Chapter 16 #2
“And the contracts that don’t fit that narrative?” I press. “The ones for money, not meaning.”
He says nothing for a long time. I feel the refusal like a draft. Then: “Sometimes I accept a piece because it buys me time for a question I can’t fund another way.”
I circle it on the page. “What question?”
The pause stretches. The heater clicks. “Pass,” he says.
“No.” The word leaves my mouth before risk can stop it. His head lifts, interested. I hold his gaze, the black lenses that give me nothing, and keep my voice low. “You want my truth; you get mine when you give me yours. Why do you keep asking the same question in different bodies?”
For a second, silence becomes a blade between us. His shoulders tense; not a flinch, but a controlled recalibration. Every muscle seems wired tight beneath the leather, coiled and waiting. His head tilts, fractionally, like a scientist watching a reaction go off-script.
I see it now, the smallest betrayals: the way his fingers flex once against his knee, the subtle tremor in his other hand before he steadies it. His chest rises, slow, deliberate.
“Careful,” he says finally, voice low enough to scrape. It’s a warning.
“You promised honesty.”
“I promised answers,” he corrects. “Not a confessional.”
“I want to know you, not only your story or the gruesome things you do.” The confession hangs there, it causes my cheeks to flare. I feels wrong, yet I want it.
The heater ticks once, then steadies. I can feel the air change before he speaks.
“Me, the man behind the killer? Not the headlining murders?” he asks, I nod, a little too fast. He seems to rethink his choices. “If I tell you anything that belongs to me, it doesn’t go in your article.”
His tone isn’t cruel, just absolute. A line drawn in the dark.
I meet the black glass of his mask. “Yes, okay. I understand.”
He tilts his head slightly, a movement that catches the light. “You may ask. I’ll decide what survives the question.”
Adrenaline coils in my veins, a heat that feels too much like hunger. For years, he’s been myth and murder, something I could dissect safely on a page. But now he’s here, real and close enough that every breath I take tastes faintly of him.
I can ask him anything. The thought rushes through me like flame, too bright, too reckless. My pulse is a drum beneath my skin, the air between us sharp enough to cut. I grip the pencil until my knuckles ache, but what’ll be the coast of this story? It’s a thought that goes as easy as it came.
“What’s your age?”
“Thirty-eight.”
The number lands harder than I expect. “You’re older than I thought.”
Thirty-eight. Almost fifteen years between us.
The realization unsettles me. It’s not disgust; it’s confusion. He shouldn’t pull me in the way he does. He’s everything I’ve been warned about, older, dangerous, unreachable, but when he speaks, the air bends toward him, and so do I. And more with every little piece of information he gives.
“Did you now?” The faintest curve beneath the filters; mockery or fatigue, I can’t tell. “People imagine monsters are ageless. It makes them easier to hate.”
I write it anyway. “Thirty-eight.”
“Erase it,” he says harshly.
The pencil stills.
“Erase it,” he repeats. “You can know it, you can’t write it.”
I drag the eraser across the paper until the line becomes dust. I move the notebook aside, the scrape of cardboard against the blanket louder than it should be. For a moment, neither of us speaks. The air feels different without the barrier of the page between us, too close, too bare.
He watches me, still as stone.
“Okay, so what’s your nationality,” I ask, softer now.
“Half Icelandic,” he answers. “Half Swedish.”
The mixture suits him; half ice, half long winter night. “Born here?”
“In Reykjavík. Moved north when I was small.” His gloved fingers drum once on his knee.
I let the silence stretch. He doesn’t fill it, and I realize that’s part of the lesson. He speaks only when words serve him, he speaks only when I ask.
I shift the focus. “Why the mask? I know I asked before, but is it really only because sight is power?”
For a moment he’s still enough that I hear the machinery of his breath. Then: “Partly. Power, anonymity, yes. But also function.”
“Function?”
“I’m not… pleasant to look at.”
Something inside me rebels. “That’s convenient,” I murmur. “You get to hide, and I get to imagine something worse.”
“You’d prefer the reality?”
“Yes.”
He studies me for a long beat, as if trying to decide whether that’s bravery or stupidity. “Curiosity again,” he says finally. “It’s your most dangerous habit.”
“Would the truth frighten me?”
“No. It would distract you.”
“Then distract me.”
He leans forward, I automatically lean closer towards the wall behind me. The black fabric at his throat creases; I catch a glimpse of pale skin marked by the faint map of an old scar, a flash of ruin quickly hidden again. “It’s not a good story,” he says.
