“Hallow Maddix,” he reads, his thumb tracing the edge of the file. “Twenty-two years old. Detained under Section 8. Diagnosis: Acute Psychosis with violent tendencies and a ‘pathological resistance to authority.’ Parents deceased. No siblings. No one looking for you. A ghost in a gown.”
He flips a page. I can see the black-and-whitephoto of me from the day I was brought in—before the bruises, before the stitches.
“You were a dancer before the city burned,” he murmurs, his eyes sliding from the paper to my legs. “You have the muscle memory for it. Even when you’re breaking, you move like you’re on stage.”
“Is this the part where I’m supposed to be impressed you can read?” I rasp, the stitches in my lip pulling tight. “You’ve had your hands inside me, Aris. You’ve seen my blood and my spit. You think a piece of paper tells you something I haven’t already screamed at you?”
He ignores the bite. He stands up, moving around the desk with the grace of a predator. He stops right in front of me, so close I can feel the heat radiating off his body. He’s tall—tall enough that I have to crane my neck back to look him in the eye. Up close, he smells intoxicating. It’s unfair that a man this twisted should smell like heaven.
He reaches out, his fingers hooking under the chain between my wrists, lifting my hands until the iron is level with my throat.
“Tell me, Hallow,” he whispers, his breath hot against my ear. “When Thorne was slamming your head into the wall… did you think of me? Did you want me to come through those doors and save you, or were you hoping she’d finally finish what I started?”
“I was hoping the ceiling would cave in and bury us both,” I spit.
He smiles. It’s a slow, dark thing that doesn’t reach his eyes. He lets go of the chain, letting my hands drop with a heavy clack against my thighs.
“Do you know what they call a specimen that surviveseverything we throw at it?” He walks behind me, his hand dragging slowly over my uninjured shoulder, his touch lingering on the nape of my neck. “They call it a miracle. And I’ve never been a religious man, Hallow, but looking at you… I’m starting to see the appeal of worship.”
He leans down, his lips inches from the stitches he put in my skin.
“Answer me this, and be honest. Why do you still fight? You know how this ends. You know I own every breath you take in this building. Why not just give up and let me make this easy for you?”
I look at him through the haze of the drugs, my head tilted back, exposing my throat to his shadow. “You want me to give up? You want me to be like the others? Shuffling through the halls with a lobotomised grin because it’s easier than feeling the friction of the leash?”
I let out a harsh, dry laugh. “I fight because watching you try to fix me is the only thing that keeps you human, Aris. If I stop, you’re just a suit with a scalpel and a God complex. You need me to scream so you know you’re still alive.”
He doesn’t pull away. Instead, he reaches onto his desk and picks up a small stack of yellowed, tattered newspaper clippings. He fans them out like a deck of cards, tossing them onto the marble surface one by one.
The headlines stare back at me in bold, jagged ink:THE VIOLET VIGILANTE: MYTH OR MURDERER? and THE MAN WITH THE CARDS—STREET TRASH URBAN LEGEND.
My heart stutters, a painful, uneven thud against my ribs.
“This is the ‘man’ you cry out for in your sleep,” Aris says, his voice dripping with a mocking, clinical pity. He picks up one of the clippings—a grainy photo of a dark alleyway with a blur of neon. “A ghost story for the desperate. A fairytale for the girls who realise too late that the city doesn’t have a heart.”
He walks back around the desk, his eyes locked on mine, pinning me in place more effectively than the chains. He leans forward, his hands flat on the marble, his face illuminated by the green glow of his desk lamp.
“You’re a smart girl, Hallow. You’ve got a mind that cuts like a razor. And yet…” He lets out a low, breathy chuckle that makes my blood boil. “Every time I have you on that table, every time the drugs start to peak and your walls start to crumble, you start whispering his name. You start looking for him in the corners of the room.”
He picks up a fresh page from my file—the observation notes from the night before.
“Physiological response: elevated heart rate, pupils dilated, increased vaginal lubrication,” he reads, his voice cold and flat, mocking the very visceral reality of what happened to me. He looks up, a cruel, beautiful smirk tugging at his mouth. “You were soaking wet for a ghost, Hallow. You were falling apart, begging for a man who doesn’t exist to come through those doors and save you from me.”
“He’s real,” I hiss, the iron of my cuffs rattling as I clench my fists.
“He’s a coping mechanism,” Aris snaps back, his voice suddenly sharp as a needle. “He’s a hallucination your brain built to keep you from realising that you areutterly, hopelessly alone. You’re getting off on a shadow because you can’t handle the fact that the only man who is ever going to touch you again is me.”
He leans in closer, his scent—sandalwood and expensive scotch—filling my lungs, suffocating me.
“Does he make you feel safe, Hallow? Does he make you feel special? Because while you’re dreaming about your urban legend, I’m the one holding the thread. I’m the one who knows exactly how many stitches it takes to keep your heart inside your chest.”
He reaches across the desk, his thumb catching a tear I didn’t even know had escaped. He smears the salt across my cheek, his eyes dark with a terrifying, obsessive triumph.
“You’re not waiting for him,” he whispers. “You’re waiting for me to finish you. And deep down, in that dark, wet place you try to hide? You know he’s never coming. There is no neon hero, Hallow. There’s just the white light, the steel, and me.”
The mock in his voice is the final spark in the powder keg.
“You think…” I start, my voice trembling with a rage so pure it feels like ice-water in my veins. “You think I’m crying for him because I’m weak? You think I’m wet because I’m waiting for a saviour?”
