Chapter 15 Dante #2
“God knows how many like him are working for them,” Jason says, his voice weaving disgust and pity together as he shakes his head, trying to dislodge the thought. “They prey on desperate people and use them up for their work.”
“Giving at least one man a second chance is still something,” Lucia says, and there’s this strange, hopeful light in her tone, like she believes words can stitch the world back together. “A drop in a sea, but the one that shatters the water and sends a ripple through. A tiny crack in the system.”
I smile because the motion is expected, because it keeps the lie whole, and because their belief feeds them. It doesn’t reach my eyes, but nobody notices it. “Of course. Makes me feel better, knowing he’s in a warm place with people around him, starting over.”
The corners of my mouth quiver, muscles taut and straining like frayed wires ready to snap.
Heat blooms in my chest, a thread of raw annoyance twisting through my ribs.
Every second stretches longer, heavier, until I feel like I might explode.
One more minute of this and I’ll have to go outside and shoot something just to uncoil, to release the tension wound so tight inside me.
I can’t even remember the moment I became this impatient, the exact point when restraint slipped from my hands and left me simmering in need.
“Let’s hope he didn’t put more people on our tail,” Jason mutters, and finally, my smile falls away.
The irritation ebbs as I unclench my jaw, peeling off the stupid mask I’ve been wearing.
“And for now, lay low, just like I said. We’ll see how long.
Dante, nothing changes—your mission stays as planned. ”
I nod, a small smirk tugging at the corner of my mouth, and it tastes sharper than any of their hollow consolations. This outcome fits me better than anything they could offer.
The world narrows, my focus sharpening to a single point, and finally, I can turn toward what I truly want. Their hope, their pity, their second chances—they can clutch their fragile light and keep it.
I have other shadows to chase, and I am ready to follow my urge.
A few hours have passed since Jason and Lucia left. The room still hums with their absence, the air thick with a lingering scent—bitter coffee and smoke—clinging like a confession that refuses to fade. It does little to keep me awake.
Because something else occupies that space, and it does the job far more efficiently than caffeine or alcohol ever could.
Estella.
Or rather, Iris McKale.
That single drop of information Owen handed me cracked everything open.
With it, I started my own investigation—one I’ve kept buried from Jason and Lucia.
I told them I’d be going through our old data, hoping to uncover new leads, a harmless enough excuse that none of them bothered to question.
They don’t know what I’m really chasing, or who. And I prefer it that way.
This needs to stay private.
Because digging into her past feels intimate, like trespassing somewhere sacred. I don’t want anyone else’s eyes on her file, anyone else reading the fragments of a life she fought to bury.
She’d kill me if she knew I was doing it.
But that’s the risk I choose, because it’s the only thing that scratches the itch beneath my skin—the relentless hum gnawing at the back of my skull. Curiosity doesn’t even begin to describe it. I’ve known curiosity before—brief, hollow sparks that vanish the moment they’re fed.
This isn’t that.
This is an obsession. Sharp, invasive, alive. Threading through every nerve and bone. Impossible to ignore.
The Order did a good job of erasing her, I’ll give them that much.
They scrubbed her history clean, tore her name from every record, scattered the remnants across continents like ashes in the wind.
But they missed pieces. They weren’t thorough enough.
Not for me. My skill, my relentless focus, and my unhealthy interest filled in the blanks they had tried so hard to hide.
My eyes sting, the edges of my vision blurring, and I press the heels of my palms against them until black dots swarm and jitter across the dark.
For a fleeting moment, I catch glimpses of color—chaotic, swirling forms that shimmer and flicker, a fragile illusion of rest I can almost reach but never quite touch.
Sleep would be mercy. But I can’t give myself that.
I’ve been awake for more than twenty-four hours, but how the fuck am I supposed to close my eyes when she’s right here, her past sprawled open before me, waiting to be understood?
My finger quivers slightly as I click on the right window. The screen glows weakly under the desk lamp, casting a pale light across the surface, and her real name appears again, impossible to ignore.
I blink rapidly, dragging the blurred words into focus.
The letters snap sharp and precise, and the story starts to unfold before me.
