My mouth hangs open just a fraction, the air whistling over my parched, bitten tongue. I can feel the weight of him on me, the heat of his body pressing into my cold, scorched skin, but I don’t flinch. I don’t fight. Iam a hollowed-out shell, a cathedral that’s been gutted by fire.
A single tear breaks free from the corner of my eye. It’s hot—the only warm thing left in my world. It crawls a slow, jagged path through the drying gel on my temple, carving a line through the soot and the salt.
Aris pulls back just enough to see it. He freezes, his hand hovering over my chest.
He watches the tear. He watches it roll down my cheek and disappear into the dark hair at my temple. Then another one follows, silent and heavy, a steady leak from a heart that has finally, mercifully, shattered.
“Hallow?” he whispers.
I don’t blink. I don’t even look at him. I look through him, through the ceiling, through the sky, into the black void where the “Man with the Cards” used to live. The ghost is gone. The girl is gone. There is only the static.
“Look at that,” he breathes, his voice thick with a terrifying, reverent delight. He reaches out, his thumb catching the next tear, smeared across his skin like a trophy. “The defiance is gone. The noise has stopped. You’re finally… quiet.”
He leans over me, his face a mask of ecstatic, religious fervour. He isn’t looking for the patient anymore; he’s looking at his masterpiece. He runs a hand down my arm, his fingers trembling as they pass over the iron cuff, feeling the stillness of my muscle.
“You’re beautiful like this,” he murmurs, his lips brushing against my ear. “No more screaming. No more biting. Just the ghost. Just my silent, perfect Hallow.”
He begins to laugh—a soft, breathless sound that makes the hair on my neck stand up, though I don’t havethe strength to shiver. He’s delighted. He’s fucking charmed by the ruin of me. He leans down and licks the salt of my tears off his thumb, his eyes never leaving mine, his pupils so wide they’ve swallowed the iris whole.
“Miller was wrong,” Aris says, his voice a caress of pure silk. “He wanted to kill the animal. But I knew… I knew if I just burned away the armour, I’d find the saint underneath.”
He rests his head on my chest, right over my stuttering heart, closing his eyes as if he’s listening to a symphony. I just stare at the flickering green light of the machine on the desk. The tears keep coming, a silent, rhythmic weeping of a body that’s been abandoned by its soul.
I am the ghost he wanted. I am the silence in the white room.
And as he clings to me, whispering my name like a prayer into my skin, I realise the most terrifying thing of all: he doesn’t want me to come back. He wants to keep me right here, bolted to the floor, weeping and broken, until the end of the world.
Chapter
Seven
HALLOW
The world is a smear of charcoal and fluorescent hum.
Aris doesn’t call Miller. He doesn’t call for a gurney. He unbolts the iron cuffs himself, the clink-clink-clink of the metal hitting the mahogany sounding like coins on a grave. He slides his arms under me—one beneath my knees, one supporting my neck—and hauls me up. My head lolls against his shoulder, my hair matted with electrode gel and sweat. I am a weightless, empty thing.
He carries me out of the office. The hallway is an industrial throat of white tile and peeling paint. The air out here smells different than his office—less like scotch and old books, more like floor wax, bleach, and the sour, sharp tang of unwashed bodies.
The lights overhead flicker with a rhythmic pop-buzz. Every pulse of light feels like a physical slap against myeyes. I see the shadows of other inmates pressed against the reinforced glass of their doors—pale, featureless faces watching the Doctor carry his broken doll back to the dark.
He reaches my cell. It isn’t the standard cage. It’s the “Soft Room” at the end of the hall.
The door is reinforced steel, heavy enough to stop a truck. He kicks the release, and the door groans open. Inside, the walls are padded with thick, cream-coloured vinyl, stitched in diamond patterns that look like teeth. There is no window. Just a single recessed light in the ceiling protected by a wire cage.
He lays me down on the low, integrated platform in the centre of the room. It isn’t a bed. It’s a slab of high-density foam covered in the same cold vinyl.
I don’t move. I can’t. My muscles have forgotten how to hold tension. I just lie there, staring at the wire cage on the ceiling, the tears finally drying into itchy salt-tracks on my skin.
He works fast. He’s practiced at this.
He pulls the heavy leather restraints from the sides of the slab. These aren’t the thin nylon straps from the infirmary. These are thick, oil-tanned leather, stained dark from years of use. He cinches them over my thighs, my waist, and my chest. Ratchets-click. Ratchet-click. The sound is industrial, final.
He leans over me, his face inches from mine. He’s still flushed, the adrenaline from the office making his eyes look glassier than mine. He reaches out and brushes a stray hair from my cracked lip.
“You’re safe now, Hallow,” he whispers. The room is so quiet I can hear the click of his spitwhen he talks. “No more Thorne. No more Miller. Just the silence. I’ve adjusted your chart. Total sensory deprivation until the neural pathways reset.”
He runs a thumb over my jaw, his touch light, almost reverent.
