She doesn't answer. Just holds on tighter.
I guide her toward the door. The lab coat man has already fled, his footsteps echoing somewhere in the distance. I should kill him, but the directive is the kids.
At the doorway, I look back and realize how fucking lucky we were that no one tripped the alarms or alerted the cops, and that means Jinx has all the time he needs to reclaim his soul from the woman who stole it.
Jinx is standing over Helena, who's on her knees now, the first flicker of real fear crossing her face. She's spent her whole life dealing in fear, inflicting it on others, using it as a tool. Now she'sexperiencing it herself, and the look in her eyes says she finally understands what she's been doing to children for thirty years.
He has rolled up his sleeves. His hands are steady. The scars on his forearms catch the light, reminders of what she did to him, what she made him. He looks down at her with an expression that isn't quite hatred. It's colder. More final.
Justice, maybe. Or vengeance. Right now, the distinction doesn't matter.
"You were right about one thing," he says to her. His voice is calm, conversational, almost pleasant. "You did teach me about pain. You taught me everything I know."
"Please—" Helena starts.
"I'm going to give it back to you now."
I close the door behind me.
The sounds that follow me down the corridor are not ones I'll ever forget. Screams that start sharp and desperate and become something else entirely. Wet sounds. Impact sounds. The sounds of thirty years of horrors being repaid in kind.
I keep walking. Twelve is trembling in my arms, her face buried against my chest, her tears soaking through my shirt.
"Is he going to kill her?" she whispers.
"Yes."
"Good."
One word. So much weight behind it. All the pain she's endured, all the suffering Helena inflicted, compressed into a single syllable of satisfaction.
I don't regret leaving him to it.
Some monsters deserve to die screaming.
And some deserve the chance to become more.
Chapter Fifteen: Jinx
ThedoorclosesbehindAsher, and we're alone. She's on her knees in front of her desk, that expensive suit getting dirty on the carpet, her silver hair coming loose from its perfect arrangement. For the first time since I entered this office, she looks truly afraid.
"You don't have to do this." Her voice is steady, but I can hear the tremor underneath. The desperation. "I have information. Resources. I can give you everything you need to dismantle the Silent from the inside."
"I don't want information." I crouch in front of her, close enough to see the pulse jumping in her throat. "I want you to understand what you did."
"I understand perfectly. I created—"
I backhand her across the face. Not hard enough to break anything. Just hard enough to shut her up.
"You don't get to talk about creation." I grab her jaw, force her to look at me. "You didn't create anything. You destroyed. Children came into your facilities whole, and you broke them into pieces. You shattered their minds and called it improvement. You taught them that pain was the only truth and love was a weakness to be exploited."
"The subjects—"
"We're not subjects." Another backhand, harder this time. Blood blooms on her lip. "We're people. We were always people. You just couldn't see it because you're not one yourself."
I stand, drag her up by her hair. She cries out, hands scrabbling at my wrists, but I don't let go.
"Do you know what I remember most clearly from my conditioning?" I haul her around the desk, shove her into her own chair. "Not the pain. Pain fades. The body forgets. What I remember is your voice, narrating my destruction like it was a nature documentary."
