"That's all!" he gasped when I'd finished one arm. "That's everyone I know!"
I believed him. Didn't matter. The other arm still had ink. Still had stories written in skin about who he'd chosen to become. When I was done, when both arms were raw and weeping, I stepped back to admire the work.
"You're insane," he whispered.
"No." I wiped the scalpel clean, precise as Gabriel had taught me. "I'm a product. Your product. All of us are what you made us."
The belt came off his waist easy—cheap leather, worn from use. I'd been strangled before. Knew exactly how much pressure it took, where to position the hands. He fought, but the tape held. His eyes bulged, vessels bursting like tiny fireworks.
Somewhere behind the blood roaring in my ears, I heard myself sobbing. Not for him. For all of them. For S-047 who should have died clean. For the girls in cages. For the woman I might have been if Gabriel hadn't found me first.
When it was over, when he was just meat like the others, I stood on shaking legs. Nathan hadn't moved from the doorway. Watching. Witnessing. Not intervening.
"Feel better?" he asked quietly.
"No." I looked at my hands. Blood under the nails. Blood in the creases. No amount of washing would make them clean. "But I don't feel worse either."
"That's what worries me."
The cleanup crew arrived— efficient and discreet. They processed the survivors, documented evidence, made bodies disappear. Professional trauma janitors, sweeping up the mess so the world could keep pretending it didn't exist.
I watched from the van, coming down from the violence high. Nathan sat beside me, not touching. He'd learned not to touch me after. Not until I asked.
"twenty-one names," he said eventually. "He gave us twenty-one new leads."
"Good." The word felt empty. They were all empty now. "How many more until we find Gabriel's current operation?"
"I don't know."
"How many more until I feel fixed?"
"That's not how this works."
I laughed, brittle as old bones. "Then how does it work? Because I'm running out of pieces to cut away."
The hotel was the same as always. Anonymous. Clean. No trace of what we'd done. I stood in the bathroom, watching pink water swirl down the drain. Third shower and I still felt coated in it. In them. In what I was becoming.
Nathan appeared in the doorway, still in his blood-stained clothes. We stared at each other in the mirror, two broken people playing at justice.
"I'm losing myself," I admitted.
"I know."
"You're letting me."
"I know that too."
Something snapped between us—the careful distance I'd been maintaining, the control he'd been exercising. I turned and kissed him hard, tasting copper and desperation. His hands tangled in my wet hair, pulling me closer.
"This is fucked up," he said against my mouth.
"Everything's fucked up." I pulled at his clothes, needing skin. Needing connection. Needing to feel something besides the void where my soul used to be. "Please. Make me feel human again."
We came together desperate, still half-dressed. My back against the bathroom counter, legs around his waist. No tenderness. No careful consent negotiations. Just need raw as exposed nerves.
"Harder," I demanded, nails digging into his shoulders.
He complied, driving into me like he could fuck the violence out of my system. Like he could reach the human underneath the weapon I was becoming. His teeth found my neck, biting down, and I cried out—pain and pleasure indistinguishable.
