Chapter 38
RAVEN
The phone vibrates beneath my palm, a sudden, jarring intrusion against the heavy silence of the room that sends a violent, involuntary tremor through my entire frame.
I flinch so hard my whole body jerks, the movement reflexive and ugly in its desperation. Beside me, Damien stills instantly, his reaction not born of simple surprise but of a chilling, immediate recognition that freezes the very air between us.
My heart is already racing, thudding a frantic, uneven rhythm against my ribs before I even dare to look at the screen, because some deep, instinctive part of me knows this vibration isn’t normal; it is wrong, too calculated, arriving with a timing so perfectly poised it feels like a physical blow to the chest.
Damien’s eyes drop to my hand, his gaze heavy with a dark, unspoken warning.
“Don’t,” he says, his voice a low, granular rasp that vibrates in the small space between us.
I don’t listen. I cannot. With fingers that feel disconnected from my brain—numb and clumsy—I turn the screen over to face the light.
UNKNOWN NUMBER
One message.
Did he make you cry this time or was that just for me?
The room tilts on its axis, the floor beneath me turning to liquid.
My ears begin to ring—a sharp, high-pitched whine like the sound of pressure building behind a dam before the concrete finally bursts under the weight.
Slowly—far too slowly, as if he is moving through water—Damien reaches out and takes the phone from my nerveless fingers.
He reads the message once, then again, his jaw tightening until a muscle flicks hard beneath the skin, looking for all the world like he’s biting down on something feral and barely holding it in place.
“No,” he says quietly. It isn’t a denial to me; it is a vow whispered to himself, a low growl of defiance.
He begins to type, his thumb moving with a lethal, practiced precision. I don’t see what he writes, for he turns away from me, shielding the screen with the broad, tense line of his shoulders, his entire frame braced as though he is preparing for a head-on collision.
The phone vibrates again. His breath stops in his lungs, and mine follows suit, trapped in the hollow of my throat. This time, he doesn’t hide it; he turns the screen toward me with a grim finality.
It is a photo. My stomach drops so violently I think I might be sick right there on the rug.
It’s me. I am not naked, nor am I posed, but the intimacy of the shot is more intrusive than if I were.
It is me as I was five minutes ago—crying, my face turned helplessly into the pillow, Damien’s hand still resting with possessive weight against the column of my throat.
The angle is impossible; it is too high, too intimate, as though it were taken from the rafters above us, or from a ghost hovering in the shadows of our most private collapse.
My hands start shaking, a fine, uncontrollable tremor. “That’s impossible,” I whisper, the words sounding thin and foreign in the quiet room.
Damien doesn’t answer. He simply pinches the screen, zooming in until the corner of the image sharpens into a jagged clarity. And there—reflected faintly in the dark, polished glass of the wardrobe door—is the unmistakable, sickly glow of a screen. Recording. Watching. Live.
Another message cuts through the stillness like a knife.
You always cover her mouth when she cries. That’s new. I like it.
I feel something tear loose in my chest, a structural failure of the heart. Damien exhales slowly through his nose, a sound that is controlled, measured, and utterly terrifying in its lack of heat.
“You’ve been watching,” he says, his voice low and even. The reply is instant, a digital sneer:
You invited me in the moment you stopped locking your doors.
My skin crawls, a thousand invisible insects dancing over my nerves. “I don’t understand,” I whisper, the world blurring at the edges, “Damien, I—”
He doesn’t look at me. He’s staring at the phone like it might bite him back. Another message arrives, demanding and cold.
Tell her to check her left wrist.
My breath catches. “No,” Damien says flatly, but my body moves before my brain can intervene.
I lift my arm. There, stark against the pale, translucent skin, is a faint red mark.
A fingerprint. It is not Damien’s; the whorls are too small, the pressure too precise, as though someone had pressed there just long enough to ensure they would be remembered long after the heat of the touch faded.
My vision blurs. “He touched you,” Damien says. It isn’t a question; it is a dark realisation that settles over us like a shroud. The phone vibrates again.
You felt it, didn’t you? That moment when you thought it was him. I didn’t rush. I waited until you let go.
My knees fold. Damien catches me before I hit the floor, pulling me back against the hard heat of his chest, his arms locking around me like a restraint, a shield, and a warning to whoever is lurking on the other side of the glass.
