Chapter 34
RAVEN
The road keeps going even though I don’t feel like I am.
The headlights cut a narrow, trembling tunnel through the dark, trees blurring at the edges like they’re trying to escape me, and I realise somewhere between one mile marker and the next that my body is moving on instinct alone, like it learned how to survive long before my mind ever caught up.
The asphalt hums beneath the floorboards—a low, rhythmic vibration that feels like it’s trying to shake the secrets out of my bones.
Damien’s hands are locked around the steering wheel. Too tight. White-knuckled. Veins standing out like they’re trying to crawl off his skin. He hasn’t looked at me in minutes. Not since the chapel disappeared in the rearview mirror.
Not since River.
The name presses against the inside of my skull even when I don’t say it. Even when I try not to think it. It’s there anyway, lodged between heartbeats, threaded through memories that won’t quite surface but won’t leave me alone either. I swallow, and my throat hurts.
Not from screaming. From not.
“You knew,” I say quietly.
The words feel fragile. Like if I push them too hard they’ll shatter and cut us both. Damien’s jaw flexes, a hard, sharp movement in the dim light of the dashboard.
“I suspected,” he says. “I didn’t know.”
That’s not what I meant.
“You knew it wasn’t the priest,” I say. “Not really. Not the way we thought.”
Silence. The kind that stretches until the air in the cabin feels thin. The kind that presses against your eardrums. Then, finally, “I knew there was someone else.”
The car hums beneath us. Steady. Indifferent. Like the world doesn’t care that something fundamental just cracked open inside me.
“There was always a gap,” he continues, his voice low and controlled in a way that feels rehearsed, as if he’s been saying it to himself in the dark for years. “A place the story didn’t fit. I told myself it was trauma. Repression. Anything that didn’t require me to admit I might’ve missed him.”
Him. My stomach twists into a cold, hard knot.
“I didn’t remember him,” I whisper. “I swear I didn’t.”
“I know.” The way he says it isn’t accusatory. It’s… careful. Like he’s handling a live wire. “But your body did,” he adds.
My fingers curl into the fabric of my coat.
Because that’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.
The way my chest reacted before my head did.
The way my breath hitched when he stepped into the light.
The way something in me leaned forward even while fear screamed no.
I hate that part. I hate that it exists.
“I keep seeing pieces,” I admit. “Not full memories. Just sensations. Smells. A sound. The feeling of being watched and… not hating it.”
Damien exhales slowly through his nose, a jagged, weary sound. “That’s how it starts.”
I turn to him, my pulse skidding. “What?”
“That’s how he gets inside,” he says. “Not with violence. Not first. With attention. With being there when no one else is.”
Suddenly I’m not in the car anymore. I’m small again. I’m sitting on cold tile with my knees pulled to my chest, counting my breaths because someone told me once that if I stayed quiet enough, I’d disappear. And there’s a shadow near the door. Not touching. Just… staying.
My nails bite into my palm. “I don’t know what he was to me,” I say. “And that scares me.”
Damien finally looks at me. Really looks. His eyes aren’t burning now; they’re terrified.
“That’s because whatever he was,” he says carefully, “he was formed in the same place as the worst parts of you. And those don’t come back gently.”
The car slows. Not stopping, just easing, like even the road knows we’re approaching something dangerous. I hug myself, the chill of the memory seeped into my skin.
“What if remembering him means losing myself?”
Damien’s voice drops, thick with a promise that feels like a threat to the rest of the world. “Then I won’t let you remember alone.”
Something inside me shifts at that. Not relief. Not comfort. Resolve. Because this isn’t about choosing between monsters. It’s about surviving the truth. And somewhere out there, River knows that. He knows exactly what he set in motion.
The road stretches on. And I realise, with a sick certainty settling in my chest—this wasn’t him taking something from me. This was him giving it back. And whatever he gave? It’s going to hurt like hell.
I don’t realise I’ve started shaking until Damien pulls the car over.
Not abruptly. Not with sirens in his blood. Just a slow drag of rubber to gravel on the shoulder, his fingers still wrapped tight around the wheel like he doesn’t trust himself to let go. Or maybe like if he lets go, something worse will take the wheel instead.
The silence inside the car thickens. No radio. No breath. No lies. Just the weight of what we saw. Of who we saw. I’m still staring out the windshield when I say it.
“He was there before you.”
The words land like a stone on glass. Damien doesn’t respond. So I say it again, softer this time, like maybe the truth will hurt less if I whisper it.
“He was there before you, Damien. That’s why it feels like this. That’s why it hurts like this.”
Damien’s voice is sanded down when it finally comes. “Tell me.”
I shake my head. “I don’t know how.”
“Try.”
My throat closes. Because I can’t tell him.
Not without sounding insane. Not without confessing that there’s a boy in my memories with a shadow for a face and moths on his fingertips.
That there’s a silence I remember curling up inside, and someone was always watching from the other side.
Not hurting me. Not touching me. Just there.
Waiting. Like a promise I didn’t know I’d made.
“I used to think I was crazy,” I say, my voice rough now, dragging itself out of my throat like it’s been buried under ten years of silence. “I used to see things. Hear things. I thought they were dreams. Nightmares. I thought I was broken.”
Damien’s knuckles are bloodless on the steering wheel.
“They weren’t dreams, were they?” I ask. “They were him.”
“Yes.”
That one word sinks into me like a needle. Sharp and clean and irreversible. I turn in my seat and look at him.
“He said I left him.”
Damien nods once, like he’s been bracing for that. “And he meant it.”
My heartbeat feels like it’s punching through my skin. “Did I?”
“I don’t know.”
My head is starting to throb. I press my palms to my eyes, but there’s too much flashing behind them. Too much noise. Too many memories clawing at the edges and not enough space for all of them to fit at once.
“I remember moths,” I whisper.
Damien tenses.
“I remember them crawling up the window. I remember one landing on the back of my hand and just staying. Not flying away. Like it was watching me.” I drop my hands from my face. “And I remember the boy behind the glass.”
Damien’s whole body stills. My voice shatters. “I thought it was you.”
He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t even blink. The trees outside whisper things I don’t want to hear.
“I thought that memory belonged to you, Damien. I thought you were the one who found me in the dark.”
He exhales. Barely. “And now?”
Now? Now, everything hurts. Now, there’s a crack running through me so deep I’m afraid if I look down, I’ll see the past staring up at me like it never left.
“I don’t know who I am without that memory belonging to you.”
Damien’s voice is a ghost when he finally speaks again. “Then we take it back.”
I blink. “What?”
He turns to face me fully now, eyes wild, jaw clenched like the words he’s about to say might kill him. “If he’s stealing your memories—your story—then we take it the fuck back.”
The headlights bathe the road ahead in yellowed light, but Damien is all shadow and sharpness beside me, like he was carved to survive the night. Like he belongs to it.
“I don’t care if he was there first,” he says, his voice dropping lower. “I don’t care if he held your hand in the dark or left you flowers in the fucking dirt. I’m the one you belong to now.”
It shouldn’t make my chest ache the way it does. But it does. God, it does.
“Then find him,” I whisper. “Find the boy who wants to take me apart.”
Damien’s mouth curves into something that doesn’t look human. “I will.”
The ignition turns. The wheels move. And the road doesn’t blur this time. It sharpens. Because we’re not running anymore.
We’re going hunting.