Chapter 52 A Little Extra Garnish Just For Fun
A LITTLE EXTRA GARNISH JUST FOR FUN
I Like You Best - Ella Red
Bones
Kayla walks out of that corridor like a general leading her army and a crime scene leading itself.
The alarms cough overhead, lights stutter, the building groans, and she just…
glows. Blood on her arms, blood on her throat, boots leaving faint prints where it’s still wet.
If I didn’t know her, I’d be worried. Because that’s not the look of a victim.
That’s the look of someone who got everything she wanted and a little extra garnish just for fun.
Nightshade sticks to her side like he’s welded there, one hand on her waist, the other hovering just shy of her stomach whenever the floor lurches.
Ghost stalks a half-step behind, eyes flicking over every door, every camera, every smear on the wall like he’s scrolling through reference shots he’ll paint later just to get it out of his head.
Hatchet floats along the far side of the corridor, silent as a shadow, but I catch the small, sharp curve at the corner of his mouth when he looks at the bodies we pass.
Honeymonster is grinning like he’s on a fucking theme park ride.
Snow oscillates between laughing too hard and going ghost-pale whenever Kayla mentions “mulch”.
And Valentine brings up the rear, trying not to step in anything.
He looks like he’s just realised the zoo enclosure never had glass.
Every time Kayla tosses another line over her shoulder – soup, wood chipper, flower garden watered with blood – he flinches like she’s throwing knives.
I can’t tell if I hate him on sight or if I just hate that he’s here to witness this at all.
We move through the hallways she’s already baptised.
You can feel the shape of what she did in the air: not chaos, exactly, but chaos that started out with a plan and then got bored halfway through and decided to be creative.
There are wheel tracks smeared in red where some poor bastard tried to move a trolley over the mess and slipped.
There’s a chair on its side, a clipboard stamped into a sticky patch on the floor, a pair of broken spectacles ground under someone’s heel.
A door hangs askew on one hinge, a smear of darker red at handle height where a hand tried to grab or push or hold it shut.
Kayla keeps up a running commentary like a tour guide on a very niche bus. “That one tried to sedate me,” she chirps as we step over a man in scrubs facedown in the doorway, an empty syringe still stuck in his hand. “Didn’t check the dosage. Very sloppy.”
“Tragic,” I say. “Bet he was great at potlucks.”
She flashes me a grin, bright and feral. “He died as he lived: unremarkably.”
Nightshade’s lips twitch. He’s trying to stay focused – threat assessment, exit routes, baby – but she’s making it hard.
Every time she opens her mouth, another screw comes loose in his spine.
He keeps dragging his touch back to her stomach, like he has to confirm every thirty seconds that there’s still movement in there and not just empty space.
“You really hacked this Director person?” I ask as we pass a nurses’ station that looks like a paper bomb went off in it – files scattered, a computer monitor tilted at a bad angle, coffee mug smashed on the floor.
“Hacked?” she sniffs. “Please. I waltzed. Man’s password hygiene is a crime all on its own. Do you know he used his own birthday for three different accounts?”
“Bold of him to assume he deserved one,” I mutter.
Valentine makes a strained noise. “You can’t just – this level of breach, the Director will—”
Kayla doesn’t even look back at him. “The Director will throw a tantrum and send men with clipboards,” she says. “I’m not impressed.”
Honeymonster barks out a laugh. “God, I missed you.”
The building shudders as something deeper in the guts of it dies – generator, server, maybe one of the bigger mechanical systems trying to reboot and failing. The lights flicker again, then settle into a weaker, jaundiced glow. Somewhere far off, a door slams shut.
Interesting. But Kayla doesn’t seem bothered so I dismiss the potential threat.
“Keep moving,” Ghost says. “These systems weren’t designed for…whatever she did.”
“Don’t be rude,” Kayla says. “They’re experiencing growth.”
We reach a junction and she doesn’t hesitate, just turns left like she wrote the floorplans. Her feet don’t slip once, even when she steps through a puddle of diluted red streaking away under a door. I can’t tell if that’s adrenaline or just…her.
“Not worried about leaving a trail, sweetheart?” I ask, nodding at the prints she’s leaving behind.
She glances down, unimpressed. “If they’re smart they’ll follow it to the nearest exit and thank me for the opportunity to be alive somewhere else,” she says. “If they’re not smart, they can stay. It’s a great time to pivot into a career in haunting.”
Snow snorts, half-hysterical. Nightshade’s jaw tightens. He keeps scanning every corner like he expects an armed response team to burst through the walls. Except there’s no movement. No shouts. No stampede of staff. The only people making noise in this place now are us.
