Chapter 31
RAVEN
I don’t fall asleep on the drive back. I just pretend to.
Because my eyes are open behind my eyelids. Wide open, staring into a void I’m not ready to cross yet. The chapel is still inside me—that heavy, ancient silence between River’s words.
The way he said my name like it was a mantra he’d been practicing in the dark for a decade. And Damien… Damien stood in front of me like a wall of meat and fury, ready to go to war not just with River, but with any part of my memory that dared to choose him.
That’s the problem. I don’t remember cleanly. I just have these slivers, like someone threw a photo album into a furnace and I’m picking through the ashes.
But it’s not the priest’s face in the ash. It’s a boy’s.
He’s sitting on a step. Twelve, maybe younger. He’s holding a lighter in one hand and a broken wing in the other. A moth. There’s blood on the wing. Or maybe on his fingers. The air in the memory smells like bleach and rot.
And he says: “Don’t scream.”
My body jolts. The car doesn’t. Damien glances at me, his eyes sharp even in the dashboard’s dim glow. He felt the ripple under my skin. He’s waiting for the flood.
“You said something,” I whisper. “In the chapel.”
He looks back at the road, his jaw flexing like he’s trying to grind stone. “I said a lot of things.”
“You said I left you there.”
Silence. Then, a heavy, jagged breath. “I didn’t mean—”
“Yes, you did.” I sit up straighter, my skin cold, my chest burning. “You said I left you. Like I made a choice. Like I abandoned you.”
“I meant,” he says, his voice dropping into a gravelled register, “that when they pulled you out, they left me behind.”
My heart stops. Not for a second, but for a lifetime. “Pulled me out of what?”
He doesn’t answer. I reach over and grab his wrist, my nails digging in, forcing him to pull the car over. The tires skid on the gravel shoulder. We’re in the middle of nowhere. Just woods, shadows, and the ticking of a cooling engine.
He looks at me, his eyes bloodshot, his hands gripping the steering wheel so hard the leather groans.
“Tell me,” I say. “Tell me what you meant.”
He stares at me for a long time. Then, with the weight of every memory I still haven’t unburied, he says: “You were never supposed to be there that night.”
The world goes sideways. Suddenly, I’m small. I’m barefoot. I’m standing outside a building I don’t recognise, and someone is whispering my name through a crack in a door.
It wasn’t the priest. It wasn’t a monster. It was a boy with haunted eyes and a voice full of warning. A boy who was already owned by the dark—and still tried to protect me.
“Raven,” Damien snaps. He’s out of the car, coming around to my side, grabbing my arms as if he’s scared I’ll vanish into the memory. “Talk to me. Where did you go?”
I blink, the forest coming back into focus. “You weren’t the first one to watch me.”
Damien stills. His fingers tighten on my arms like he’s bracing for an earthquake.
“I remember…” My voice catches. “There was a boy. I don’t know his name. I didn’t see his face. But I was in a place that smelled like mould and bleach. My feet were always cold.”
Damien’s pupils dilate. I know that look. It’s the flicker of knowing exactly what I’m talking about—and wishing I didn’t.
“Was it you?” I ask, grabbing his shirt. “Damien, was it you?”
His mouth opens, but no truth comes out. Whatever he’s hiding, it’s about him, too. He looks past my shoulder at a ghost with teeth.
“I don’t know,” he says hoarsely.
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t know which version of me you remember.”
The wind stops. Even my thoughts go silent. He says it as if it’s normal to have multiple selves trading stolen memories.
“You were there,” he says quietly. “But you weren’t supposed to be. He wasn’t supposed to touch you.”
“Who?”
“The priest.”
I flinch. Not because I didn’t know, but because hearing it feels like a physical blow.
“He wanted you,” Damien says, his voice cracking. “He watched you for weeks. But I—I told him to stop. I told him you were mine. I thought if I claimed you, he wouldn’t touch you.”
“But he did, didn’t he?” My voice trembles. “He hurt me anyway.”
Damien doesn’t answer. He sinks to his knees on the gravel, shattered. “I should’ve burned him then. I should’ve ripped his fucking throat out.”
I stare at him, torn between touching him or running for my life. And then, behind the wind—a sound. A low, electronic hum.
Damien’s burner phone is lit up on the car seat. A message.
He reaches for it, his voice dead. “Don’t open it yet.”
But I already have. The screen says:
Tell her what she did.
The words burn into my retinas.
Damien rips the phone from my hand, snarling, and hurls it into the trees. It crashes through the brush and vanishes into the dark.
“What the fuck does it mean?” I demand.
“You think I haven’t been trying to figure that out every day since I found you?
” he explodes, his body a loaded spring.
“This obsession… it drags me back to you like there’s no air outside your name.
I didn’t come back to finish what he started.
I came back because I couldn’t fucking breathe without you! ”
He steps into me, pressing his forehead against mine. “I swear I will never let him touch you again.”
The rage in him is vibrating, a storm leashed only by my presence.
“I need to remember,” I whisper.
“You will.” He kisses my temple, his hand cupping the back of my head like I’m made of glass.
And I feel it. A splinter rising to the surface. I blink—and suddenly I’m in a different room. Metal lockers. A boy—seventeen, maybe—his hands shaking as he hides me.
“Don’t make a sound,” he whispers.
“Why?”
“If he finds you, he’ll take you, too.”
I wake up. Or I come back. It’s hard to tell. Damien is still holding me, but his hands are shaking, too.
Because maybe he remembers that night, too. Maybe he remembers that he wasn’t the one who hid me.