There’s something about seeing his face painted. Seeing the mask. I remember it vaguely, Halloween night. The lollipop. I’m not afraid of him like this. There’s no version of him I’ll ever be afraid of.
Reth’s hand is steady and warm on the small of my back as he guides me into the room.
I told him I wanted to see her. I wanted to look the monster in the eyes and know she could never touch us again.
Valeria is chained to that ridiculous gilded chair, face smeared with the same black and white paint Reth wears. Blood runs in thick, slow trails from the word PRETTY carved deep into her forehead.
Acts of violence have never been something I can tolerate. I’ve spent my career trying to pull people back from the edge of them, trying to understand the pain that creates them.
But seeing Valeria like this—broken, painted, bleeding from the word Reth carved into herforehead—makes something dark and satisfied unfurl low in my belly. A quiet, vicious sense of justice.
She deserves this.
After everything she did to him, she deserves to feel even a fraction of what she made him endure.
Her elegant dress is torn open down the front, her breasts fully exposed, streaked red with fresh blood that continues to ooze and run in heavy drops from her chin. She looks ruined. A bleeding parody of the powerful woman she once was. Her painted eyes are wide with pain and fury, her body trembling against the chains with every shallow, agonized breath.
And still, she lifts her chin like she’s the one in control.
I stop a few feet in front of her. Reth stays close behind me, his body a wall of heat at my back.
Valeria’s bloody lips curl into a mocking smile.
“Well,” she rasps, voice hoarse but still dripping with that old venom. “The little therapist. I wondered when he’d drag you down here to gloat. Come to see what a real monster looks like, darling?”
I hold her gaze. My heart is pounding, but my voice comes out steady. “I came to see what’s left of you after everything you did to him.”
She laughs—a wet sound that turns into a cough as blood trickles into her mouth. “Everything I did to him? Sweet girl, I made him. Without me, he would have been nothing.”
"Everything you made," I say, giving it room, "chose me.”
I watch it move through her. Slowly. The way real damage moves—not the sharp, immediate sting of a cut but the deep, spreading cold of something that has found theplace underneath the armor where there's nothing left to protect.
“Everything you spent years building,” I saunter up close, “walked away from you and chose. Me.”
"You don't—" she starts. Stops. Her voice is different now. Still controlled, barely, but different, thinner at the edges, like something load-bearing has just given way underneath the architecture. "You don't understand what it took. What I?—"
"I understand exactly what it took. That's what makes it worse for you, doesn't it? That I know the full cost of what you did, and I'm standing here anyway. And he's standing here with me." I hold her gaze. "You gave everything you had to own him. And all it got you was this room."
Her face does something then that I don't think she can stop. It crumbles. The composure fracturing along lines that have been under pressure for too long, the mask showing its seams in a way that no cut, no carved letter, no blood has managed to produce.
The cuts and the pain are something she can endure. But this? She can’t.
The truth of it. The simplicity of it.
I lean down, my hands on my knees as I bring my eyes to her level. “How does it feel,” I ask softly, “to know that the one thing you wanted most in the world is the thing that’s going to send you to hell?”
Her eyes slide to Reth, then back to me, gleaming with malice.
“You think you’re special? You think you’re the one who finallysavedhim?” She tries to lean forward, snarls from the pain, then stills. “You’re not special, darling. We both knowwhat his cock feels like. How he fucks when he’s trying to forget who he really belongs to.”
The words hit like a slap, and I stand there, letting it sink in. The therapist in me notes the tactic automatically—last resort, pure desperation, the specific cruelty of a woman who has lost every other weapon and is reaching for the one she thinks will find the gap in the armor.
She wants shame. She wants me to shrink. She wants to watch me look at Reth differently and see in that second that she still has power over something in this room.
She's miscalculated. Because what moves through me isn't shame. Isn't doubt. It's something I didn't know I was capable of until I fell in love with this man. Something hot and clean and entirely without apology, rising up through my chest and settling there like it's always belonged.
Possession.
