CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT
DAMIEN
She’s quieter today.
Not in the way she used to be—curled in on herself, flinching at her own shadow.
This is different.
Measured.
Like she’s rehearsing normal.
She moved through the apartment this morning like she was performing a scene from a script she only half-remembered. Coffee. Shower. A question about groceries. Her voice too even. Her smile too still.
But her eyes?
Her eyes won’t stay on mine for more than three seconds at a time.
And I know her.
She looks away only when she’s keeping something in.
The silence stretches between us like it’s trying to say something neither of us will.
She’s sitting on the couch now, pretending to scroll. I can see the screen from here. It’s off. Black. Just a reflection of her own face staring back at her.
I turn back to the monitors.
But I don’t watch her through the cameras.
I watch her through the glass on the far side of the room.
Live.
Unfiltered.
I want to say something. I want to ask.
But I won’t.
Because whatever she’s holding—it’s not ready to surface.
And I’m not sure I want to see what’s underneath.
So, I do what I’ve always done when I feel the edge creeping in.
I catalog.
1. Note delivered without breach record.
2. Paper, not digital
3. Language: personal, historical
4. Her withdrawal—slow, deliberate
5. The chapel reference
6. My own surveillance—compromised once
7. My grip—slipping
That last one burns.
Because it’s the only one that matters.
If I’d seen it sooner—back then, before she moved in, before I ever touched her, before I ever let her crawl—
Maybe I’d know what this is.
Who this is.
But I was too focused on being the predator to see the other one.
And now?
Now I’m bleeding trust by the hour.
I open a hidden file—one she doesn’t know exists. One no one knows exists.
And I add a new line:
Contingency Plan: Raven Extraction
Because if this is what I think it is—if someone else is circling her, close enough to know where to leave a message and what it should say—then this is a game with new rules.
And I don’t know who’s writing them.
Not yet.
But I will.
Because I don’t need to chase shadows.
They come to me.
But when the apartment finally goes still, I can hear it again — that hum.
Low. Constant. Crawling through the vents like memory made sound.
It isn’t the system this time. It isn’t feedback or static. It’s older than that. Deeper. A frequency that lives in my bones, one I grew up breathing.
The same hum that haunted the chapel.
The same one that seeped through plaster and prayer and the slow scrape of leather against skin.
My throat locks because I know that sound, and I know the man who made it.
He used to hum when he hurt me.
Softly.
Like worship.
Like he wanted God to hear what he’d made.
And when I close my eyes, it’s all there again—the shadowed pews, the candle smoke, the altar steps slick with wax and something darker. His hand at the back of my neck. His breath in my ear. The whisper I thought I’d buried.
Good boy. Don’t move.
I flinch, but only inside. Never on the outside.
Across the room, Raven shifts on the couch. Her head tips against the cushion, her fingers twitch, her body caught somewhere between waking and a dream. She doesn’t remember. Not the sound. Not the chapel. Not the man.
But I do.
And I can feel him crawling back through the cracks I thought I sealed shut.
Maybe he never left.
Maybe he just changed the hymn.
I look down at my hands—the scarred knuckles, the ink stretched tight over skin I once carved to make him stop seeing me as prey.
Venator.
Hunter.
But what if that’s exactly what he wanted me to become?
What if that was the point all along?
The thought settles heavy behind my ribs, slow and inevitable, like rot in clean water. Because if the priest is still out there—if he’s the one who left that note—then this isn’t a haunting. It’s a resurrection.
And the worst part isn’t that he’s coming back.
It’s that he never really left.
He’s still here.
In the hum.
In the walls.
In me.
I watch Raven breathe, slow and even, her chest rising with the rhythm of someone who trusts what she shouldn’t. And I wonder—when she finally remembers that night, when she finally sees him for what he was—will she still look at me the same way?
Or will she recognise the echo?
Because I wasn’t just made by him.
I was made to replace him.
And the only thing worse than being haunted by the past—
Is realising you’ve become it.
The hum doesn’t stop.
It just changes pitch.