CHAPTER 5.5
DAMIEN
The warehouse hums with silence—the kind that hangs after a storm. The kind of quiet that comes when men are dead and others are wishing they were.
Blood still stains the floor in streaks. Not fresh. Not dry. Just… permanent.
I sit at my desk in the back office, cigarette burning low between my fingers. The room stinks of iron and smoke and power. Loyalty is tested, bought, or buried in this place.
A low click echoes from the terrarium beside me.
Vex.
She’s perched perfectly still on her driftwood throne, eight black legs tucked like a queen waiting for an execution. Her glass box is cleaner than my soul. Sometimes I think she’s the only thing in this world I can’t break.
“She doesn’t know yet,” I murmur, watching her shift a leg, slow and deliberate. “Raven thinks she can play coy. Play prey. Like she’s not already tangled in the web I built for her.”
I flick ash into the tray beside me, lean back, and smile.
“But you see it, don’t you, girl? That sharp, brief glint in her eyes? Like she wants me to chase. Wants to be caught.”
I reach into the drawer and pull out the file. Not her file. Her file. The last one.
Juliet.
Even now, the name tastes like poison on my tongue.
I crack it open and let the rot spill out.
A photo slips free—her mouth twisted in that cruel little smile, the one she wore when she left. When she burned my flat to the ground and carved RUN into my wall with a kitchen knife.
“She thought she was clever,” I murmur, showing the photo to Vex. “Thought hurting me first meant she’d win.”
She didn’t win.
She just taught me how much pain it takes to finally snap.
I throw the photo into the ashtray and crush it with the butt of my cigarette.
Juliet was wildfire. She made me believe in chaos and called it love. She licked the blood from my knuckles and told me I was beautiful when I was most violent. And then she left—left me bleeding, shaking, craving more.
But Raven?
Raven is a different addiction.
“She thinks she’s surviving me,” I whisper, dragging my knife across the edge of the desk, gouging another line into the wood. “She thinks I’m chasing her because I’m unhinged.”
I grin. “But I’m not chasing her, Vex. I’m preparing her.”
I flick the switch behind the desk, and the monitor lights up. Hidden camera feeds flicker to life—her flat, her fire escape, the alley she smokes in every Thursday night at 1:42 a.m.
My sweet little ghost.
She hasn’t noticed the new camera yet. The one I mounted in the corner of her bedroom ceiling. The one that caught her curling into her sheets, whispering my name in her sleep.
“You heard it too, didn’t you?” I ask the spider. She doesn’t blink. “She said my name like a prayer. Like a curse she didn’t want lifted.”
I lean back, watching Raven on the screen—sitting cross-legged on her bed, headphones on, completely unaware she’s being studied like a fragile specimen.
“She’s better than Juliet,” I whisper. “Smarter. Softer in the right places. But harder too. She won’t break the same way. She’ll need… special attention.”
I glance at the wall across from me. The one with the photos. The strings. The sketches. The map of her daily life.
I’ve mapped her like a city I plan to invade.
And I will.
“She’ll thank me eventually,” I say, eyes still on the screen. “After the fear fades. After the walls crack. She’ll see that no one will ever love her the way I do.”
I lean in closer, watching her smile faintly at something on her screen.
“I just have to peel her apart slowly,” I whisper. “Like silk. Like skin. And when she’s raw and real and ruined—”
I smile.
“That’s when she’ll finally belong to me.”
Vex shifts again, resting at the very edge of the glass like she’s waiting for the next story.
And I have plenty more to tell her.
The monitors flicker. Raven moves across the screen—pacing now. She has that look again, like she’s trying to crawl out of her own skin.
I know that feeling.
I live it.
I pull the drawer open again, the one no one’s allowed to touch, and slide out the velvet-lined case. I crack it open slowly. The syringe gleams under the low warehouse lights, crystal glass and steel, filled with nothing but air.
Not heroin. Not poison.
Just a memory.
I hold it up to the light, watching the tiny bubbles shift. My hand trembles, and I curl it into a fist before the past can win.
Juliet made me weak once. She licked the sweat off my chest after I killed a man for her, told me I was beautiful when I bled. And then she left me gutted, made me feel things I didn’t want to feel.
And I let her.
That won’t happen again.
I push the case aside and pull my phone from the drawer. Tap the encrypted icon. Bring up the file marked RAVEN.
Dozens of recordings. Photos. Transcripts.
The one from last Tuesday plays automatically:
RAVEN (laughing): “I don’t know, maybe I’m just meant to be alone. Like… no one ever sees the real me. Not really.”
BARISTA (offscreen): “You’re just picky.”
