyes.
The room is a tomb of grey stone, lit by a single, naked bulb hanging from a frayed wire. It sways in a phantom draft, casting distorted shadows that stretch across the walls like grasping fingers. No windows. One heavy metal door.
And him.
He is standing a few feet away, his back to me.
His shoulders are a broad silhouette beneath a dark hood that swallows his head.
Black fabric, gloved hands, no skin visible.
He moves with a terrifying, clinical calm, as if time has ceased to exist outside these walls.
As if he knows the world has already forgotten I’m here.
My throat constricts. I don’t scream. I refuse to give him the satisfaction of my terror.
“Where am I?” I whisper.
He doesn’t turn. “That depends,” he says. His voice is filtered, a low, modulated rasp that makes my stomach turn. It isn’t electronic; it sounds intentional, like a man reshaping his own vocal cords to hide a ghost. “On how much you choose to remember.”
Ice slides through my marrow. “I don’t know who you think I am,” I say, my voice gaining a desperate edge of steel.
A soft sound escapes the hood. Not laughter—something far more chilling. Amusement. “You’re exactly who I think you are, Raven.”
He turns then, slowly. The hood keeps his features in a well of shadow, but I can feel his gaze crawling over me like spiders. He crouches in front of me, close enough that I can smell the scent of his clothes—expensive soap, clean and sharp, an incongruous smell for a dungeon.
“You always were good at playing small,” he says. “The quiet one. The forgettable one.” My heart hammers against my ribs. “You learned that lesson early, didn’t you?”
I shake my head, my hair sticking to the sweat on my forehead. “You have the wrong person.”
“No,” he says softly. “I have the right version.”
He reaches out, not to touch me, but to lift a weathered object from the floor. A notebook.
My stomach drops into a void. It’s old, the corners curled and yellowed, the cover mottled with dark stains. He flips it open, turning the pages so the swinging bulb illuminates the contents.
Drawings. Moths. Hundreds of them. Ragged wings, heavy bodies, over and over in frantic charcoal lines.
My breath stutters. I never told Damien about the drawings. I never told anyone about the things I sketched in the dark when the house was silent and the air felt heavy with eyes.
“You remember these,” he says, watching my face instead of the book. “You used to draw them when you couldn’t sleep. When you were waiting for the door to creak open.”
My mouth opens, but the air in the room has turned to lead. I can’t speak.
He closes the notebook with a soft thud and stands, looming over me until his shadow swallows me whole. “Don’t worry. I’m not here to hurt you, Raven.”
My stomach churns. In my experience, that sentence is the herald of a different kind of agony.
“I’m here to finish something.”
The bulb flickers, a brief strobe of light hitting his hands as he adjusts the fit of his gloves. In that second of clarity, I see it—letters stitched into the dark leather of his inner wrist. They are crooked, uneven, the work of a hand that prioritised the message over the craft.
OBEDIENT.
My vision swims. The past is no longer a memory; it’s a living thing, breathing in the corner of the room.
“No,” I whisper. “Please.”
“Please is a memory,” he replies, his voice a velvet threat. “And memories are exactly what we’re working on.”
The metal door behind him groans open, light spilling in from a corridor that looks like it belongs in a hospital or a morgue. He steps back into the glare, leaving me tied and trembling on the cold stone.
“He’s going to remember too,” he says, the filtered voice echoing off the walls.
The door slams shut, the sound final and absolute.
I’m alone. I can feel the ropes biting, the dampness of the floor, and the terrifying realisation that the map of my life has just been redrawn. I know Damien is coming. I can feel the pull of him, the inevitable collision of our twin traumas.
But I also know that when he kicks that door down, he won’t be saving the girl he thinks he knows. He’ll be stepping into the mouth of the same nightmare that broke us both.