“F-fourteen. Twelve within the city limits. Two in the county. You were going to be fifteen.”
I glance at Eddie, who looks like he could shoot Red Hands in the other leg any second. That’s more than either of us thought he’d killed.
“Where did you kill them?” Eddie grounds out.
Red Hands rattles off different places like warehouses and abandoned buildings. All of them are places a woman could scream and the sound would bounce off empty walls and die without reaching a single ear.
James flexes his shadowy fists. “Why get your rocks off like that?”
"Because I'm nobody," Red Hands says. "I'm no one. Everyone is no one, underneath."
"You wanted to see what's underneath me," I say. "Here I am. Now what's underneathyou? Who are you?"
A pause, then, "Allen. Allen Webb."
The name is as ordinary as the face. It’s a name no one would remember five minutes after hearing it.
"And what do you do, Allen, when you're not cutting people open?"
"I'm always cutting people open." Something shifts in those brown eyes. Pride, maybe. "Mortuary technician. Fifteen years."
The information slots into place with a click. Fifteen years of handling the dead. Fifteen years of knowing exactly where the blood pools and the tendons anchor and the skin separates easiest from muscle.
Fifteen years of standing over bodies that can't scream and learning what they look like when every mask has been removed, every pretense stripped away, every performance ended.
He didn't learn to kill. He learned to undress, and then he decided the living needed the same service.
“KCK Community College?” Eddie asks.
Red Hands—Allen—nods.
Itook classes at KCK Community College, not fifteen years ago, but still. It’s a small world, filled with serial killers and rapists.
"Why Sera?" James demands. "Why her specifically?"
"She was already in transformation when she arrived. Shedding her old skin. Becoming something new." His head tilts with that specimen-glass look, even now, even broken and bound and terrified. "But she was doing it wrong. Building new masks instead of removing old ones. Collecting monsters to hide behind instead of facing what she really is."
"And what am I really?" I ask.
"The same as me. The same as everyone. Meat and fear and the desperate need to be seen." His voice drops to a whisper, and for a moment I hear the loneliness in it, vast and echoing, the emptiness of a man who spent years with the dead because the living never looked at him long enough to see he was there. "I just want to help you finish the process."
I cross to him slowly. The shadows trail behind me, extending from the walls, from the floor, from the cold air itself, flowing in my wake like a bridal train made of nightmares.
The temperature drops with each step I take, and I watch his composure fracture by degrees. The tightening at the corners of his mouth. The slight dilation of his pupils. The way his bound hands flex against the shadow-restraints, unconscious, involuntary, the body's animal protest against the approach of something it recognizes as apex.
As queen.
I stop close enough to see my reflection in his eyes.
"You're wrong about me," I say quietly, because volume is unnecessary when the silence belongs to you. "You're wrong about all of them. Every woman you killed. You didn't reveal truth. You imposed your own emptiness on people who were trying to survive. Who were trying to build something from the wreckage of what was done to them."
"You looked at women who were fighting, changing their names, leaving their old lives, reinventing themselves from the ground up, and you decided that was weakness. That was deception. That was a mask that needed to be ripped off."
I lean closer. The cold fire in my veins pulses, and I know my eyes are doing the hell-fire thing with the ember-glow, the darkness bleeding into my irises, the visible proof that what lives inside me is not entirely human anymore and hasn't been for a while.
Even before I sold my soul to Daddy.
"But they weren't hiding, Allen. They werebuilding. The wayIbuilt. And you are too hollow to understand that. I'm not hiding underneath my masks."
