Chapter 28
RAVEN
It takes a second for my brain to catch up with what I’m seeing. Another second to remember how to breathe.
And a third to realise that every memory I’ve used to survive the last decade has just been lit on fire.
Because when the hood drops—when the shadows peel back and the monster finally has a face—it’s not what I expected. It’s worse.
It’s him.
He isn’t the priest returned from the grave. He isn’t some ghost from Damien’s past. He isn’t a stranger with a grudge. He is a boy I once knew and forced myself to forget, and he’s not a boy anymore. He’s a living sin carved into bone and breath.
God, how does he look like that?
His hair is dark—thick, messy, falling over his brow as if it’s never known a gentle touch.
His cheekbones are blades, and his mouth is a crooked, beautiful ruin that looks like it was made for secrets.
His jaw is shadowed with a dark rasp of stubble, and his eyes…
they’re ice cut from a glacier. Electric, lethal, and staring straight through me as if he’s been watching me sleep for years.
Because maybe he has. Maybe he never stopped.
My throat hitches. My knees threaten to turn to water.
He’s taller than Damien, leaner—his body composed of jagged lines and a predatory stillness, wrapped in the same black hoodie that has haunted my nightmares.
But there’s no mask now. Just a man who looks at me like I’m a debt he’s finally come to collect.
“River?” The name scrapes out of my throat, raw and bleeding.
His mouth twitches. Not a smile—something hungrier. “Hello, Raven.”
My world tilts. The moths. The boy in the dark. The feeling of being watched when I was alone in the garden. It wasn’t Damien. It was never Damien.
He never left.
The name tastes wrong on my tongue. River.
I don’t know it—not really. Not with my mind. But the second it leaves my lips, it doesn’t feel new. It feels buried. It’s something I dug up from a grave I built in my own head, something I was never supposed to find.
His expression shifts, like the sound of his name in my voice did something to him. He likes it. Not the word, but the way I say it—like a prayer I once screamed into the dark.
“What…” My voice cracks. “What is this?”
River moves a step closer. He doesn’t rush; he moves with a stillness that feels like a coiled spring. “This is everything you forgot.”
A thousand needles thread down my spine. His voice is the one from the tapes, from the whispers behind the walls. I realise the terrifying truth: I never imagined the third person in that house. I knew him.
He brushes a hand against my jaw, his thumb dragging across my skin as if he has the right. I flinch, but he doesn’t pull away.
“You looked for monsters,” he whispers, his breath warm and terrifying. “But you never remembered me.”
“Did we—” My throat swells shut. “Were we—”
“Yes.”
Simple. Brutal. Final.
I hate how my lungs forget to inflate. I hate that I don’t know what we were, but my body does.
There’s a heat crawling down my spine and a tremor in my stomach that isn’t entirely fear.
I don’t know if I should run or beg, and the worst part is, I don’t think this is the first time I’ve stood before him feeling exactly this way.
“Tell me what you did to me.”
His lips curl—dark, vicious, almost fond. “I don’t think you’re ready for that, baby.”
Baby. The word rips through me. A flash behind my eyes: A closet. A hand over my mouth. A whisper. Baby, don’t cry.
I stagger back, but he catches me. His grip is a ghost of a memory, too familiar to be a stranger’s.
“Get away from me—”
“You don’t want me to.”
He’s not wrong. That’s the rot at the centre of it. There’s something terribly right about the way he touches me, like we have unfinished business that Damien was just an interruption for.
Like he watched Damien break me and simply waited his turn to pick up the pieces.
“You’re not real,” I whisper, desperate.
He tilts his head. “Then why are you shaking?”
“I’m not—”
The moment shatters. A shift in the shadows, and Damien steps into the light.
His fists are clenched white. His mouth is a thin, bloodless line. And his eyes aren’t fire this time—they’re frost. Dead, burning frost.
“What the fuck did you just say to her?”
River doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t need to. “I told her the truth.”
“You don’t know what that is.” Damien’s voice is low, caged.
“You don’t remember her,” River replies softly, almost pitying. “Not the way I do.”
“I remember enough to kill you.”
River finally turns. The world tilts as the two of them lock eyes. They look nothing alike, but the recognition between them is instant. It isn’t brotherhood. It’s two predators meeting again in the same cage they grew up in.
“You thought it was the priest, didn’t you?” River says, his voice eerily calm. “That’s who you were chasing. The one sending the tapes. The Polaroids. You thought you were fighting a ghost.”
Damien’s silence is a confession.
River’s smile is soft and void of humanity. “He didn’t want her. I did.”
The room sways. I can’t tell whose heartbeat is slamming in my ears—mine, Damien’s, or his.
“I watched her for years,” River murmurs. “You weren’t the only one who saw her first.”
Damien lunges.
I scream his name, but it’s too late. They crash into each other like hell finally ripped open. It’s a storm of fists and obsession—no tactics, just a decade of boiled rage.
“Stop!” I cry out, but I’m frozen.
There’s blood on the floor. A sound—a choke, or a laugh. River hits the stone wall hard, but he’s laughing. He’s laughing as if he’s missed the pain.
“You left her!” River spits, wiping blood from his mouth. “You left her in that house. You let the priest take her. You think you saved her? You think she chose you?” He grins, red-toothed and manic. “I was the one who stayed.”
Damien freezes. I do, too. Something in the air cracks.
“…It was you in the closet,” Damien whispers, his voice colder than I’ve ever heard it.
River looks at me. No words. Just a long, deliberate look that pulls the veil back all the way.
The moths. The whisper. The hand on my mouth telling me not to make a sound while the priest paced outside the door. It wasn’t the priest. It wasn’t Damien. It was him.
River.
My knees finally give out. Damien catches me before I hit the stone, one arm locking around my waist, pulling me against his wet, shivering heat.
But I’m not looking at Damien. I’m looking at River.
And for the first time, I see the boy behind the monster. He’s smiling as if he’s been waiting a lifetime for me to see him.
“I told you,” he whispers. “You never forgot me.”