I nod, grabbing a paper towel and drying my hands. For a moment, neither of us speaks. We just stand there; two people who now know something we couldn’t even imagine a few hours ago. Something we can’t unknow now.
“You heard what she said,” I point out finally.
It’s not a question.
His jaw locks. “Yeah.”
I lean back against the counter, crossing my arms. “She wasn’t guessing,” I continue. “That wasn’t confusion or trauma filling in the blanks. She knew exactly what happened to her.”
“I know.” His voice is low, too controlled.
I study him for a second, then push off the counter. “What did the ME find in the last girl?”
His eyes flick to mine, something shifting. This is the part he wasn’t going to say out loud. But now he has to because I already found out the truth from Nadine.
“They flagged a paralytic.”
My stomach drops at his admission. “What kind?” I ask, pretty sure that I already know the answer.
“Succinylcholine.”
The name settles between us like something solid. I exhale slowly, my mind already connecting the dots. “It matches,” I say.
His gaze hones in. “Yeah?”
I nod, the pieces clicking into place whether I want them to or not. “It’s fast-acting,” I explain slipping into a clinical mind without thinking about it. “Causes full muscle paralysis. You can’t move, speak, or breathe on your own. But it’s normally used with a sedative, during something like surgery. General anesthesia. Without the sedative… you’d be awake and unable to move or breathe.” I swallow hard.
“She described it perfectly.” His expression doesn’t change. But something behind his eyes tells me he’d already looked up what Succinylcholine does.
So, I continue, hoping to dig into what he’s figured out already, about the drug and the case itself. “She said she couldn’t breathe,” I add. “That she could feel everything but couldn’t respond. That lines up with Succinylcholine…”
“And the tube?” he asks, testing me.
“That’s standard if someone can’t breathe on their own,” I say. “But not like that. Not without sedation. Like during surgery, it’s part of general anesthesia.”
It’s not a weapon or to be used for control.
“They waited until she was panicked enough,” I say quietly, repeating the words that haven’t stopped echoing in my head.
Alex looks away for a second, like that one hit deep for him too. “They’re controlling the experience. Not just the victim.”
I nod. “They’re deciding when she can move,” I add. “When she can breathe. When she can react.” My chest aches again. “They’re deciding how she feels it.”
The silence that follows is suffocating. Because now, it has a name. Not justwhatthey’re doing buthow. And that makes it so much worse than either of us had expected.
“It’s not random,” Alex says after a moment.
“No,” I agree. “It’s not.”
“It’s practiced.”
“Refined.”
Our voices overlap slightly. We both stop.
He lets out a quiet exhale. “They’ve done this before.”
“More than once.”