“I don’t want a good story,” I say. “I want yours.”
I know what every answer costs me. Each piece he gives me drags me further from the world above; the one with weather, noise, and people who still believe in ordinary things like mercy.
Every detail he offers is another thread pulling me down into his dark orbit, tightening around my ribs until I can’t remember how to breathe air that isn’t his.
I should stop asking. I should cling to the last pieces of the girl who had a desk, a byline, a heartbeat untouched by this kind of gravity. But the need to know him, really know him, swallows reason whole. Curiosity isn’t just hunger anymore; it’s compulsion, obsession.
He leans closer, and heat climbs through me like flame meeting oxygen. The air between us hums, thick with everything unsaid. His voice lowers, rough, threaded with something unguarded, and the sound slides through me like a slow poison I don’t want cured.
“My father was a chemist; brilliant, cruel, obsessed with control. He believed perfection needed witnesses, so he made me one. When he ran out of instruments, he used what was left of the living in his household. I learned young that precision and pain are easy to confuse.”
The images form too clearly in my head: a small boy in a lab’s cold light, the smell of solvent and smoke.
My heart aches before I realize it’s happening; an ache that starts small, somewhere beneath my ribs, then spreads until it’s everywhere.
His voice drags me back, low and even, as if he’s describing someone else’s tragedy. “He said fear sharpens focus,” he continues. “That if my hand could stay steady while I was hurting, I’d never fail a test again. He was right, in a way. I didn’t fail. I just stopped feeling.”
He flexes his hand once, slow and deliberate, the faint tremor there betraying the calm he tries to wear like armor. “The nerve damage came later,” he says. “And tons of side effects more.”
He exhales through his nose, a bitter sound.
“The tremor never leaves. I hide it when I work, when I work it’s the only time it stops.”
I can’t speak. Every word he says sinks deeper, rooting under my skin, making me feel something I don’t want to name.
He goes on, quieter now. “He turned the house into his lab. I became his test subject, his proof of theory, his mistake.”
Then he moves, slowly, deliberately, and pulls at the seam of his left glove. The leather sighs as he peels it away.
What’s underneath makes my throat close.
His hand looks more ruin than flesh: skin pale and warped, veins like blue cords beneath a map of raised scars.
Black ink coils over the damage, runes and equations tattooed where the flesh never healed right.
It climbs past his wrist, disappearing into the sleeve.
The fingers are calloused, two of them crooked from bones that never set.
When he moves, the tremor follows like a shadow that never learned obedience.
“This is what it cost me,” he says, voice flat, almost bored.
My chest tightens, my own body answering something I don’t understand.
I think of the scar. Then, before fear can stop me, I reach forward.
Moving closer to him, away from the safe mattress.
My fingers hover, trembling inches from his bare hand.
He doesn’t move. The heat between us pulses, alive, wrong, magnetic.
When my skin finally meets his, every nerve in me riots. His flesh is warm, real, rougher than I imagined. The ridges of the scars feel like Braille, a language only pain knows how to write.
He inhales sharply, a sound not quite human.
I don’t pull away. Neither does he.
He exhales, slow and shuddering, like he hasn’t felt a touch in years and doesn’t know what to do with it. The sound crawls through me, equal parts warning and surrender.
The tremor that lived there moments ago is gone. Completely.
For the first time, he’s still.
I trace one of the scars with the edge of my thumb, following the raised line until it disappears beneath the ink and the sleeve. His breath stutters, sharp, as if I’ve reached something even the pain couldn’t touch. The air between us vibrates, charged, dangerous.
“You shouldn’t touch me,” he says, voice lower now, rougher, an animal pretending to remember language.
“Then stop me,” I whisper.
The words hang there—reckless, trembling, alive. He could stop me. End this. Remind me he’s the monster I spent years writing about.
But he doesn’t.
All the words I’ve ever written about him feel small now; empty shells trying to name something that doesn’t fit language anymore. I thought I was documenting a monster. But maybe monsters aren’t born. Maybe they’re built, one scar, one silence, one unbearable choice at a time.
His hand tightens around mine, just slightly, grounding me in a world that shouldn’t exist. The tremor is still gone. I don’t know if it’s the warmth or the touch or something else entirely, but for a heartbeat, he’s representing a human.
And maybe that’s the most terrifying part—
that the man the world calls Vapor might be more human than any of us thought.