Chapter 26
RAVEN
The night tastes wrong.
It clings to the roof of my mouth like soot—thick, hot, and cloying—even though the chapel is colder now. Emptier. It feels as though the building has finally exhaled something it held inside for too long, a stale breath of incense and old secrets.
I keep seeing it behind my eyelids. The moths. The boy. The second shadow.
For years, I told myself it was Damien. I had to.
I stitched that lie into the fabric of my sanity because the alternative was a void I couldn’t cross.
It had to be him because the truth would have killed me before I was old enough to understand it.
But now? Now the lie is dead, and the truth is moving in the dark. It’s alive, breathing, and it’s hungry.
I walk through the nave like I’m being watched, and I am—by ghosts.
By versions of myself I tried to bury in shallow graves.
I am haunted by the girl who flinched at the soft brush of moth wings but didn’t blink at the sight of blood.
The girl who slept with her hands clenched into white-knuckled fists, whispering secrets into the dark corners of her room and calling it safety.
I don’t feel safe anymore. I don’t feel anything except the pull. The presence.
Someone is following me. And it isn’t Damien. It’s the other one. The first one. The real architect of the nightmare.
I’m halfway to the shattered door when I hear it.
Not a footstep. Not even a whisper. It’s something older, deeper—a vibration in the air that sounds like my name.
It isn’t spoken aloud; it’s a phantom breath against the shell of my ear, just enough to make the blood turn to slush in my veins.
It’s a reminder that this chapel was never truly empty. Not then. Not now.
I turn slowly. The altar glows with a sickly, fading light from the dying candles. I left the note there, splayed open like a wound, still mocking me. I walk back to it—not because I want to, but because there is a thread tied to my heart, yanking me toward the epicentre of the rot.
The air grows heavier with every step, thick as water, dragging at my limbs. My hand trembles as I reach for the stone slab, but the note is gone. In its place lies something new.
A moth.
It’s dead. Its wings are pinned open with savage precision, its body crushed into the stone. And underneath it, written in a dark, rusty smear that isn’t ink, are five words:
“You were supposed to be mine.”
My throat closes, a physical phantom grip tightening around my windpipe. I can’t scream. I can’t even draw enough air to sob. That isn’t Damien’s handwriting. It’s too neat, too deliberate, too cold.
It’s the boy in the dark. The one who watched. The one who waited while I gave my heart to a man who was only ever a shield. The one who followed me through every year of my life like a second shadow I couldn’t cast off.
And I know he’s not far.
I feel it again—that breath, that whisper, the unmistakable shape of a smile hidden in the gloom. Then, a sound. The heavy creak of the chapel door swinging on its hinges.
I spin around, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs, my lungs seizing. I expect to see him. I expect the mask, the hood, the truth.
But there is no one there. Just the open door. Just the black maw of the night and the mourning howl of the wind.
But I know better. He was here. He has always been here, tucked into the places I refused to look. And now? Now he’s done watching. Now he wants me to remember exactly what I promised him in the dark.