His mother went a lot too—fractured ribs, concussions, injuries explained away as falls.
Everyone knew.
No one stopped it.
His father liked to beat him with a deck of playing cards. He called it teaching.
Later, Rook grew up and built his crew, naming them the Broken Court. It was all other damaged people categorized in the four sections of a deck of cards—diamonds, clubs, spades, and hearts. The diamonds earned the money to fund his mission of madness. The clubs were the muscle. They helped him kill. The spades staged the bodies or got rid of them. And the hearts were the bunch that did the day-to-day things—cooking, cleaning, etc.
What will happen when I meet him?
I'd interviewed other serial killers in maximum security prisons. I'd sat across from men who had done unspeakable things and kept my voice steady, my hands still, my face professionally neutral.
This was different.
Those men had been contained. Finished. Their stories already written, their violence safely in the past tense.
Rook's story was still being told.
And I had the terrible feeling I was about to become a chapter in it.
Stay calm.
We entered Block D and I spotted a member of the Broken Court.
A club.
He had the symbol branded onto his forehead.
When he saw me, his whole body went rigid. Then he started bouncing—actually bouncing, like a child who'd been promised a present, and then his palms started slapping against the glass in a frantic rhythm. “She’s here!! She’s here!!”
I tensed.
My clinical mind tried to categorize it—hypomania, religious delusion, shared psychosis—but my body wasn't listening to my mind. My body wanted to run. My body remembered, on some cellular level, what it meant to be prey.
The club then began laughing and crying at the same time. "Glory to Rook! She’s here!"
I kept walking.
My hands had started to shake.
The next cell held a Diamond—a massive gamma with hands like dinner plates.
Gammas were the forgotten middle children of designation biology. Not dominant enough to be Alphas, not submissive enough to be Omegas, not neutral enough to be Betas. They existed in the genetic in-between—stronger than Betas, prone to aggression, but without the pheromone production or bonding instincts that made Alphas valuable.
Society didn't know what to do with them, so it mostly pretended they didn't exist.
Sigmas were even rarer. Lone wolves by biology, not choice. Their systems rejected pack bonds entirely. They couldn't scent-match, couldn't pair-bond, couldn't feel the pull that drove the rest of us toward connection. Some called them evolutionary dead ends. Others called them free.
Most of them ended up in places like this.
This Gamma had traced hearts all over his walls, hundreds of them, layered so thick the concrete had disappeared.
When he saw me, he slammed his fists against the glass so hard the impact echoed through the corridor.
I jumped.
"The Queen!!" He beat at the glass again. "The Queen! The promised one! Bless me! Please!”
