Chapter 25
RAVEN
He leaves the candle burning.
He doesn’t say a word as he walks out, his footsteps echoing across the stone floor like a warning I’m too exhausted to heed.
The scent stays behind, though. It clings to the air, wrapping around me like incense from a dead religion—something that was once sacred but is now just ash and heavy, suffocating memory.
And I’m still tied. Still kneeling on the cold floor. Still trying to hold all the fractured pieces of myself together with nothing but skin, teeth, and a heartbeat that won’t fucking quit, even when every other part of me wants to surrender.
I don’t know how long it’s been. Minutes? Hours? Time doesn’t move in this cellar; it just waits. It holds its breath, crouching in the corners, waiting for the next cruel thing to happen.
My wrists ache where the hemp bites into the bone, and my thighs tremble from the strain of my posture, but I don’t cry.
I won’t scream. I just stare at that pink brush, that silver pin, and that flickering flame.
I wonder if this is where I’m meant to end—surrounded by relics from a past I still can’t fully grasp.
Until I hear it.
A door creaks open. But it’s not the one he left through. This sound is behind me. Soft. Intentional. Wrong.
My breath hitches, and I twist violently in my restraints, trying to see through the peripheral dark, trying to hear over the roar of my own blood—but nothing comes. Not a footstep. Not a breath.
Not until the hand touches my neck.
It isn’t rough like the stalker’s. It isn’t possessive like Damien’s. It’s just… there. I freeze, my skin turning to ice beneath the contact. This isn’t him. This isn’t the man in the hood.
The hand doesn’t tighten. It doesn’t grab. It strokes. A single finger trails from the base of my pulse to the hollow of my throat, moving like a signature written in ghost-ink. It moves with a terrifying, intimate familiarity. Like it knows the exact map of my terror.
Something in me shatters. I twist, wild and feral, my heart slamming against my ribs like a trapped bird, but I can’t see the face.
I only catch the blurred shape of a figure retreating, slipping back into the shadows as if it were carved from the dark itself.
No face. No words. Just a presence that feels like a burial shroud.
And then—the flame blows out.
I scream. It’s a loud, ragged, ugly sound that tears through the silence. I don’t know who just touched me. I don’t know how long they were standing there, watching me bleed in the candlelight. I don’t know why I suddenly feel like I’m being hunted from more than one direction.
The room plunges into a total, heavy blackness, and I start to shake. This isn’t just the cold. Something is wrong—more wrong than it was ten minutes ago. The man in the hood isn’t the only one playing games with me. There’s a third shadow. A third memory. A third nightmare.
I was never the only one in that chapel. And I’m not the only one being watched.
I stumble backward, the ropes gone now—did they cut them? Did they just fall away?—and I almost trip over the edge of the stone altar. My palms slap the floor, stinging as they hit the grit. My knees burn. I don’t care.
The note is still there, lying where it was dropped, open and waiting. I don’t look at it again. I can’t. The words are already branded onto the inside of my eyelids.
It wasn’t Damien.
The boy with the moths. The one who watched me like he knew me. The one who never spoke but never left. If it wasn’t Damien… then who the fuck was it?
I clamp a hand over my mouth before the scream can crawl out. It’s not panic anymore; it’s something worse. It’s the sensation of my entire reality unravelling behind my ribs. Something is shifting in my chest, something that doesn’t fit anymore, something trying to claw its way out.
I back up until my spine hits stone. Cold. Ancient. The chapel wall. I press into it as if the granite can hold my bones together, but I’m splitting down the middle. The memories are no longer flickers; they are haemorrhaging. The garden. The insects. The boy.
The second shadow.
The one I thought was a hallucination born of trauma. He was real. He was always real. And he’s here.
I drag in a breath that tastes of dust and old regret. My hands are vibrating. My heart is louder than the silence. I twist my head toward the entrance, expecting Damien to come storming in to find me. He doesn’t. Which means he doesn’t know. Which means I’m alone in this.
Which means the other one planned it that way.
I slide down the wall, hugging my arms around my knees, fingers digging into my skin until I draw blood. I want to scrape the confusion away. I want to peel back the years and make the truth look the way I need it to, but the architecture of my past is changing.
Everything I believed—everything I felt for Damien—was it built on a lie? What if this isn’t new to him? What if he already knows who the other boy was? What if that’s why he really came back to me?
My jaw locks. I rise, slow and uneven, using the wall for support. If there’s a second player in this game, then I need to learn the rules. I need to remember all of it—every dark corner, every whispered secret—before someone else starts playing with my mind again.
I am not the victim anymore. I am the evidence.