Chapter 2
RAVEN
I sat with my cane upright between my knees, my grip white-knuckled on the handle and my head spinning.
My mind wouldn't leave the alley.
Logic told me to let it go. It was just a little shortcut to the bus stop I took nearly every night. Nothing weird there. A dirty, damp, rat-infested strip of asphalt behind the restaurant where the dumpsters lived that always smelled like rotting cabbage and stale beer.
But it wasn't nothing. Tonight... tonight the air had been different. And it had nothing to do with the weather.
As I waited for my stop, I replayed the tape of memories in my head, rewinding the sensory input I'd recorded to analyze later.
The door latch clicking behind me. The sudden change in temperature from the restaurant. Two steps forward. Cane sweep left. Cane sweep right.
There'd been a smell that wasn't the usual garbage decay. It was sharp and metallic, like copper pennies and salt. The smell sat high in the throat, coating the back of my tongue.
And then there was the silence.
Alleys aren’t quiet. They hiss with steam pipes, scuttle with vermin, hum with distant traffic.
But back there, the silence had been vacuum-sealed.
Like when something dangerous walks through a forest and all of the birds and animals go still and quiet.
Or the kind of silence that happens when a room full of people suddenly stops talking because you walked in and you forgot to wear pants. The air felt pregnant. Expectant.
Like someone holding their breath.
I'd faltered, just for a second, and then I kept walking. I remembered the sensation of my sneaker sliding on something slick—not a puddle of water, something else. Oil, maybe? Or grease?
Maybe, I told myself, the bus brakes squealing as we neared my stop.
But the hair on my arms hadn't settled since I walked out that door. My instincts, usually dialed to a frequency most people ignored, were screaming that I wasn't the only one who'd been in that alley.
I'd felt the eyes on the back of my head until I made it out to the main road.
"Third and Elm," the automated voice announced.
I pushed up from the seat, navigating the aisle by the rhythmic sway of the bus. I knew the count—six steps to the door, grab the rail, step down.
"Watch your step, love," the driver mumbled kindly.
"I’ve got it," I said, my voice tighter than intended. I hit the pavement and snapped my cane out, the tip finding the curb instantly. I didn't need help. I didn't need to be watched.
But as I walked the remaining two blocks to my apartment building, weaving through the familiar sidewalk cracks and counting my steps by muscle memory alone, I couldn't shake the sensation of heat between my shoulder blades.
That prickling awareness that someone's eyes were on me, tracking my every movement.
I told myself it was paranoia. Residual adrenaline from whatever the hell I'd walked through in that alley. But my body knew better. My body always knew.
The feeling didn't fade until I reached my building's main entrance and slipped inside, the heavy door closing behind me with a reassuring thunk of metal on metal. I checked my mailbox, and then headed toward the stairs.
My apartment was neat and orderly. Not because I was some kind of clean freak, but because it had to be. My 600 square ft home was the only place where I knew exactly where everything was, down to the millimeter.
Keys in the bowl at the three o'clock position on the console table. Coat on the second hook. Cane collapsed and placed in the ceramic umbrella stand.
I exhaled, the tension in my shoulders finally loosening as I locked the deadbolt into place. Sometimes, this new life of mine was exhausting.
Moving to the kitchen, I counted steps unconsciously. One, two, three, turn left. I reached for the kettle without fumbling, filling it by the weight of the water, knowing the exact heft of a full cup. While the water boiled for tea, I leaned against the counter and rubbed my temples.
My feet throbbed. I’d been wearing my shoes for too long. I kicked off the right one, sighing as my arch released when I placed my bare foot on the floor.
I went to kick off the left one, bracing the heel against my other foot, but it didn't lift cleanly. There was a sound.
A sticky, peeling sound against the linoleum I'd vaguely noticed when I first walked inside.
I froze for a few seconds before I used bare toes to slide it off my foot.
Crouching down, my hand hovering over the floor, I found the shoe and ran my fingertips along the sole. The tread, usually rough and gritty with city dirt, was filled with something tacky. It wasn't gum. Gum was lumpy. This was something that coated the entire bottom of my shoe.
I brought my fingers to my nose.
The smell hit me instantly. The same thing I'd smelled in the alley, only this time, without the other smells from the city mixed with it, I knew exactly what it was.
Blood.
Copper pennies and salt. That specific, unmistakable iron-tang that separated it from any other smell.
I recoiled, dropping my shoe and scrambling backward until my back hit the cabinets. My heart hammered a frantic rhythm against my ribs, and my breath came in short, sharp gasps that I couldn't control.
It wasn't grease in the alley outside of my job. It was blood. And a lot of it, to coat the bottom of my sneaker like that and make it all the way back to my apartment. Enough to still be tacky after the walk home. Enough to still carry that smell.
