James was gone for days, but the footage doesn’t last that long. He’s edited it down to forty-three minutes.
He makes me watch all forty-three minutes.
When it's over, the screen goes dark, and my face is wet. The tears feel foreign on my cheeks, like they belong to someone else, because I no longer cry all that often. The girl I was before did, though.
I'm not that girl anymore.
But I'm not so far gone that I can watch James being dismantled and feel nothing.
"Fascinating specimen," Red Hands says, closing the laptop with a soft click. "All that violence. All that rage. The way he fought. He’s extraordinary, really." He pauses, tilting his head again. "And underneath? A terrified boy beaten by his father. The animal, or the beast as he calls it, was always there since he was a young boy. The capacity for extreme violence, the hair-trigger rage, the need to protect at any cost. He said it was locked inside him, but I helped him see that it isn’t. The beast lives on the outside. The beast ishim."
"You tortured him." My voice comes out flat and steady.
My tears have stopped.
"I revealed him. There's a difference." He folds his hands together. "The torture is incidental. A method, not a goal. Pain is simply the most efficient tool for stripping away pretense. You can lie with words. You can lie with silence. You can even lie with your body, with your face, with your tears. But you cannot lie when the pain is great enough. When the body takes over and the mind surrenders its grip on the performance. That is when truth emerges."
He stands. The metal chair scrapes against concrete, the sound cutting through the silence.
"You surround yourself with broken things, Penelope."
My true name again. Each time he says it, my blood sizzles. It’s a reminder that he knows me. That he's peeled back the first layer already without touching me.
"Broken things like the killer who smiles too much because he learned as a child that a smile might delay the next beating. The detective who despises the very institution he serves, who bends the law he swore to uphold because a woman with shadows in her eyes asked him to. The thing in your basement, so desperate not to be forgotten that he'd bind himself to the first soul dark enough to see him."
He picks up the smallest scalpel and holds it loosely. "But a new life built on broken pieces is still broken. A new life built on trauma doesn’t change the damaged woman playing pretend."
"You changed your name," he says, stepping closer. "Changed your city. Changed your body with shadows and blood and rage. You bound yourself to something inhuman. Layer after layer after layer of disguise, Penelope, each one more elaborate than the last. Each one designed to hide the same terrified girl in an alleyway in Kansas City while a man with a sheriff’s badge took everything from her."
My heart slams against my ribs with the kind of rage that burns so hot it circles back to cold, crystallizing in my veins into something sharp and lethal.
I hate that he knows the shape of the wound that made me, the violation that unmade Penelope Seskeny and birthed Sera Vale from the wreckage.
He knows my life like I’m a case study, researched me at the University of Internet.
The scalpel catches the red exit door light as he raises it. The blade is impossibly thin, impossibly sharp, and in the crimson glow, it looks like a sliver of frozen blood.
"I'm going to peel those layers all away," he says, his voice dropping to something almost tender. "Every mask. Every lie.Every story you've told yourself about who you are and what you deserve. Because without food and water, you won’t be able to fight me for long. And by then, you’ll want to see those layers too."
He toes the edge of the Seal, knowing he can’t cross it just yet, not while I’m upright and thinking such violent thoughts about him. "And when there's nothing left? When the last mask falls? We'll finally meet the real you. We’ll finally see the truth underneath all that beautiful, desperate rage."
I look into those brown eyes—those ordinary, forgettable,nothingeyes—and I let him see exactly what's underneath the first layer.
Not fear. Not the girl from Kansas City. Not even the cold, calculated shadow woman he thinks is my latest disguise.
What's underneath is worse.
What's underneath is patience.
Red Hands watches my face with rapt attention, searching for the crack, the break, a clue as to when the mask will fall.
He won't find it.
Because the thing he doesn't understand is that there is no mask.
My rageisthe truth. The shadows and the blood and my broken court of monsters who love me aren’t a disguise. That's not a performance.
That's what grows in the place where innocence used to live.
