His body was heavier than I expected. Death had settled into his limbs, making him dense and unwieldy,and I had to drag him across the floor in increments—a few feet at a time, pausing to catch my breath, then a few more. The blood had dried on his charcoal suit, stiffening the fabric into something that felt almost like armor. His face was peaceful in death, the tension finally gone from his jaw, the worry lines around his eyes smoothed into nothing.
"You were the first monster I learned to love," I told him as I pulled his body through the doorway. "The first person who ever looked at me and saw something worth keeping. Even if keeping meant breaking."
He didn't answer. I hadn't expected him to.
The incinerator was in the basement, exactly where Nathan had said it would be. Gabriel had designed it himself, back when the Institute was operational—a way to dispose of evidence, to erase mistakes, to make problems disappear. He'd never imagined it would be used on him. But then, Gabriel had never imagined a lot of things about how his story would end.
I fed his body into the flames with hands that barely trembled. The heat was immense, a physical force that pushed against my face and made my eyes water. I watched the fire consume him—the charcoal suit, the silver hair, the hands that had shaped me and broken me and loved me in the only way he knew how. The flames turned everything to ash.
"Goodbye, Daddy," I whispered. "Goodbye, Gabriel. Thank you for making me strong enough to survive you."
The incinerator roared on, indifferent to my grief.
Nathan was heavier than Gabriel.
I didn't know why that surprised me. He'd always been the larger of the two brothers—broader shoulders, more muscle, the physical presence of a man who'd spent his life training for violence. But death had made him dense and difficult, and I had to drag him across the floor the same way I'd dragged Gabriel—in increments, pausing to catch my breath, my muscles screaming with the effort.
His face was not peaceful. His eyes were still open, frozen in an expression of shock and betrayal, and I had to close them with my fingers before I could continue. His blood had pooled beneath him, soaking into the linoleum, leaving a stain that would never come out.
"You were the monster I wanted to believe wasn't real," I told him as I pulled him toward the basement stairs. "You were so gentle. So patient. So perfectly attuned to everything I needed. I thought it was love. I thought it was fate. I thought I'd finally found someone who saw me and chose to stay."
The stairs were the hardest part. I had to brace his body against the railing, guiding it down one step at a time, my muscles burning with the effort. His head lolled against my shoulder, and for a moment it was almost likean embrace—his body pressed against mine, his weight familiar, his presence still lingering in the spaces between us.
"But you never saw me," I continued, my voice steady despite the strain. "You saw an asset. A weapon. A proof of concept that your brother had perfected and you wanted to claim. You loved what I could do for you, not who I was. And when I stopped being useful, you would have discarded me the same way you discarded Monika. The same way you discarded all of them."
The incinerator was still hot from Gabriel's cremation. I fed Nathan's body into the flames with the same methodical precision, watching the fire consume his tactical gear and his dark hair and the hands that had held me through nightmares. The heat was a physical presence, pushing against me, forcing me to step back.
"Goodbye, Nathan," I whispered. "Goodbye, my savior. Thank you for teaching me that love can be a weapon."
The flames roared higher, and I watched until there was nothing left but ash.
The research notes came next.
Gabriel's study was exactly as he'd left it—the bookshelves lined with psychology texts, the desk covered in papers and equipment, the laptop still open to the last file he'd been reading. I gathered everything with methodical precision, sorting through decades of research and selectingonly what I needed. The conditioning protocols. The counter-agent formulas. The documentation that proved what had been done to me—and to all the others.
Nathan's laptop was still in his bag, abandoned near the entrance of the conditioning chamber. I added it to my collection, along with the server drive I'd copied during the heist. The evidence of his crimes. The evidence of his network. The evidence that would ensure his empire crumbled even without him there to prop it up.
I carried everything to the car in three trips, my arms full of files and hard drives and the accumulated evidence of a lifetime of atrocity. The trunk was nearly full by the time I finished, and I stood for a moment in the cold morning air, breathing in the scent of winter and freedom and the faint, distant smoke from the incinerator's chimney.
The bathroom was exactly as I remembered it.
The pink tiles. The claw-foot tub. The mirror above the sink, slightly warped, the kind that made your reflection look just a little bit wrong. I'd stood in front of this mirror a hundred times during my conditioning, staring at a face I barely recognized, trying to find the woman I'd been before Gabriel had taken me apart.
Now I stared at a face I'd never seen before.
The blood had dried on my skin, cracking in the creases of my palms and the hollow of my throat. My hair was stiff with it, the braid coming undone, dark strandsfalling around my face. My dress—what was left of it—was more red than white, the fabric stiff and crusted and heavy with the blood of two brothers.
I stripped it off and let it fall to the floor. The water in the tub was cold but I didn't mind. The cold was grounding. The cold was real. The cold reminded me that I existed, that I was more than the sum of my conditioning and my lies and the careful performances I'd been giving for months.
I scrubbed my skin until it was pink and raw. I washed my hair three times before the water ran clear. I stood in the cold tub and let myself feel everything I'd been suppressing—the grief, the rage, the terrible, complicated love I'd carried for both brothers in different ways. The tears came without warning, silent and hot, and I let them fall into the cold water and didn't try to stop them.
The pink room was waiting for me.
I hadn't intended to go back there. Hadn't intended to revisit the space where Gabriel had broken me and rebuilt me into something extraordinary. But my feet carried me there anyway, drawn by something deeper than memory—the pull of the woman I'd been, the ghost of the girl who'd knelt on this carpet and called a monster "Daddy" and meant it with every atom of her reconstructed self.
The room was exactly as I'd left it. The pink walls, still that sickening shade of cotton candy. The canopy bed with its white lace curtains. The vanity with theheart-shaped mirror. The shelf where Mr. Hoppy had sat, watching me with his glass eyes while Gabriel took me apart and put me back together.
The shelf was empty now. They'd taken Mr. Hoppy when they'd abandoned me—packed him away with the rest of my belongings, the evidence of a life I'd never get back. I'd mourned him almost as much as I'd mourned Gabriel. Almost as much as I'd mourned myself.
