Chapter 36
RIVER
The waiting has ceased to be an exercise in patience; now, it is simply rot.
It is a slow, black necrosis eating its way through my composure until there is nothing left but the raw, pulsing nerve of my intent.
I pace the perimeter of the tree line like an apex predator with a snare cutting into its leg, every step replaying the same image I refuse to picture and cannot escape—his hands on her, her body giving in because it always gives in when it’s tired enough, because pain is familiar and familiarity feels like safety when you’ve never had anything else.
She didn’t choose him.
That’s what I tell myself first. Then I say it again. Then I say it louder, until the words are the only thing drowning out the sound of the wind through the pines. She chose quiet. She chose the blunt-force trauma of his presence to make the noise in her head stop. And he knows that.
Damien knows exactly how to make her go still; he knows how to press until she stops fighting, stops questioning, and—most importantly—stops remembering me.
That’s unforgivable.
I stop moving. The cabin in the clearing creaks—old wood, bad bones, a structure held together by the same rot that’s currently claiming my mind. I memorised the anatomy of this place the second they arrived.
I counted the steps from the porch to the bedroom door. I found the blind spot near the back window where the moonlight fails to reach. I know the warped board by the sink that groans if you put your weight on it wrong. I know the house better than the man currently hiding inside it.
I don’t need to go inside.
I crouch near the edge of the clearing, dragging my fingers through the cold, damp dirt, letting the rage sharpen into something clinical and usable.
Escalation isn’t a scream; it’s precision. I think of the asylum—the blinding white walls, the sterile, chemical smell of the unit, the way they taught her to doubt her own skin.
I remember how easy it was for them to make her compliant once she stopped trusting her own mind. They told her the boy with the moths wasn’t real. They told her I was a glitch in her hardware.
Damien is doing the same thing. He’s just doing it prettier. He’s doing it louder.
I pull another phone from my pocket—not the one he’s tracked, not the one that exists on any record.
This one is older, cracked, a relic of a past I never truly left.
I scroll through photos I shouldn’t have, files I don’t need anymore but can’t bring myself to delete.
Blueprints. Floor plans of the psychiatric wing.
Scanned medical records with redacted names.
I stop on one image and feel my mouth curve into a jagged, cold line. Perfect.
I type slowly this time. Carefully. I want the words to feel like a needle sliding into a vein.
You remember the place with the white walls.
They lied to you there.
Ask him what he did the night you stopped talking.
I don’t send it to Damien. Not yet. A warning to him would be a mercy, a chance for him to spin another lie.
This one goes to her. Because if he wants to drown me out with touch, I’ll drown him with doubt.
I want her awake in the dark. I want her questioning the hands that just held her.
I want her looking at him the way she looked at me in the chapel—like the story she’s been told has a missing, violent chapter.
I lean my forehead against the rough, freezing bark of the tree and close my eyes. Breathe. Control the fire. This isn’t about a simple abduction. This is about reclaiming the time he stole.
Every hour she spends doubting him is an hour she drifts back to the truth. Back to me.
And he won’t hurt her. Not the way he wants to. Because I’m watching now. Because if Damien crosses the wrong line—if he pushes too far, tries to erase too much, or tries to cage her completely—I won’t offer a second warning.
I straighten, melting back into the obsidian shadows of the forest, already moving, already calculating the next move. He thinks he’s her sanctuary. She thinks she chose a protector. They’re both profoundly wrong.
The next thing I take won’t be subtle. It’ll be something he can’t ignore and something she can’t forget. Because escalation isn’t loud.
It’s inevitable.
I don’t just watch her; I inhabit the space around her. I am the cold air that makes the hair on her arms stand up. I am the floorboard that doesn’t creak because I know exactly where the nails are rusted through.
I lean my head back against the jagged bark of a towering Scots Pine, closing my eyes, and the present begins to bleed, the dark woods of the now dissolving into the sterile, fluorescent hum of the then.
The asylum.
The air there didn’t move; it stagnated, smelling of industrial bleach and the metallic tang of unwashed fear. I’m back in the crawlspace, the narrow, galvanised steel throat of the ventilation shaft above her room.
My chest is pressed against the vibrating metal, my heartbeat echoing off the tin walls, syncopated with hers. I am eighteen, and my world is exactly twelve inches wide—the size of the vent grate looking down into her cell.