And that’s the part that gets to me.
I’ve seen Kayla bleed and I’ve seen her be the one holding the blade.
I’ve seen messy and clean and everything in between.
But walking through a facility this big and hearing nothing but our footsteps and her jokes?
That hits different. There should be resistance.
There should be guns. There should be someone yelling codes into a radio and slamming emergency shutters down in our faces.
Instead, all the shutters look like they tried.
Some are stuck halfway, stuttering in place, others dropped and then jammed. Systems coughing, sputtering.
“She pulled the plug on them,” I murmur, mostly to myself. “While they weren’t looking. Right under their noses.”
Ghost glances at me. “She does that,” he says mildly.
Kayla hears us and beams. “Look at you, paying attention,” she says. “Ten points to Team Reality.”
Valentine has gone quiet. He keeps scanning the bodies we pass with the kind of strained expression I’ve seen on junior staff after their first real mission.
He isn’t new. He’s seen corpses before. But I don’t think he’s seen someone he thought was a patient turn a building into this much collateral in a single night. Certainly not single-handedly.
“She really did this alone?” he asks finally, voice thin.
Nightshade turns his head just enough to look at him, eyes very flat. “She wasn’t alone,” he says. “She had them.” His hand tightens on Kayla’s stomach, a brief, possessive press. “That’s more than enough.”
Kayla hums, pleased. “He gets it,” she says.
We hit a set of doors that lead out toward the side wing, glass panels streaked with smudged handprints.
Beyond them I can see the darker shape of the grounds, the glimmer of another building’s windows, the faint shadowy outline of something that might be the greenhouse.
The corridor angles that way, carrying the ghost of fresher air.
“Almost done?” I ask. “Because as much as I enjoy your murder museum, I’d like to be off-site before this place decides to fall on our heads.”
“In a minute,” she says. “There are still some loose ends in the medical wing. And I’d hate for my art to go unappreciated. Or my message to go undelivered.”
Ghost makes a soft noise that could be horrified agreement. Snow actually laughs; it comes out too high. Honeymonster claps him on the shoulder like he’s proud.
“Loose ends?” Valentine echoes, wary.
Kayla glances back at him, eyes bright and sharp. “Doctor Callaway,” she says. “She and I had a little chat. She’s very motivated to talk to the right people now. I just…adjusted her circumstances.”
A picture begins to form in my head. It’s not pretty. It is extremely satisfying.
“Do we need to finish it?” I ask. “Tie it off, so to speak?”
“Tempting,” she says. “But no. She’s the message. Messages don’t work if you shred them before they’re delivered. Seytan can mop up. Or the Director. Or whoever gets here first.”
Nightshade’s mouth does that tiny, vicious curl I like. “You’re getting good at this,” he murmurs.
Snow whispers, almost reverent, “She was always good at this.”
“Duh.” She tuts. “Took you long enough to realise it.”
We push through another set of doors and cooler air hits my face, tinged with damp earth and something green underneath the chemical tang.
Outside. Grounds. Somewhere to put our backs against if things go bad.
The sky is a flat, low ceiling of cloud; the facility’s lights cast everything in a washed-out, sickly glow.
Kayla steps into it like a queen leaving a banquet. Blood on her feet, chin tipped up, my girl strolling out of hell she decorated herself.
Ahead, I can see the greenhouse silhouette, glass panels catching reflections from the security lights.
Beyond that, the bulk of what looks like it might be the medical wing.
She slows for a second, looking toward it, and something shifts in her posture – not fear, exactly, but a kind of sharp, cold focus.
“There,” she says softly. “One last exhibit. Then we go.”
Nightshade follows her gaze, thumbs pressing briefly into her hip, grounding himself or her or both.
Ghost’s eyes narrow, already tracking the line between buildings, routes in and out.
Honeymonster cracks his neck like he’s getting ready for an encore.
Snow wipes his palms on his trousers, breathing a little too fast. Valentine whispers something under his breath that sounds like a prayer and probably won’t help.
Me? I roll my shoulders, shake out my hands, and grin.
Because for all the horror in these walls, for all the ways this could still go wrong, there’s one thing I know for sure as we angle toward the greenhouse and the medical wing beyond it: We didn’t find Kayla on a slab.
We didn’t find her sedated, cut open, gone.
We found her standing in the middle of her own apocalypse, smiling.
A fucking queen ruling over her corpse army.
The rest, whatever it is, we can handle.
She leads. We follow.
And if the Director doesn’t get the message from the bodies she left behind, he’s going to understand it very clearly when we come back to finish the job.