RAVEN: “No. I’m just done giving pieces of myself to people who don’t know how to hold them.”
I rewound that line three times. I’ve memorised the cadence of her voice. I know when she’s lying. I know when she’s deflecting. I know she looks out the window when she talks about loneliness, like she’s trying not to cry.
“But I see you,” I murmur to the screen. “I see every fractured piece. Every place they dropped you. Every place I want to fill with something that only I can give.”
I grab my lighter and flick it open, the flame dancing. The photos on the wall—the ones of Juliet—curl and blacken. I let them burn.
She’s in the past.
Raven is the reason I survived it.
Raven was the first one, it was always her. I just wasn’t ready for her. I didn’t want to break her, not really. I wanted to bend her but I had to know how to hold her right without breaking her.
I sit back down in front of Vex’s tank, watching her shift across the sand with silent elegance. She’s patient. She waits. Just like me.
“You remember Juliet, don’t you?” I whisper. “You remember what I did after she ran. I let it ruin me.”
Vex crawls across the glass.
“But Raven will not run. You know why?”
I reach for the hidden switch under my desk. The monitor view flips—from Raven’s bedroom cam to the one I just installed in the floorboards beneath it. Infrared. Night vision. Movement tracking.
“Because this time, I’m not leaving the door unlocked.”
I press my fingers to the screen, tracing her outline like she’s already mine.
Because in my mind?
She is.
“You’ll love her, too,” I murmur to Vex. “She’s just like us. Hungry. Alone. Waiting for someone to come along and cage her right.”
I smile—slow and cruel and calm.
Because I’m done playing pretend.
The next time Raven sees me?
There won’t be any warnings.
Just silk.
And steel.
And a trap that never lets her leave.
I light another cigarette. The smoke curls through the dim room, weaving itself through the scent of blood, petrol, and dust—everything sacred. Everything mine.
Vex twitches in her glass kingdom, tilting just slightly toward me, like she’s listening.
“You remember that night?” I murmur, eyes unfocused, still watching Raven on the monitor. “The one where she wore the black dress and pretended she didn’t know I was watching?”
I close my eyes.
And it hits like a gunshot.
FLASHBACK — TWO MONTHS AGO
Rain. Neon. Her heels click against the pavement like a countdown to something holy.
She’s laughing—soft, distracted—as she exits the bar with that fucking bartender. The one who thinks because he remembers her drink order, he gets to touch her.
He puts a hand on her back. Lower than her spine. Too familiar. Too casual.
And she lets him.
I watch from across the street, half-shielded by the shadow of a crumbling awning, my fists clenched in the pockets of my coat.
Her head tips back when he says something stupid and charming. She laughs as if it means nothing.
But to me?
It’s treason.
I watch him touch my girl.
I watch her smile at him.
And something inside me splits.
Not a crack.
A shatter.
I don’t remember crossing the street. Only the moment I’m standing right behind him, breathing in her perfume like a drowning man gasping for oxygen.
She doesn’t see me.
He doesn’t hear me.
But I hear everything.
“Thanks for walking me out,” she says, reaching for her keys. Her fingers are shaking slightly.
She always shakes when she’s uncomfortable. When she doesn’t want to be touched but doesn’t want to make a scene.
He leans in.
And I nearly killed him.
Not physically.
Not yet.
But mentally? Emotionally? Spiritually?
I see every way I could end him without making a sound. A blade behind the ribs. A garrotte in the alley. A quiet shove under a passing car.
“Night, Raven,” he says, brushing her hand.
She walks away.
And I follow the bartender.
Two blocks.
Then three.
Until we’re alone.
He never sees my face. Only the fist.
One punch to his jaw, another to his ribs, and he’s down.
I kneel beside him, not out of mercy. Out of ritual.
“She’s not yours,” I whisper, low and calm. “You don’t get to look at her. You don’t get to breathe the same air.”
He chokes on blood and a broken tooth.
I leave him there, rain washing away the evidence, and disappear into the dark.
I exhale smoke slowly, watching it hit the glass where Vex sits motionless.
“He didn’t touch her again,” I murmur, dragging a scar down the desk with the tip of my knife. “Didn’t look at her. Quit the bar two weeks later. Funny how silence keeps people obedient.”
I lean forward, hands braced on the desk.
“She still doesn’t know I was there that night. She still thinks it was a coincidence. Or fate.”
I grin, teeth sharp behind the cigarette.
“But we know better, don’t we, girl?”
Vex shifts one leg, flexing slowly across her driftwood. Watching me. Still. Quiet.
Just like Raven will be.
Soon.
Because that bartender was the first.
But he won’t be the last.
And the next man who even thinks about putting his hands on her?
Won’t crawl away.