The words throb against my skull, heavy and rhythmic, like a song I can’t shut off. I tear my eyes away from them, forcing myself to focus on the photo beneath, on the first fragment of where her story began.
Oxygen dims, sentences dissolve, and my mind forgets how to function the second she comes into view.
Therealher.
Her hair is chestnut, tangled and slick with sweat, streaked with flakes of dried blood. Strands cling stubbornly to her forehead, her cheek, the graceful curve of her neck. Her eyes, hollow and bottomless brown, stare back at me from the grainy photograph. Vacant, yes, yet charged with a volatile energy, a pulse that vibrates just beneath the surface—madness, rage, grief, all twisted together into something unrecognizable and fierce.
Bruises bloom across her skin, aching in their quiet violence. Scratches trail along her jaw and collarbone, pale against the pallor of her flesh. Her lip is split—a thin, jagged line of red—and I can almost trace the imprint of her teeth where she bit down hard enough to draw blood, as if she needed to feel something—anything—through the haze of mental agony.
The corners of her mouth dip slightly, a shadow of defiance etched into the dead calm of her face. And I find myselfwondering, absurdly, if the person who took this picture is still alive.
She wears something white, likely a sweatshirt, soaked with sweat and marred with smudges of blood. Flecks of dirt cling to the fabric, darkening it, turning the cloth into a map of struggle and chaos.
I stare into her eyes, unable to tear my gaze away. It feels like a circle closing in on itself, a sense that I’ve glimpsed this ghost before but never truly confronted her. The first photo I ever saw of her now seems tame, almost lifeless. In that image, she was alive, composed, lips tipped into the faintest smirk, untouchable and controlled. But this is something entirely different.
This isn’t Estella. This isn’t the calm, meticulous assassin I thought I knew.
This is a ghost. A fractured, furious girl suspended between life and whatever waits beyond it. Her eyes burn with a storm of raw, tangled emotion, each feeling layered into one unbearable pulse of intensity. It’s a force so fierce, so immediate, that it feels as if she could step right out of the screen and clamp her hands around the throat of anyone who dares to meet her gaze.
She radiates destruction—the kind that doesn’t just want to kill, but to consume. The kind that wants to burn the whole world for what it did to her.
I lose track of time, sitting motionless, my gaze locked on her. Seconds slip into minutes, minutes into hours, each one unnoticed, irrelevant. My eyes sting, the harsh glow of the monitor cutting into them without mercy, but I can’t look away.
I don’t want to. I am trapped in her orbit, tethered and unwilling to escape.
I want to understand her pain. To feel it deep inside. To trace the jagged edges of what shattered her and what forged her into something new, something dangerous, something alive.
I know I will never fully reach her, never completely bridge the distance, but sitting here in the heavy silence of the night, with her face staring back at me from the screen, feels like a fragile kind of connection. It is the closest I can come to being near her without breaking something sacred, without crossing a line that can never be undone.
A pause stretches between my breaths before my eyes return to the text near the image. The words sharpen, cutting through the quiet.
Patient Number Thirteen. Convicted of murdering her father and another inmate.
The words blur as the ache behind my eyes flares to life. I pinch the bridge of my nose, trying to crush the headache blooming between my temples.
Patient Number Thirteen.
That’s all she was to them.
A number. A case. A statistic.
I scroll down, frustration building with every line I read—frustration for her, for what they did to her, for what they turned her into. Because beneath all the clinical words, I can feel her screaming, unheard and unacknowledged, from the other side of the page.
I pull up the file that describes her family—starting with the father, the man she killed. A local cop and a beloved citizen. The kind of man people build small-town legends around. The report paints him as a saint—devoted to his work, adored by his neighbors, the perfect father, husband, and protector.
A man who could do no wrong.
I shake my head, the words slipping through my mind like oil spreading over water. Something feels wrong. Too much effort has been poured into painting him as squeaky clean, untarnished.
Nobody is perfect.
Especially not the men who usually need to be described that way.
I scroll further, searching for information about her mother, but find barely anything. A grain of detail with her name and a single photograph that looks decades old. She’s beautiful, with the same bone structure, the same quiet fire in her eyes that Estella had.
According to the report, she was a housewife, another adored figure in that picture-perfect village. Then a tragedy happened—a fire caused by a gas leak during a quiet night, which killed her instantly.
I freeze, my chest tightening as my eyes lock on the date—a full year after Iris’s supposed death at Gravemoor Asylum. A slow, deliberate chill snakes down my spine, curling through every nerve.
