Eddie holsters his weapon. “You promise you’ll wait to kill him?”
The darkness inside me thrums. “I’ll try very, very hard.”
Chapter 11
Sera
Icomebacktomyself in pieces.
First, the smell. Antiseptic and industrial. It's the smell of enforced cleanliness, which is really just the smell of someone else's control.
Second, the IV. A cold thread in the back of my left hand, taped down with clear adhesive that pulls at the fine hairs on my skin. My body is a dry creek bed accepting rain. The fluid moves through me, hydration reaching places that had gone papery and thin.
Third, arms. Someone is holding me with an arm across my waist, a chest pressed against my back that rises and falls in the slow, measured rhythm of a man who is not sleeping but is pretending to be still so he won't wake me.
I know this breathing.
Eddie.
He holds me to him with his full body, possessive but careful.
I don't open my eyes yet. I stay in the dark behind my lids and let myself have this—the warmth, the weight, the steady proof of another heartbeat against my spine.
A name sits on my tongue like a coin I can’t swallow.
Penelope.
I said it back in the hangar. I remember it now, or pieces of it, the way you remember fever dreams. James, alive and whole again, telling me the lock on the Seal of Dissolution recognizes only one voice.
So I said it. My name. The real one, the one I buried in a shallow grave in Kansas City and covered with a new identity.
Penelope.
I didn’t say it as a surrender. Or as a return to the girl who found herself trapped in an alleyway with the wrong man and paid for it in ways I’ll never forget. I said it as a claim. Self-recognition. Self-possession.
The Seal shattered. I remember that part clearly—the carved lines in the middle splitting, a sickly yellow light guttering out, the star collapsing inward like a house of cards hit by a breath that had been held for too long.
I think there was more to it than that, but…I don’t know what else I’m missing.
And then Daddy was there, everywhere, cold and vast and furious, and James's arms were around me, and Eddie's voice was saying something I couldn't parse because my body had finally decided it was allowed to stop fighting and promptly shut down.
Penelope.
I turn the name over in my mouth. It tastes different now, not like the chain Red Hands carved into concrete. It tastes like a room I locked and left, and now I'm standing at the door again, and the key is in my hand, and I get to decide whether to open it or walk away.
She's still in there. Penelope. The one who existed beforehim. The one who went to bars without calculating the cost, who drank without running threat assessments, who believed she’d come home as herself instead of in bloody pieces.
The young, innocent girl who had friends, a job, and laughter.
She's buried under everything I've built on top of her—the rage, the shadows, the custom-made morality, the taste for dangerous men—but she's not dead.
You can't kill the person you were. You can only bury them deep enough that you forget they're breathing.
Is that a bad thing? That she's still there?
I don't know. I genuinely don't know. But the possibility feels less like weakness than it used to.
I open my eyes.
