Chapter
Seventeen
HALLOW
Freedom isn’t a graceful leap. It’s a pathetic, shaking crawl.
My legs aren’t mine. They’re two columns of dead marble that refuse to hold my weight. When I try to stand, the room spins in a nauseating tilt of green gas and black shadows. I hit the floor again, my knees barking against the tile, my breath coming in short, panicked bursts.
“Fuck,” I hiss, the word feeling like a jagged stone in my throat.
He doesn’t give me a hand. He doesn’t offer some poetic line about rising from the ashes. He just stands there, watching me struggle with a clinical, detached hunger. His mask of eloquence has slipped; he’s breathing hard, his chest heaving under the purple velvet, his eyes fixed on the way my muscles cord and strain.
“Get… up,” he rasps. The smooth, cello-voice isgone, replaced by something raw and ugly. “He’s waiting. And he’s leaking.”
I grab the edge of the metal slab, my fingers slick with the blood from my wrists, and haul myself up. My vision whites out for a second, then snaps back into focus on the serrated knife lying on the floor. I reach for it, my hand shaking so violently I almost drop it.
I don’t look at him. I don’t care who he is or why he’s here. All I care about is the sound of the wet, bubbling breath coming from the hallway.
I stagger toward the door, one hand on the wall for balance. Each step is a scream of agony from my wasted muscles, but the rage—the cold, black, female rage that’s been fermenting in my gut for two hundred and fifteen days—is a better fuel than adrenaline.
I step into the hall.
The green mist is thinner here, but the smell of copper is a wall. I see him.
Aris is pinned to the wall like a fucking butterfly. He wasn’t lying; he’s an “installation.” His skin is peeled back in flaps, pinned into the drywall with long upholstery needles. He looks like a raw anatomy chart come to life. His eyes find me, bulging and bloodshot, fixed in a permanent state of animal terror.
“Hhh… hhh…” He tries to speak, but his jaw is hanging by a thread of muscle.
I don’t say a word. I don’t need a monologue.
I reach him and the smell of his fear is better than the peppermint gas. It’s sweet. It’s intoxicating. I lean my weight against him, my face inches from his. I want him to see me. Not the “subject.” Not the “project.” Me.
I take the serrated blade and I don’t go for his throat. That’s too fast.
I drive the knife into the soft meat of his inner thigh, right where the femoral artery sleeps. I don’t just stab; I twist. I feel the blade catch on the bone, the serrated teeth tearing through the heavy muscle like a saw through wet wood.
Aris’s body jerks against the pins, a muffled, high-pitched shriek dying in his throat as a fountain of hot, dark blood sprays across my face. It’s warm. It’s thick. It tastes like iron and justice.
“You… liked… to watch,” I growl, my voice a guttural snarl.
I pull the knife out and go for his stomach. I don’t slice; I dig. I want to see the “data” he was so proud of. I want to see what a monster looks like on the inside. I carve a jagged, horizontal line across his abdomen, pulling the blade upward until I hear the wet squelch of his organs shifting.
I drop the knife and reach into the wound.
My hands are deep in his warmth, my fingers wrapping around the slick, pulsing coils of his intestines. I pull. I pull until I hear the snap of connective tissue, until Aris’s eyes roll back into his head, showing nothing but the whites. He’s shaking, a rhythmic, dying tremor that vibrates through my arms.
“Look at me!” I scream into his face, my voice breaking. “LOOK AT ME!”
I grab a handful of the cards Jex tucked into his skin and I shove them into his open mouth, packing them in until he’s gagging on the Queen of Hearts. I want his last breath to be the taste of the game he lost.
He slumps. The light in his eyes doesn’t just go out; it curdles.
I stand back, my chest heaving, my gown soaked in his blood from the neck down. I am covered in him.
He is behind me. I can feel his heat, his gaze. He isn’t talking now. He’s just staring at the mess I made, his mouth slightly open, a dark, obsessive fascination written across his pale face.
He reaches out, his thumb catching a glob of Aris’s blood on my cheek. He smears it across my skin, his touch heavy and possessive.
