Chapter 24
RAVEN
He disappears behind the curtain of dark once more, and I’m left swallowing the echo of his words like poison.
You remember how I feel, even if you’ve forgotten my name.
I don’t want to remember. Not him. Not the way the air in this room feels like it’s being siphoned out by his very presence.
But memory isn’t obedient; it’s a parasite.
It claws, it drips, it hunts you in your sleep and nests in the seams of your scars.
And mine? Mine are stitched with a decade of silence.
I close my eyes, trying to drag myself somewhere safer—back to the chapel, back to the rough, honest weight of Damien’s hands. But there is no anchor here. Only the bite of rope against my wrists and the metallic taste of a fear that hasn’t changed since I was small.
There is no sound of a door opening, but I know he’s back. I feel the static rise of the hair along my spine, that sickening pulse of presence that hits just before the world breaks.
I grit my teeth, my jaw aching. “You think I’m scared of you?”
A beat of silence follows. Then—a laugh. It’s low, soft, and profoundly unsettling. It sounds like someone remembering an old joke that used to make them cry.
“No,” he murmurs, his voice a distorted rasp. “You’re scared of yourself.”
I feel his fingers drag through my hair. The movement is gentle, almost reverent, which makes it feel a thousand times more violent. It’s too slow to be kind.
“Scared of what you liked. What you wanted. What you begged me for in the dark before you even had words for it.”
My throat tightens. He’s lying. He’s twisting the trauma, performing some twisted Stockholm cosplay. Except… a part of me knows. A part of me remembers the attic steps. The sound of my own breath bouncing off the wood. A hand clamped over my mouth that felt more like protection than a threat.
And that whisper, echoing from a ghost: “Don’t scream. He’ll hear.”
He. The priest.
The room tilts. I suck in air, blinking hard, trying to find a horizon line in the dark. “Why now?” I whisper. “Why come back now?”
The man moves to face me again. I still can’t see his eyes through the hood, but I feel the weight of them, picking apart every secret I’ve ever tried to bury.
“Because you let someone else touch what’s mine.”
My heart drops into a hollow abyss. Damien. He knows.
“You’ve always been mine,” he continues, his voice darkening into something jagged. “Even when you tried to forget. Even when you let him fuck the obedience back into you—”
“Shut up—”
He doesn’t flinch. He just tilts his head as if listening to a melody only he can hear. “I waited. I watched. I saw every little thing he did to you. Every bruise, every whimper, every time you cried his name instead of mine. I forgave you for all of it. Because you were broken.”
He steps closer, leaning in so far I can see the faint outline of his lips through the fabric of the mask. “But now it’s my turn to put you back together.”
A sob claws at my throat, but I swallow it. I won’t give him that. I won’t give anyone that ever again. But he sees the tremor anyway. He touches my cheek as if I’m expensive glass he plans to shatter at a glacial pace.
“You’ll remember,” he whispers. “Piece by piece. Just like before.”
He steps back, and the sudden absence of his heat hits harder than the touch. He lifts a small object and sets it on the floor beside me.
A child’s hairbrush. Pink. Worn. A single missing bristle.
It hits me like a scream in a locked room. I had one just like it. I lost it the week I stopped speaking for six months.
My vision tunnels. That brush shouldn’t exist. It was gone. Lost. Stolen. I had buried it in the same mental grave as the rest of that week—the muffled screaming behind closed doors, the red-soaked tiles, the memory of nails digging into my skin that weren’t my own.
I hadn’t seen that brush since the day I hid in the church supply closet, praying to a God I didn’t believe in to make him go away. Not Damien. The other him. The priest with the patient smile and the key to every room a child wasn’t supposed to enter.
I lurch forward, the ropes snapping me back. He crouches beside me, dragging a gloved finger along the faded princess on the handle.
“I kept it,” the stalker says softly. “You dropped it the day you ran. I tried to call you back, but you didn’t hear me. Or maybe you just didn’t care.”
“I don’t know you,” I rasp, my voice sounding like broken glass.
“You will.”
The brush is a landmine. I was seven when I stopped using it.
Seven when I stopped smiling. Seven when my sister asked why I started locking my bedroom door even when Mum said not to.
I close my eyes, trying to force the memories back down, but a new one cracks open: a breath in my ear. A voice, younger, desperate.
“I’ll keep you safe, okay? Just don’t look at him. Just stay behind me.”
My eyes fly open. There was someone else. Not the priest. Not a shadow. A boy. And he’d had my brush in his hand when he pulled me away.
I swallow hard. “You were there.”
The stalker doesn’t respond immediately. He lifts the brush and presses it to where his mouth would be, a kiss against the plastic. “I was always there,” he says. “You just stopped looking.”
“Why didn’t you say anything? Why this?”
He shrugs, as if the answer is too simple for words. “I needed time. Time to make sure you’d forget him before you remembered me.”
The world tilts again. This isn’t a stranger. This is a ghost with unfinished business. And maybe I’m the one who let the door open when I started following Damien’s footsteps in the dark.
He rises, and I hate the way the brush swings from his fingers like a trophy. It was a weapon once—the handle used to silence me when I cried. Now it’s back, a relic of a war I thought was over.
“You think this will make me remember?” I spit. “A fucking hairbrush?”
“No,” he says. “But the smell might.”
He turns and picks up a candle. Not white tallow. Not vanilla.
Frankincense.
The scent hits me like a physical blow. He lights it, letting the smoke curl under my nose like a hook in my sinuses, dragging up pews, whispered prayers, and a sweaty hand resting on my lower back while I knelt on stone.
The memory hits like a truck. Me, on my knees. A voice whispering my name. Another whispering his. And between them—a choice.
“Do you remember now?” he asks through the holy fog.
I shake my head, because I don’t know which version is real. The one where I was alone, or the one where someone else was meant to bleed in my place.
“You used to follow him,” he murmurs. “Like a lamb. But you always looked back at me.”
He crouches again, setting the brush and the candle between us. Then, he adds a third item. A silver moth pin. Sharp. Bent at the edge.
My heart stutters. That isn’t mine. That belonged to the boy. The one who told me to hide. The one I thought I’d dreamed up to survive. He disappeared, and I never even learned his name.
“Why are you doing this?”
The hooded man leans in until his breath brushes my lips. This time, there are no riddles.
“Because I’ve waited long enough.”