Chapter 33
RIVER
I move like I’m weightless, a ghost drifting through the graveyard of my own past, as if the physical world can no longer find purchase on my skin. Because it can’t.
The gravity of this life stopped working on me the moment she let the memory of us go. I burned the last part of it that mattered—the soft part, the part that hoped—the night she forgot me.
And now? Now I’ve built something new in the ashes. A cathedral of shadow and obsession, something just for her.
The streetlamp above me flickers, a dying pulse of electricity that casts stuttered, rhythmic halos onto the wet pavement. I pull the hood of my jacket tighter; the fabric is still damp from her breath, carrying the phantom heat of her panic from when I pressed my palm against her mouth.
I can still feel the vibration of her throat against my skin, the frantic, muffled whimpers as I whispered into her ear: shh… shh… you remember me now, don’t you, baby?
She did. I felt the moment the recognition hit her—that sharp, electric jolt that bypassed her brain and went straight to her marrow. That look in her eyes when she finally forced my name past her lips?
It was everything I’ve waited for. It was the only prayer I’ve ever said that was answered.
Years of hiding in the peripheral of her life.
Years of watching her love him—a man who is nothing but a shield made of scar tissue.
Years of letting another man touch what was always meant to be mine.
I’ve stood in the corner of her vision for so long I’ve become part of the scenery, a monster she mistook for a nightmare instead of a memory.
I wanted to slit his throat tonight. I wanted to hear the wet, heavy sound of his life leaving him and watch her eyes fill with the truth while his blood soaked the chapel floor. I wanted to show her that her protector is just a hollowed-out boy playing at being a king.
But that would’ve been too soon. The crescendo has to be perfect.
She doesn’t understand yet. She doesn’t know what he did.
What they all did. The priest with his sanctified violence.
Damien with his misplaced martyrdom. Her mother with her eyes squeezed shut.
The whole rotted, decaying town that watched her die in pieces, bit by agonising bit, and had the audacity to call it girlhood.
I was the only one who saw her cracking. I was the only one who didn’t look away when the light left her eyes. And I still am.
That’s why I left her there tonight.
That’s why I slipped away like smoke. Because I need her desperate for me.
I need her to claw through every jagged, blood-stained memory, tearing her nails on the truth until she finds the one with me in it.
I need her to reach for the one she buried deepest of all because it hurt too much to keep—the one where I was the only thing standing between her and the abyss.
The boy in the moth-light.
The shadow in the wall.
The hand that reached for her when no one else did.
I never stopped watching, Raven. I watched you learn to breathe without me.
I watched you learn to smile at a man who doesn’t know the colour of your soul.
Even when you forgot me. Even when you screamed for someone else in the middle of the night.
Even when you let his hands touch what should’ve been sacred—what I made sacred.
I was still there. In the dark of your periphery. Behind the mirrors you didn’t want to look into. Beneath the floorboards of every house you tried to call a home.
Waiting.
And now that your eyes are open again, now that the fire has been relit, I’ll make sure they never close. I’ll be the only thing you see until the world burns down around us.