His mouth is at my ear when he speaks. “You don’t get to touch her,” he says softly. “Not like that.”
The reply takes longer this time, the silence stretching until the air feels heavy with static. When it comes, it is one line:
You taught me how.
The room goes dead silent. No breathing.
No movement. Just that sentence hanging between us like a blade suspended by a single thread.
And in that stillness, I realise something that makes my stomach twist even tighter than fear.
This wasn’t a warning. This wasn’t a threat.
This was proof. River didn’t step forward. He stepped in.
I don’t remember the act of sitting down.
One second my knees buckle, and the next I am on the floor with Damien behind me, his arms locked around my body so tightly it hurts to draw breath.
He isn’t doing it to comfort me; he is doing it to anchor me, as if he fears that if he lets go, I’ll slip away into a darkness where he cannot reach.
The phone is still in his hand, a malevolent object that vibrates again. I feel the pulse of it through his chest before I hear it. Another message.
She smells different when she gives up. Did you notice?
I make a sound I don’t recognise—something animal, something torn and jagged. Damien’s grip tightens until my ribs ache under the pressure.
“Don’t answer,” I whisper.
“I’m not,” he says, but his thumb moves anyway.
He doesn’t type. He opens the camera—the front-facing one.
He tilts it down so it frames me in the harsh light—bare skin, tear-streaked face, eyes blown wide and empty.
Then he lifts his free hand and cups my jaw, forcing my face up toward the lens, making me a witness to my own terror.
“Look,” he murmurs. The screen flashes. Sent.
My stomach drops through the floor. “You can see her now,” Damien says with a terrifying, hollow calmness. “Really see her.”
The reply doesn’t come immediately, and the wait is an exquisite torture. Seconds pass—ten, twenty—while my heartbeat starts to roar in my ears. Then, a video arrives. Damien opens it, and I instantly wish he hadn’t.
It is grainy, bathed in a sickly, night-vision green that makes the familiar bedroom look like a tomb.
It is shaky for half a second before it steadies on the bed.
Not tonight, but another night entirely, a night I thought I was safe.
It shows me asleep, curled on my side, wearing an old T-shirt I thought I had lost months ago.
The night-vision renders my skin like marble, cold and unmoving.
The camera angle is low, far too close for comfort, positioned right at the edge of the mattress.
The footage moves slowly, almost reverently, as a hand enters the frame.
It is not Damien’s hand; the fingers are longer, thinner, appearing almost skeletal in the green-tinted light.
The hand doesn’t touch me, but it hovers agonisingly close—an inch from my mouth, tracing the line of my throat, hovering over my pulse point at the wrist. It looks as if it is memorising me, as if it is practising a form of lethal restraint, a predator counting the heartbeats of its prey.
The video cuts to black. I scream. It rips out of me without permission, sharp and broken and humiliating.
Damien clamps his hand over my mouth instantly, dragging me tighter against him, rocking me once—not to soothe me, but to keep me quiet, because he understands something I don’t yet: noise is a form of vulnerability. Noise is dangerous.
The phone vibrates again.
You slept through it every time. That was my favourite part.
I start shaking so hard my teeth chatter. “He’s lying,” I choke into Damien’s palm. Damien doesn’t answer; he is staring at the screen like it’s a mirror showing him a reflection of a monster he has never seen before.
Another message:
Do you want to know the first night I touched her?
“No,” Damien says, his voice thick with suppressed rage.
The reply is immediate:
She was already yours. She just didn’t know it yet.
Something inside Damien snaps; I feel the literal shift in his posture, the hardening of his muscles.
His breathing changes—slowing, dropping into that dangerous, predatory calm that always precedes violence.
He lowers his mouth to my ear, his breath hot against my skin.
“You don’t get to narrate her life,” he says quietly. “You don’t get to rewrite her body.”
A pause follows, heavy and pregnant with malice. Then comes the message that breaks everything.
I didn’t rewrite it. I edited around you.
My vision tunnels. Edited. Like I am mere text on a page, like I am footage to be manipulated and spliced.
I realise then, with absolute, nauseating certainty, that this isn’t about taking me away from Damien.
River doesn’t want me separate. He wants me shared.
Witnessed. Ruined in layers, like a painting being scraped back to the canvas.