Chapter 38 #2
The phone vibrates one last time. Damien doesn’t look at it, but I do.
Check under the bed. I left you something.
“No,” I whisper, clutching at Damien’s shirt. “Damien, please.”
He looks down at me then, really looks at me, and in his eyes, I see the truth before he even says it.
If there’s something under the bed, it means River was here after him, in the sanctum of our home while we were oblivious.
Damien releases me slowly, not because he wants to, but because whatever is coming next doesn’t belong to him alone.
“Don’t touch it,” he says, his voice a warning, but I crawl anyway, my hands shaking as I reach into the dark, suffocating space beneath the bed frame.
My fingers close around fabric—soft, folded, impossibly familiar.
It is my T-shirt, the one from the video, the one I had mourned as lost. It is clean and warm, as if it has been held against someone’s skin, as if it hasn’t been gone long at all.
Something slips out of the folds and clatters onto the floor: a phone.
Not mine. The screen lights up with the front camera already recording, a digital eye wide open.
I stare straight into it, my own reflection overlapping with the recording, and somewhere on the other end, I know that River finally breathes.
I don’t breathe. I forget the mechanics of it entirely.
The phone under the bed hums softly in my hand like a living thing, a beating heart of glass and silicon.
My own face fills the screen—pale, wrecked, eyes blown wide—and behind that reflection is the room itself, with Damien standing there like a statue, watching me watch myself.
The recording light blinks a rhythmic, predatory red.
“Turn it off,” I whisper, but my voice has no power.
Damien doesn’t move. “Raven,” he says, and my name sounds different—tight and careful, as if it might break. The phone vibrates with a message overlaying the live feed of my face:
Don’t stop now. You’re doing so well.
My fingers slip, and the phone almost drops. “I can’t,” I say, the words tearing out of me. “I can’t—I didn’t—”
“You don’t have to,” Damien says, but his eyes never leave the screen. I understand then that this isn’t about what I do, but about what I allow myself to feel while being watched.
Do you remember the first night you felt safe with him?
My throat closes because I do remember the exact breath, the exact lie I told myself when Damien’s presence stopped feeling like danger and started feeling like gravity.
The phone buzzes:
I was there too.
My vision swims. “No,” I whisper. “You weren’t.” The camera view shifts—the phone tilts by itself, a remote command changing the angle just enough to catch the mirror on the wardrobe door. In it, I see a small black circle high in the corner of the room, tucked into the moulding. Blinking.
Damien moves fast and violent, a blur of motion. He rips the device from the wall with a sound of snapping plastic and screeching wires. He crushes it in his fist until the casing cracks. The phone in my hand vibrates harder, almost mocking him:
You always destroy the toys you don’t understand.
Damien turns slowly. “At least show some fucking respect,” he says, his voice a low, lethal hum. “You’re still alive because I allow it.”
The reply:
No. I’m alive because she lets me be.
My chest caves in. “I don’t let you do anything,” I say to the empty air.
The phone buzzes:
You do. Every time you don’t look away.
I realise I’m still kneeling, still holding the phone, still staring into the abyss of the lens. Another message:
Tell him what you felt when you realised I was watching.
“No,” Damien says instantly, but my mouth opens anyway, driven by a compulsion I can’t name. “I felt… chosen.”
Horror flashes across Damien’s face, a look of profound betrayal. The phone vibrates: There it is. I start crying again, silent and violent, as if my soul is trying to exit my body. “That doesn’t mean I wanted you,” I choke out.
It means you didn’t scream
Damien is shaking now, his control finally fraying at the edges. “That’s enough. You don’t get to turn her fear into a confession.”
I didn’t. I turned it into a mirror.
The camera switches to rear-facing, showing the room, but the angle is lower, closer—like someone is crouching just outside the doorway in the hall. Damien steps in front of me, blocking the view. “You come near her again, and I will end you.”
You already did. Just not the way you think.
Then, an audio file arrives. I don’t touch it, but it opens on its own, the play bar moving.
My own voice fills the room—breathless, soft, saying Damien’s name like a prayer, like a secret, from a night weeks ago.
Damien stares at the phone, then at me. River didn’t steal anything; he just stood close enough in the silence and waited for me to speak.
Now none of us know which moments were real—only who was listening.
I don’t recognise my own voice anymore. It sounds wrong—too intimate, too exposed. Damien takes the phone with surgical care. “How,” he asks, the word a demand for logic in a world that has gone mad.
You taught her how to talk when she’s afraid. I just stayed quiet long enough to hear it.
“I didn’t know,” I whisper, looking at Damien’s back. “Damien, I swear—”
“I know,” he says, but he still doesn’t turn around.
