“Whenever a murderer dies from now on, they will appear in this room, bound and completely powerless. It will be up to us to decide on a just punishment.”
The wordpunishmentechoes off the black stone walls and disappears into the dark above.
Mark still hasn’t looked up.
“He’s the first,” Talon says. “The very first to be judged under the new system. And because he is yours—“ he pauses, choosing the word carefully, ”—because of what he did to you specifically, the choice of punishment belongs to you.”
I look at him. “To me?”
“To you,” Nathaniel confirms. “Whatever you want, Skye. We have the means to make it happen.”
I turn back to Mark.
I have long given up on revenge.
Besides, I’m not sure what justice even is anymore.
That was always the problem with Mark. It was not that he couldn’t feel pain, but that his pain and my pain would never be the same thing. I could hurt him every way available to me and he would experience it as injustice. As something beingdoneto him. He would turn it into a story where he was the wrongedparty, because that is what he has always done. The way he understands the world leaves no room for the possibility that he could have been the one who caused damage first.
But perhaps this place is different. Perhaps here, true eye for an eye can exist.
“Anything?” I ask, looking at Nathaniel.
“Anything,” he confirms.
“Even supernatural stuff?”
“Yes.”
It comes to me not as a flash but as something that surfaces slowly. A very right answer from nowhere.
“I want him to be me,” I say.
The room is quiet.
“I want him to step into my life from the beginning and live it out.” I pause. “Every single day of it. Not knowing how it ends. And I want him to wake up from it at the exact moment he kills me.”
Nathaniel steps forward until he is standing beside me and slightly ahead.
“We can do that.”
It is fair because he never once considered what my life felt like from the inside. He clipped everything in me that felt alive and called it love. Then he brought dangerous men into my home for the sake of his own deals, and when one of them came for me, when I had to kill to survive, Mark looked at what I’d done and saw a problem to solve. Not a wife who had been terrified. A loose end.
He put his hands around my throat and finished it himself.
So yes. Let him live it. Let him feel the smallness he built around me, day after day, year after year. Let him feel the moment that man came for me and understand what it took to survive it. And let him wake up at the exact moment he decides I am worth less than his own convenience.
Let him be me, just once.
Talon is already moving toward the chair.
Talon is already moving toward the chair. I watch him place one hand on Mark’s shoulder and the moment Mark’s eyes go distant.
I watch his face change.
It takes less time than I expected. It is both more and less satisfying than anything I imagined.
I turn away before it’s finished.
Nathaniel’s hand finds the back of my neck. He presses a kiss to my shoulder.
“Okay?” he asks.
“Okay,” I say, and I mean it.
I couldn’t feel better.
As for the four of us, I fully intend to make our eternity a happily ever after.
Death never tasted so sweet. The afterlife will be sweeter still.
