Chapter 22
RAVEN
Pain woke me. Not all at once but in layers, like a symphony tuning up.
First the dull bass note throbbing through my ribs, then the sharper strings of my cheekbone, my jaw, the split skin above my eyebrow where something had opened and dried and pulled tight.
Then everything else joined in, a full-body crescendo of hurt that made me gasp before I even remembered how to breathe.
I tried to move and my muscles screamed in protest, locked rigid, like they'd been clenched for hours and forgotten how to let go. Every joint felt welded shut. My throat was hoarse and raw, and when I swallowed, the pain was so bright and immediate that my eyes watered behind closed lids.
But I was lying on something soft. A bed? Clean sheets that smelled like detergent and nothing else. No lavender fabric softener, no trace of my own shampoo in the pillowcase.
My fingers curled into the cotton sheets and I listened.
Wind was blowing outside, low and steady, pressing against what sounded like a single-pane window.
No traffic. No bass thrum of a highway. No sirens, no horns, no eighteen-wheelers downshifting on the interstate.
I heard birds. And something that might have been crickets, though the rhythm was wrong for Austin.
There were too many, and they were too loud.
Something told me I wasn't in Austin anymore.
I could smell the slightest hint of pine in the air. Not air freshener pine, real pine from trees. Underneath it, something medical. Antiseptic. And beneath all of that, so faint I almost missed it—
The ocean at night and clean soap.
Milo.
He was in the room with me, but his breathing was wrong. It sounded shallow and tired, the rhythm interrupted by near silent sounds of distress.
I opened my eyes. Not that it mattered. The darkness was the same as it always was. But the reflex was still there, two years later. Wake up. Open your eyes. Hope.
At least the crushing feeling I always felt when I realized I still couldn't see wasn't as bad now.
"Milo." His name was barely a whisper, forced through a throat that felt like it had been scraped with steel wool.
A chair creaked. The sound of weight shifting forward, and then his breathing was closer. Right beside the bed. I heard him swallow. Heard the wet, thick sound of a man trying to speak through something sitting heavy in the middle of his chest.
"I'm here." The words sounded like they'd been dragged out of him with pliers.
I tried to sit up. The pain detonated through my ribcage and I couldn't hide a small, hoarse cry.
His hand was on my shoulder immediately. "Don't. Don't move yet. Let me call the doctor. He's been waiting for you to wake up."
His touch was careful. So careful it made my skin crawl, and at first I didn't remember why I was acting this way.
The memory hit me like a truck, all at once, and I suddenly remembered…because the last time his hands had been on me, they hadn't been careful at all.
The drive. The chair. His fist. His voice, flat and mechanical, asking questions I couldn't answer. The cigarette smoke from the man in the chair. Viktor. Viktor sitting there, watching, while Milo—
While Milo—
My hand shot out and found his wrist. Gripped it hard.
"Where am I?"
"You're at a safe house in South Dakota. In the middle of nowhere."
South Dakota. I turned that over in my mind, tried to make it fit into what I remembered.
I tried to swallow. "How long?"
He handed me a glass of water, but I shook my head. I didn't trust him.
"We've been here about a day and a half. The drugs kept you under longer than I expected."
Drugs. The needle sliding into the crook of my arm. The chemical cold flooding my veins, slowing everything to a crawl, pulling me down into a darkness I felt like I'd never be able to claw my way out of—
"You drugged me."
"Yes."
"You beat me."
He was silent for a very long time.
"Yes," he finally said.
I released his wrist. Not because I wanted to let go, but because touching him was making it impossible to think, and I needed to think. I needed to understand why I was alive and in South Dakota and in pain and not dead on the floor of a warehouse south of Bastrop.
"Talk more," I managed to say.
He did.
The story came out in fragments. The easy drawl, the laid-back charm, the obsessive focus…it was gone. All gone. And what was underneath couldn't string together complete sentences.
"The only way out was to make it real," Milo said.
His voice was a little steadier now, but barely.
"Viktor was there in the room with us. Less than ten feet away.
Watching everything. If your reactions weren't real.
If you hesitated, if you responded to something I said wrong, if anything felt rehearsed—he would've seen it.
And we'd both be dead right now." He paused.
"There was no other way out." Another pause.
"I'm so fucking sorry. There was no other way… " His voice faded away.
I lay there and absorbed this.
The bruises were real. The pain was real.
There was no faking the fire in my ribcage or the nausea in my stomach or the way my face felt tight and swollen and hot, the bones aching, or the way my throat felt like I'd been screaming for hours, because I had.
I'd screamed until my voice gave out and then I'd kept screaming in silence.
I remembered it all clearly. Every plea.
Every sob. Every time I called his name.
"A drug cocktail," he was saying. "Midazolam and fentanyl. It slowed your heart to almost nothing. Your breathing went invisible. To the camera—to Viktor—you looked dead."
That explained the taste in my mouth. "How did you get me out?"
"I had to leave them a body, and so I did."
I absorbed that information. Then, "They'll know it's not me…"
"No," he told me. "They won't. Raven Oakley is dead," he said quietly. “Little bird…" Once again, whatever he was about to say got stuck in his throat.
