Instead, I’m listening for the sound of his boots.
“Stop it. Fucking stop it!”
I grab the teacup and hurl it at the fireplace. It shatters, the orange-scented liquid spraying across the marble like a weak, pathetic imitation of the blood he spilled.
I want to kill him. I want to be the one to end the Hale line. I want to see him realise, in his final moments, that he couldn’t break me. But as I stand there, chest heaving, staring at the broken porcelain, I know the truth.
I’m already broken.
The pieces are all there, but they’ve been glued back together in his image. I’m a creature of his making now, a girl who finds safety in the arms of a butcher.
I sink back onto the floor, my face buried in my hands, sobbing for the woman I used to be and the monster I’ve become. I’m waiting for him. I’m waiting for the man who destroyed me to come back and tell me that I’m the only thing that matters.
And I hate him for it. But I hate myself more.
I stand up, my movements jerky and fuelled by a frantic, self-loathing energy. If I stay in this room, the walls will swallow me whole.
I push past the heavy double doors, my bare feet silent on the cold marble of the hallway. The house is a cathedral of stolen wealth. It’s too quiet—the kind of silence that feels like a bated breath. I wander past oil paintings of grim-faced ancestors whose eyes follow me with a shared, ancestral cruelty. The air smells of beeswax, old books, and the faint, lingering metallic tang of last night’s “laundry” downstairs.
I find myself in front of a door made of dark, iron-banded oak. His office. The sanctum where the monster does his math.
The handle is cold, but it turns.
The room is vast, lined with books bound in human-touch leather and maps of a city he treats like a playground. But it’s the wall behind his desk that stops my heart.
It’s not a wall. It’s a shrine.
My breath hitches as I step closer, my skin crawling. It’s me. Hundreds of photos, some grainy and blurred, taken from the shadows of my old life. Me at the coffeeshop three blocks from my old apartment. Me laughing with a coworker I haven’t seen in months. Me sleeping—God, a photo of me sleeping in my own bed, taken from the fire escape.
There are also things. Things I thought I’d lost. My favourite silver earring. A hair tie. A grocery list written in my own frantic scrawl.
And in the centre, a large, charcoal sketch. It’s me, but not me. It’s me as he sees me—covered in his marks, eyes wide and shattered, a crown of thorns and roses around my head. It’s dated six months ago.
He’s been hunting me since before I even knew he existed.
This isn’t love. It’s not even a fetish. It’s a total, systematic consumption. He didn’t just stumble upon me; he curated me. He waited until the perfect moment to pluck me from the world and pin me to his board.
“I’m a ghost,” I whisper, my hand trembling as I touch the sketch. “I’ve been dead for months.”
“You’ve never been more alive, Wendy.”
The voice is a low, vibration that hits me like a physical blow. I spin around, my back slamming into the desk, my heart leaping into my throat.
Peter is leaning against the doorframe. He’s a nightmare in the flesh. He’s covered in soot and dark, dried splatters of blood that look like ink against his white shirt. His hair is a mess, his eyes dark and blown out with the adrenaline of whatever slaughter he just finished at the gate.
He looks at me, and a slow, terrifyingly beautiful smirk spreads across his face.
“Oh, Darling,” he purrs, his voice thick with a dark,mocking delight. “Only day one, and you’ve already broken the fucking rules.”
He walks towards me, his boots heavy and rhythmic on the hardwood. I’m shaking so hard I can hear my teeth chattering, my mind a fractured mess of terror and that sickening, addictive heat that ignites the moment he’s in the room.
“I told you not to leave the room,” he whispers, stopping inches from me. He smells of gunpowder, expensive gin, and death. He reaches out, his hand—still stained with the grit of the fight—cupping my jaw. “But look at you. Drawn to the heart of the web. You wanted to see how deep the rabbit hole goes, didn’t you?”
He leans in, his eyes darting to the shrine behind me, then back to my face.
“Do you like it?” he asks, his thumb dragging across my lower lip. “It’s my favourite view. The anatomy of my obsession. You’re the only thing in this world that doesn’t bore me, Wendy. And now that you’ve seen the truth, there’s no going back to the lie.”
Peter