The phone vibrates:
You always believed she was fragile. That’s why you tried to protect her.
Damien exhales. “She survived because she’s strong.”
No. She survived because she learned when to go still. I recognised that.
Do you want to know the difference between us? You want to keep her. I want to see how far she’ll bend before she breaks.
The phone switches to live video again. The hallway. Our hallway. Now.
Someone is standing just outside the door. I scramble back, heart slamming against my ribs. “No, no, no—”
Damien moves, pushing me behind him. The video pauses with an overlay:
Relax. I’m not coming in.
The camera tilts down to show a hand lifting my necklace—the one I thought I lost weeks ago in the bathroom.
I told you. I don’t take what isn’t offered.
“How long?” Damien asks, his voice dropping an octave.
Long enough. Ask her about the dreams.
Damien turns to me, his eyes searching. “What dreams?”
I shake my head, but the memory of being awake but unable to move—the dreams where I wake up calm and empty, the air smelling of something I couldn’t place—floods back. “I didn’t think they mattered,” I whisper.
The phone vibrates:
They mattered to me.
The screen goes black with one last message:
You don’t need to choose yet. I’m patient. But next time, I won’t stay on the other side of the door.
The phone dies. Silence crashes down around us like the lid of a casket. Damien catches me as my legs give out. “This isn’t your fault,” he says, but his voice isn’t steady. River didn’t want to scare me; he wanted to introduce himself. And now that he has, nothing in me feels untouched anymore.
I don’t sleep. Damien paces, checking every vent and corner, pulling out drawers, his eyes darting to the shadows.
He keeps a hand on me at all times—ankle, wrist, throat—as a constant pulse to prove I am still here.
Hours crawl by until a smell—clean, cold, faintly metallic—fills the room.
Damien goes still. “Don’t move,” he murmurs.
Beside the bed, a white envelope has appeared on the floor where there was only carpet a moment ago. Damien reaches for it, but the phone on the bedside table lights up: She should open it. You already had your turn.
Inside the envelope is a key and a sheet of paper with an address—the place I stopped talking about because no one believed me. The therapy centre with the high white walls and the boy who whispered about moths and disappeared before the morning.
You learned how to go still there. I learned how to wait. “He’s lying,” I whisper, though the key feels heavy with truth.
The phone responds:
You were fourteen the first time you realised silence could protect you. I was sixteen when I realised it could be used. The boy with moths. The one the doctors told me never existed.
“What did he look like?” Damien asks, his voice tight.
“Tall,” I whisper, my eyes fixed on the past. “Dark hair. He always stood in the shadows, catching the moths that hit the glass.”
You remembered me exactly right. You survived because you learned when to submit to silence. I survived because I learned how to own it.
I don’t let go of the key. Damien asks me what feels familiar. I close my eyes and see the dark room, the smell of dust and old paper, counting my breaths to keep the screaming at bay. One. Two. Three.
“He didn’t hurt me,” I tell Damien, desperately needing it to be true. “He just stayed when everyone else left.”
I never asked you to obey. You chose stillness because it worked.
“You were a child,” Damien says, his voice breaking with pity.
And what do you call teaching her that pain means protection? You both taught her how to survive. I just started earlier.
I look at the key. It has my initials scratched into the metal: R.M. Memory slams into me—a hand pressing this cold brass into my palm years ago as I stood by the exit. In case you need to come back. “I never had a key,” I whisper, but the weight of it in my hand says otherwise.
You didn’t escape that place alone. You were let go.
If that’s true, my survival wasn’t an accident. It was curated. River has the first version of me that learned how to disappear, and now he’s come to collect the rest of the soul.
I don’t tell Damien my thoughts. If I go back to that address, I’ll understand.
“Where did you just go?” Damien asks, sensing the shift in me.
“Nowhere,” I lie, the word tasting like ash.
The phone shows a location pin. Damien refuses to let me go, his grip tightening on my shoulders, but I tell him I need to go without him.
“Because of him?” he asks, his eyes dark with pain.
“Because of me. I’m walking toward the part of me he thinks he owns, and I’m going to take it back or burn it down.”
Damien lets go, the claim loosened. “If you walk through that door, I can’t promise I’ll be able to protect you from what comes next.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
I don’t choose River or Damien. I choose the place where I learned to disappear.
I dress while Damien watches in a silence that feels like mourning. I keep the key visible in my hand.
“I’ll be close,” he says finally. “Not following. Not interfering. But I’ll be there.”
I turn toward the door. The lock clicks open—a sound that slices through the remains of our life together. I step into the hallway, the door closing behind me with a soft, final thud. And for the first time in years, no one tells me to be quiet.