I don’t need light to know what it is. I can feel the embossed shape of the suit. My thumb traces the curve of a heart.
The whistling in the hall starts again, but it’s further away now. It’s accompanied by a new sound: the wet, heavy drag of something being pulled across the tiles. A body. The sound of a dead weight being hauled through the dark, the heels of its shoes clicking a frantic, hollow rhythm against the floor.
Thump-drag. Thump-drag.
Then, the scream starts.
It’s Aris. It’s not a command this time. It’s a high, thin sound—the kind of noise a rabbit makes when the owl’s talons find its back. It’s muffled by distance and several inches of steel, but it’s unmistakable.
“Please!” he shrieks. “I have… I have the data! The files! You don’t understand the work?—”
The scream breaks into a wet, choking gargle. It sounds like someone trying to talk through a mouthful of marbles and blood. There’s a frantic scuffle, the sound of glass shattering, and then a heavy thud that makes the light fixture above me rattle in its cage.
I am straining so hard against the floor bolts that my wrists start to bleed. I can feel the warm, copper-scented liquid trickling down my palms, soaking into the leather cuffs. The pain is a grounding wire, keeping me from drifting away into the green fog.
The silence that follows the scream is worse than the noise. It’s a hungry silence.
I lie there in the dark, the card resting on my belly like a gravestone. I am still trapped. I am still a girl in a padded box, splayed out for a doctor who is currentlybeing unmade in the hallway. I’m not free. The door is still locked. The leather is still tight.
But as the smell of fresh blood begins to fight with the peppermint in the air, I realise the “therapy” is over.
The light doesn’t come back on. The orderlies don’t come to check my vitals. I am alone in the dark with my ghosts and a paper heart, listening to the sound of footsteps returning toward my door.
Not Italian loafers. Heavy boots. Slow. Deliberate.
Each step is a promise. Each step is a threat.
I pull one last time, my muscles screaming, my joints popping in the dark. The leather holds. The bolts stay deep.
Chapter
Fifteen
JEX
The lobby smells like a butcher shop in a pine forest.
I step over the security desk, my boots sliding on a slick of gore that used to be a man named Peterson. His tie is caught in the shredder, his neck twisted at an angle that says he tried to run while the machine was still chewing. I don’t stop to help. I just like the way the red looks against the white linoleum. It’s clean. It’s honest.
“Check the guest list, Pip,” I bark, flicking a glob of brain matter off my purple sleeve.
The green gas is a thick, swirling soup now. It’s beautiful. Through the haze, I see three guards in the corner. They aren’t shooting. One is trying to scrub his own skin off with a piece of broken glass, sobbing about spiders. The other two are locked in a lover’s embrace, exceptthey’re trying to bite each other’s throats out because they think they’re fighting wolves.
I walk past them, whistling Pop Goes the Weasel through my teeth.
A guard—one who must have been holding his breath—stumbles out of the elevator. He levels a shotgun at my chest, his hands shaking so hard the barrel is drawing circles in the air.
“D-don’t move! I’ll blow you to hell!”
I don’t slow down. I don’t even reach for my blade. I just tilt my head and give him the grin—the one that shows all my teeth, the one that makes people realise there’s nobody home behind the eyes.
“Hell’s full, sweetheart,” I rasp. “I just came back for my luggage.”
He pulls the trigger. The click is hollow. Dry. I already had Pip swap the shells for confetti two hours ago when she crawled through the vents.
The look on his face is the best punchline of the night.
I reach out, grab the barrel of the gun, and yank him forward. My head meets his nose with a wet crunch. Cartilage explodes. He drops to his knees, clutching his face, and I don’t waste the momentum. I grab a heavy brass “Employee of the Month” trophy from the desk and bring it down on the back of his skull.