I can almost feel her presence hovering across the desk, a ghost daring me to keep looking, daring me to know more.
A jolt of fear and anticipation coils in my chest as I trace the lines of her prison file, its dates stretching back years, each word a whisper from the past.
Died at age nineteen at the Gravemoor Asylum.
The words throb against my skull, heavy and rhythmic, like a song I can’t shut off. I tear my eyes away from them, forcing myself to focus on the photo beneath, on the first fragment of where her story began.
Oxygen dims, sentences dissolve, and my mind forgets how to function the second she comes into view.
The real her.
Her hair is chestnut, tangled and slick with sweat, streaked with flakes of dried blood.
Strands cling stubbornly to her forehead, her cheek, the graceful curve of her neck.
Her eyes, hollow and bottomless brown, stare back at me from the grainy photograph.
Vacant, yes, yet charged with a volatile energy, a pulse that vibrates just beneath the surface—madness, rage, grief, all twisted together into something unrecognizable and fierce.
Bruises bloom across her skin, aching in their quiet violence.
Scratches trail along her jaw and collarbone, pale against the pallor of her flesh.
Her lip is split—a thin, jagged line of red—and I can almost trace the imprint of her teeth where she bit down hard enough to draw blood, as if she needed to feel something—anything—through the haze of mental agony.
The corners of her mouth dip slightly, a shadow of defiance etched into the dead calm of her face. And I find myself wondering, absurdly, if the person who took this picture is still alive.
She wears something white, likely a sweatshirt, soaked with sweat and marred with smudges of blood. Flecks of dirt cling to the fabric, darkening it, turning the cloth into a map of struggle and chaos.
I stare into her eyes, unable to tear my gaze away.
It feels like a circle closing in on itself, a sense that I’ve glimpsed this ghost before but never truly confronted her.
The first photo I ever saw of her now seems tame, almost lifeless.
In that image, she was alive, composed, lips tipped into the faintest smirk, untouchable and controlled.
But this is something entirely different.
This isn’t Estella. This isn’t the calm, meticulous assassin I thought I knew.
This is a ghost. A fractured, furious girl suspended between life and whatever waits beyond it.
Her eyes burn with a storm of raw, tangled emotion, each feeling layered into one unbearable pulse of intensity.
It’s a force so fierce, so immediate, that it feels as if she could step right out of the screen and clamp her hands around the throat of anyone who dares to meet her gaze.
She radiates destruction—the kind that doesn’t just want to kill, but to consume. The kind that wants to burn the whole world for what it did to her.
I lose track of time, sitting motionless, my gaze locked on her. Seconds slip into minutes, minutes into hours, each one unnoticed, irrelevant. My eyes sting, the harsh glow of the monitor cutting into them without mercy, but I can’t look away.
I don’t want to. I am trapped in her orbit, tethered and unwilling to escape.
I want to understand her pain. To feel it deep inside. To trace the jagged edges of what shattered her and what forged her into something new, something dangerous, something alive.
I know I will never fully reach her, never completely bridge the distance, but sitting here in the heavy silence of the night, with her face staring back at me from the screen, feels like a fragile kind of connection.
It is the closest I can come to being near her without breaking something sacred, without crossing a line that can never be undone.
A pause stretches between my breaths before my eyes return to the text near the image. The words sharpen, cutting through the quiet.
Patient Number Thirteen. Convicted of murdering her father and another inmate.
The words blur as the ache behind my eyes flares to life. I pinch the bridge of my nose, trying to crush the headache blooming between my temples.
Patient Number Thirteen.
That’s all she was to them.
A number. A case. A statistic.
I scroll down, frustration building with every line I read—frustration for her, for what they did to her, for what they turned her into. Because beneath all the clinical words, I can feel her screaming, unheard and unacknowledged, from the other side of the page.
I pull up the file that describes her family—starting with the father, the man she killed.
A local cop and a beloved citizen. The kind of man people build small-town legends around.
The report paints him as a saint—devoted to his work, adored by his neighbors, the perfect father, husband, and protector.
A man who could do no wrong.