I can see her. Right now.
She’s sitting on the edge of that pathetic, bolted-down cot, her spine curved like a question mark.
She’s eighteen, too, but she looks like a ghost that hasn’t realised it’s dead yet.
Her hair is a tangled crown of dark silk, and her fingers are raw, picking at the hem of the heavy, institutional gown they forced her into.
The “Quiet Room.” That’s what they called it. A place where the walls were padded so thick no one could hear you shatter.
“Raven,” I whisper.
It’s barely a breath, a vibration sent through the steel, but in the silence of that tomb, it’s a thunderclap.
She freezes. Her head tilts, her eyes tracking upward, wide and glassy from the chemical cocktail of Risperidone they’ve been pumping into her veins.
She looks for me, but she only sees the shadows behind the grate.
I slide the grate aside. The screech of metal on metal is a love song.
I drop down. My boots hit the linoleum with a soft thud, a sound that shouldn’t exist in a locked ward.
She doesn’t scream. She never screams for me.
She just watches as I emerge from the dark, a shadow taking human shape.
I’m covered in the grey dust of the attic, cobwebs clinging to my black hoodie like lace, and I look like the monster they told her lived only in her head.
“You’re real,” she breathes, her voice a fragile, papery thing.
“I’m the only thing that’s real,” I say, stepping into the pool of sickly yellow light.
I reach out. My hand is shaking—not from fear, but from the sheer, agonising voltage of being this close to her.
I press my palm against her cheek. Her skin is clammy, pale as bone, and she leans into me.
She leans into the monster. My thumb traces the dark circles under her eyes, the bruises left by the system, and I feel a possessiveness so violent it threatens to tear my ribs open.
“They’re trying to kill you,” I murmur, my face inches from hers. I can taste her breath—mint and iron. “They’re trying to bleach you out until there’s nothing left but a blank page.”
“I can’t feel my hands,” she whispers, her eyes welling. “The medicine… everything is blurry.”
“Then feel me.”
I grab her wrists, pulling them toward me, forcing her fingers to curl into the rough fabric of my hoodie.
I want to leave marks. I want her to have something to look at when the sun comes up to prove I was there.
I sink to my knees between her legs, my head resting on her lap, and for a moment, the asylum disappears.
There is no ward. No doctors. No Damien waiting in the wings to play the hero.
“Tell me to stay,” I growl into the fabric of her gown. “Tell me to burn this place down with us inside.”
She doesn’t answer with words. She sinks her fingers into my hair, pulling my head back until I have to look at her.
Her expression is a jagged mess of terror and worship.
She reaches out, her trembling fingers tracing the scar on my lip, and then she does it—she kisses me.
It’s not soft. It’s a collision. It tastes of desperate, dying things.
It’s the taste of a pact signed in the dark.
I remember the way her heart hammered against mine—that panicked, beautiful rhythm I’m still chasing. I remember the way she looked at me right before the heavy steel door at the end of the hall groaned, the signal that the night nurse was coming.
“Go,” she whispered, her eyes burning with a sudden, sharp clarity. “Don’t let them catch you.”
“I’ll never leave you,” I promised. “Even when you forget, I’ll be the shadow you can’t shake.”
I open my eyes.
The asylum is gone. The white walls have turned back into the obsidian night of the woods. My hand is gripping the rough bark of the pine so hard the wood is biting into my palm, drawing blood.
The memory isn’t enough anymore. It’s a starvation ration.
I look at the cabin, the light in the window flickering as a shadow passes across it. Damien. He’s in there, touching her, trying to overwrite the pact we made in that padded room. He thinks he can fuck the memory of me out of her. He thinks he can be the light that heals her.
He doesn’t understand. Raven doesn’t need light. She was forged in the dark, and she’ll return to it.
I pull the burner phone from my pocket. The screen glows, a small, artificial star in the wilderness. I look at the message I sent. The hook is in. Now, I just have to wait for her to pull the line.
I start to move toward the cabin, silent as a moth, my boots finding the softest patches of moss. I’m not going in. Not yet. I just want to be close enough to hear the moment the doubt breaks her.
I want to be there when she realises that her “protector” was the one who signed the commitment papers.