The metallic scent acted like a tripwire in my brain, bypassing logic and detonating a memory I had spent two years trying to bury behind the walls in my mind…
Flashes of light. Screeching tires. The horrifying crunch of metal folding like paper—a sound I still heard sometimes in the middle of the night. The smell of radiator fluid and wet earth and…blood.
Then the silence. The absolute, suffocating silence after impact, broken only by my own ragged breathing.
"Daddy?"
Nothing but the ticking of the cooling engine.
I try to open my eyes. I blink, expecting the stars, the headlights, the moon. Anything. Even the dashboard lights would be something. Just a sliver of illumination to prove the world I know still exists.
But there's only darkness. A heavy, wool-blanket of darkness pressed against my face. Against my eyes. Smothering everything.
The panic is immediate. My hands fly to my face, wet with something I can't comprehend, pawing at my eyes like I can wipe the darkness away. Like it's something external that can be removed.
It's not.
"Daddy, I can't see. Daddy?"
My voice is small. Childlike. I haven't sounded like that since I was eight years old and afraid of thunderstorms.
I reach out with shaking fingers. My hand finds his arm.
It's warm and wet, like my face. Too wet.
And it's spreading, soaking through his sleeve, coating my palm.
I shake him, desperate for a response, for movement, for anything.
My fingers slide down to his wrist, searching for a pulse I can't find—
"No," I gasped, the word tearing out of my throat in the quiet kitchen.
The present slammed back into me like a second collision. I wasn't in the car. I was in my apartment sitting in the kitchen. I was okay. I was home. I was safe.
I scrambled up, rushing to the sink, clipping my hip on the drawer handle hard enough that pain bloomed bright and sharp.
Turning the faucet on full blast, I shoved my hands under the scalding water.
It burned me, but I didn't fucking care.
I scrubbed the blood from my fingers until my skin turned raw, breathing hard through my nose and fighting back the bile rising in my throat.
I wasn't that girl anymore. I wasn't the twenty-four-year-old screaming in the wreckage, clawing at her own face, covered in her father's blood. I was Raven Oakley. And I was a survivor.
I had to be.
Finding my shoe, I grabbed it off the floor, thrusting the sole under the stream of water, and scrubbed it violently with the dish brush.
The water swirling down the drain would be pink.
I knew this, even if I couldn't see it. In my mind's eye, where I could still see colors, I watched it, crimson swirling into the clear water.
Get it off. Get it off.
I scrubbed until the tackiness was gone, until the smell was drowned out by lemon dish soap.
When it was finally clean, I left the shoe drying in the sink, put the other one in its spot by the door, and retreated to the living room, curling up on the sofa. Pulling my knees to my chest, I wrapped my arms around them.
The anger came next. It always did, chasing the fear away like a wolf chasing a rabbit.
I was angry at the alley. Angry at the blood. Angry at the panic that made me feel small and broken again.
Ever since the accident, everyone treated me like I was made of spun glass. Poor Raven. So tragic. She had such a bright future. They spoke in hushed tones when I entered a room, as if blindness was contagious, or as if I couldn't hear the pity in their voices.
But I could. I could hear everything.
I hated the gentleness. The hands of strangers hovering at my elbows to guide me over curbs I'd already mapped. The soft voices explaining things I already understood. They stripped me of my edges, sanding me down until I was smooth and harmless.
But I wasn't harmless.
And I wasn't helpless.
I sat there in the dark apartment—what was the point of turning on the lights?—seething. Someone had bled in that alley. Someone had likely died. And I'd walked right through it, completely oblivious, tapping my little white cane like a good little disabled girl.
If I could see...
I cut the thought off. If changed nothing. If was a poisonous thought that did nothing to help me.
I was blind. My father was dead. The restaurant he'd put his life into was owned by Russian mobsters who used it to launder money and god knew what else while I played piano for their clueless customers. That was the reality of my new life, and I'd grown used to it.
But tonight, the reality felt different. Dangerous. Because I'd stumbled upon something I shouldn't have.
And I didn't…hate it.
I touched the scar on my hairline, hidden by my bangs.
I'd lived so carefully since the accident.
So safe. I missed the danger. I missed the adrenaline of driving too fast, drinking too much, dancing with the wrong guys who were still sexy as hell, of taking risks.
Now, my biggest risk was crossing the street or navigating a crowded room.
Why didn't they stop me? If there was a body, if there was a crime scene... why let the blind pianist walk right through the evidence?
Unless they thought I didn't matter. Unless they thought I wouldn't notice.
My fingers tightened on the cane handle until my knuckles ached. People always underestimated me. They thought darkness made me stupid.
They were wrong.