The words hung in the air between us. I let them settle. Let them sink into the mattress and the sheets and the dark, unfamiliar room that smelled like pine and antiseptic and the man who'd broken me to save me.
Raven Oakley is dead.
I waited for the grief to hit. The loss of my name, my apartment, my piano at The Silver Table, my memories of my father, the coffee shop where the barista knew my order, even the sidewalk cracks I'd memorized step by step over two years of rebuilding a life in the dark…
All gone.
But the grief didn't come. Not yet. Something else came first.
Rage.
It hit like a wall of sound—sudden, deafening, and obliterating everything in its path. Chasing the pain and the confusion and the image in my mind of Viktor in that chair, smoking, watching, and Milo's fists and Milo's voice asking me questions he already knew the answers to while I—
"You could have told me." The words tore out of my throat.
"No, I couldn't."
"You could have warned me. Given me something—a signal, a word, anything—"
"Viktor was in the room." His voice didn't waver.
"If your reactions weren't real, he would have seen it.
The man has watched people die more times than either of us can count.
He knows what real fear looks like. He knows what real pain sounds like.
And if anything—anything, Raven—had rung false, he would've put a bullet in both of us and called it a productive evening. "
"So you let me think I was going to die."
"Yes."
"You let me beg. You let me scream your name. You let me call you a monster—"
"Yes."
"While he sat there and watched."
"Yes."
Each yes landed like a blow. Not because they were cruel. Because they were honest. He wasn't defending himself. Wasn't softening it. Wasn't wrapping the truth in excuses or explanations.
He was giving me the facts. Here's what happened. Here's the blood. Here's the mess.
Clean it up or don't, but this is what it is.
"You made me believe I was dying, Milo. I felt it, you know. The needle, the cold in my veins, my heart slowing down—I thought that was the end. I thought the last thing I would ever feel was your hand on my face and I—"
My voice cracked. I hated it. Hated the tremor, hated the weakness, hated that even now, even knowing what I knew, the memory of his hand on my cheek in those final seconds still made something inside me ache.
"I know," he said.
"You don't know. You don't know what it's like to—" I stopped. Pressed my palms into the mattress and breathed through the pain in my ribs and reorganized myself the way I reorganized a room in my mind: systematically, corner by corner, until the geography made sense.
He waited. Didn't fill the silence. Didn't try to touch me. Just waited for me to finish dismantling him or forgiving him or whatever the hell I was going to do.
I laid there in my rage for a long time as it burned hot and then banked. Not completely gone, but settling into coals that would glow for a long time.
And underneath the rage was something so much worse.
Betrayal.
Because the rage was about what he'd done.
The betrayal was about who he'd been while he did it.
He'd become someone else. The warmth I'd learned to read in his breathing, the gentleness in his hands, the voice that whispered little bird against my throat—that man was gone.
Replaced with someone cold and mechanical and professional, and he'd done it so completely that I couldn't tell the difference between the two men.
And I didn't know anymore which one was real.
"Were you working with them?" I asked. "Was I just…" I couldn't bring myself to ask it, but his answer was harsh and immediate.
"No. Fuck, Raven. No."
I thought I felt the lightest brush of his fingers on my face, but it was gone before I could be sure.
"No, little bird. The thing with you and me, that was real. I swear to you, it was all real. It still is."
I believed him. It may have been stupid of me, but I did.
"But you're not completely wrong about me," he said quietly.
"I am a monster. Deep down, I am. And for that, for what I had to do to get us both out of there alive…
I won't apologize. No matter how it kills me to look at you now and see what I did, I won't apologize.
Even if you never forgive me. Because the thought of a world without you in it was not acceptable to me, so I did what I had to do to keep you in it.
For me. Because I'm too fucking selfish to let you go. "
This time there was something in his voice that I couldn't quite read.
Not guilt. Guilt would've been simpler. This was the sound of a man who'd calculated the cost of his actions before he'd started and paid it willingly, and was now sitting in the wreckage.
There wasn't even a shred of hope in his tone that he'd come out of it unscathed. Just acceptance of what was.
I lay there for a long time. Long enough that the light through the window must have shifted, because the warmth on the bed moved from my feet to my shins.
Long enough that his breathing evened out slightly, then went ragged again, like his body kept trying to stabilize and his mind wouldn't let it.
The things that happened in that building kept replaying over and over in my head.
I'd assumed the beating he gave me was random.
Methodical but random. But now, with what he'd told me reframing everything, I realized he could've hurt me a lot worse than he did.
Instead, he'd hurt me expertly. Professionally.
Just enough to sell the performance without destroying what came after.
And he'd never touched my hands. My hands that were everything to me. The only tool I had left.
He'd never touched my hands.
I hated that the logic was sound.
I hated that, even now, even processing this through a fog of pain and fury and drugs still clearing my system, I could see the architecture of what he'd done and recognize it for what it was. Every blow placed to maximize the show for Viktor while minimizing the long-term damage to me.
He'd broken me to save me.