Chapter 23
STALKER
She doesn’t remember me. Not yet.
But she will. God, she will. She was never meant to forget—not the window, not the white dress, and especially not the moths. They were the first gift. My calling card. My warning. My promise.
I saw her through that cracked pane before she ever knew what it meant to be seen. I watched the man in the collar tell her lies and write sins in the shape of salvation. I knew he’d try to claim her eventually; that’s what parasites do—they sense the soft ones.
The quiet ones. The ones who try to disappear in plain sight. But she didn’t disappear from me. Even when she tried to. Even when he took her and painted her in chains and called it affection.
I let her go once. Once. And look what he did to her.
I drag the blindfold from her face now, slowly, carefully, as if I’m peeling back a veil that never should have existed.
Her lashes flutter against her cheeks, dark fans against pale skin.
Her lips part on a ghost of a whimper, the sound lost in the thick, stagnant air of the cellar.
She’s drugged, but not gone. Good. I want her to feel the echo of this moment when it returns to her later, when the memory blooms in the back of her throat and chokes her with its familiarity.
She’ll ask herself: Was it real?
She’ll answer herself: It was him.
But she’ll be wrong. Because I’m not the man in her bed. I’m the one who waited. The one who watched her slip through the cracks and held my breath every fucking time she almost shattered. The one who saw what he was becoming and knew—knew—I had to bide my time.
Obsession isn’t about impulse; it’s about timing. And now? The clock is bleeding.
I pace in front of her, hands clasped behind my back.
My black combat boots echo off the stained floors of this forgotten room beneath the old seminary.
He doesn’t know about this place. He thinks he burned it all, buried the past in ash and fire, but all he did was scorch the surface.
I was underneath. And I’ve been building ever since.
Raven twitches on the mattress. Her fingers curl into the rough fabric.
“Shh, little moth,” I whisper, the sound soft as silk. My fingers hover over her cheek, inches from the skin, but I don’t touch. Not yet. “You’re almost ready.”
She groans, and something deep in me snaps like a violin string tuned too tight. He touched her too soon. He ruined the pacing, cracked her open before she knew what she was made of. He turned the slow-burn into a wildfire, and I’m the only one who sees she’s burning.
But I can still fix this. I can still fix her.
There’s a sound above. Distant. A door slamming. His voice—shouting, searching, feral.
Too late, Damien.
I run a hand over the wall, tapping a sequence into the stone. A hidden panel slides open with a grind of ancient gears. “Don’t worry,” I murmur to her dazed face. “When you wake up… you’ll remember everything.”
And then I disappear into the dark with her.
She weighs nothing. Or maybe I’m just that strong. Either way, she doesn’t fight me as I descend the spiral staircase beneath the chapel floor. The lantern swinging in my grip casts halos of gold across the weeping stone. The air thickens—tasting of mildew and prayers that never got answered.
I lay her down on the narrow cot. The one I prepared.
The one she doesn’t remember screaming in, years ago, after the priest dragged her here.
He never touched her then—not because he didn’t want to, but because I was there.
I left the moths in his collar that night.
Crushed wings and a broken rosary. A promise.
I pace a slow circle around the cot, watching her chest rise and fall. She whimpers. Not from pain, but from the edge of remembrance.
“You felt me, didn’t you?” I whisper, kneeling beside her. My voice is smoother than Damien’s. No gravel, no grit. Just the eerie lilt of something born in the shadows. “He was too loud. He broke you open. I would’ve waited. I was waiting.”
I rise and open the cabinet in the wall. Behind the glass: relics. A Polaroid of her at fifteen—eyes wide, dirt on her knees. A page from the priest’s journal. A jar of dead moths.
“They think the priest died screaming. But he didn’t. He died begging.” I smile under the mask. “But I’m not God.”
Raven groans, her lashes fluttering. Her eyes open—unfocused, glassy—and for a single, perfect second, she looks right at me. Not through me. At me. Like she knows.
“Wh-who…?” she croaks.
“Not him,” I say quietly. “Not yet.”
I press a cool cloth to her lips, hushing her back into the dark.
I sit in the chair opposite the cot and fold my hands, timing her breaths like a metronome. She stirs, and a name slips out of her like a splinter working its way free. Not mine. Not his.
The priest’s.
“You see,” I murmur. “Your body remembers even when you don’t want it to.”
I lean forward until my shadow falls across her. “You were always quiet. Other girls cried. You just… watched. Like you were waiting for someone else to do it for you.”
I take out my notebook and read aloud: “She stops breathing when footsteps pass her door. She looks out the window when she thinks no one sees.”
Raven whimpers, her head turning side to side as if trying to escape the sound of her own history.
“I knew you before you learned how to lie about being okay.”
I move to the door, my hand resting on the cold metal. “You’re not alone,” I say without turning back. “You just chose the wrong guardian.”
I leave her there, suspended between memory and fear. He will come, and when he does, she will finally have to decide which monster she remembers first.