She's there.
What remains of her, anyway.
The metal chair is bolted to a concrete slab someone dragged to the cliff's edge long before I arrived. A previous tenant of vengeance, perhaps. This place has that energy—soaked in endings, baptized in the kind of finality that seeps into the soil and poisons the roots of anything foolish enough to try growing here.
Vivian is bound to it with industrial-grade restraints, though they're hardly necessary at this point. Her body is a patchwork of surgical precision and deliberate cruelty—stitched back together in places where I'd opened her up, the black thread pulling taut against swollen, discolored flesh that weeps fluid inthin, continuous streams. Her designer curves—the ones she'd purchased rather than earned, the BBL and the implants and all that carefully constructed artifice—are unrecognizable now.
Everything about her was always a fabrication.
Her body. Her name. Her love.
At least now the outside matches.
Her head hangs forward, chin touching the ruin of her collarbone. What was once perfectly maintained blonde hair—dyed to differentiate herself from my natural brunette, as if changing the surface could change the substance—now hangs in matted, blood-crusted tangles that obscure most of her face. Her jaw is slack, and behind her cracked, colorless lips, the hollow cavity of her mouth sits empty and dark.
Her tongue is gone.
I removed it on the second day, after she'd spent sixteen hours alternating between screaming threats and begging for forgiveness. The audacity of it—switching between promising to destroy me and pleading for my mercy in the same ragged breath—was what made the decision so easy.
You used that tongue to steal my life.
To whisper your lies into Holmes's ear.
To introduce yourself as Victoria Sinclair to every room you entered as if the name had always been yours.
As if I'd never existed at all.
Her breathing is the only indication she's still technically alive. Thin, reedy wheezes that barely displace the air in front of her lips. Each inhale sounds like paper tearing—slow and fragile, as though her lungs have forgotten their purpose and are simply going through the motions out of biological stubbornness rather than any genuine will to survive.
Her heart beats.
Barely.
A faint, arrhythmic pulse visible in the damaged vein at her throat that I chose not to sever.
Not out of mercy.
Out of spite.
I walk toward her.
My boots are silent against the stone—the same black combat boots I've been wearing for three days straight. They're scuffed now, stained in ways that won't wash out, and I find I don't care. Fashion was always Vivian's obsession. The designer dresses, the calculated aesthetics, the way she curated her appearance the way a museum curates an exhibit—everything positioned for maximum impact, nothing left to chance or genuine expression.
I dressed for function.
She dressed for deception.
And in the end, all those pretty clothes couldn't protect her from the consequences.
I stop two feet in front of the chair and stare down at her.
Nothing.
That's what I feel.
I search for it—actively, deliberately probe the spaces inside my chest where emotions are supposed to live—and find only a vast, echoing stillness. No satisfaction. No grief. No triumph or guilt or the cathartic release that every revenge fantasy promises but never delivers. Just... absence. The emotional equivalent of walking into a room you've spent years trying to reach only to find it completely, devastatingly empty.
Maybe this is what they don't tell you about vengeance.
