Ellie #3
"Not consciously, perhaps. But you were close to your father." Grace leans closer. "Close enough that Killian would have known exactly where to start looking." She pauses, letting it settle. "He may genuinely care for you now. But ask yourself, was that always true?"
Killian’s face materializes before I can stop it.
The way he looked at me the morning after the gym.
The way his hands shook when he thought I wasn't watching.
I run those images through my head like evidence, looking for the seam where the performance starts.
I can't find it. I don't know if that means there isn't one, or if he's just that good.
The restraints have rubbed my wrists bloody.
I can feel it, the warm sting every time I shift.
Old bruises throb with every heartbeat. The cold in the room has settled into my bones now, turning them to icicles.
I stopped shivering a while ago. I think that's worse.
My eyelids drag, but my thoughts won't stop.
Two opposite commands. Same body. Neither winning.
"I'm being direct about my methods," she adds, her voice dropping to something almost reasonable. "Whereas Killian..." She strokes my hair. The gentleness is worse than the restraints. "What if your trust was the objective, Ellie? What if earning it was the entire job?"
I recognise the technique immediately. I could write a paper on it. Plant seeds of doubt. Let the victim catastrophize. I know every step. Yet I'm powerless to stop the questions from taking root.
"Your house arrest situation isn't as secure as the courts believe." Grace taps her tablet, bringing up surveillance footage from inside my home. The kitchen where we’d cooked together. The living room where we’d talked late into the night. “We’ve been studying your interactions."
My ribs squeeze tighter with each frame. Moments I thought were private. Conversations where I'd bared my soul. All of it observed. Analyzed. Archived. I try to turn away, but the restraints hold me exactly where she wants me. Forcing me to watch. Nausea climbs my throat and I swallow it back down.
"How...?"
“The federal monitoring contract went to Sentinel Security, one of our subsidiaries. His security measures were designed to keep him contained, not to keep us from watching."
“You had no right.”
"Rights?" Grace's expression doesn't shift. "You signed the monitoring consent forms yourself, Ellie. You simply assumed you were the one doing the observing."
"You don't know him," I manage to say, my voice weaker than I intend.
Grace tilts her head, studying the monitor readings. "He's very good at becoming what a person needs, Ellie. It's the most useful skill a man in his position can have." She pauses. "Ask yourself when exactly he started feeling safe to you. Then ask yourself who benefits from that."
I’m too slow to stop his voice from surfacing. They won't fucking take you. That was the moment. I didn't choose it. It just happened. And now it's on her monitors. A spike in my heart rate that answered the question before I could.
"Tomorrow we go deeper." Grace unclips the last electrode, her movements unhurried. "Today was just the surface." She loosens my restraints, though not enough for escape. "You should rest now. Process what you've learned."
As she prepares to leave, I manage one question through the haze of drugs and confusion. "Why are you doing this?"
Grace pauses at the door with Reed by her side. “Because your father’s work was never completed, Ellie. And tomorrow, we’ll extract every piece of it from your mind, whether you remember it or not. You're the key to finishing it."
After she leaves, I lie shivering on the cold table.
The drug is still working. I know because I can't stop my mind from answering the questions Grace left behind.
My father. The Order. Killian. The three of them rearranging themselves until I can't remember which fear belonged to which person.
I'm too cold to move. Too tired to fight it.
Trapped between waking and sleeping. I lie there and let her questions eat at me.
As the drug begins to wear off, my brain starts sorting slowly.
Trying to separate Grace's theatre from the things she actually showed me.
The photographs. The documents. The surveillance footage of my own kitchen.
The problem is I can't tell where the evidence ends and the manipulation begins. That's the point.
I close my eyes and look for him. Not the version Grace described. The real one. The one who pressed his lips to my hair and whispered "To me, you're everything." I hold that image up against everything Grace just said. I can't make it fit. I also can't make it not fit. That's the worst part.
“Find me,” I whisper into the empty room. No matter what he's hiding. No matter who he used to be. I don't know who I'm asking for, I only know I can't stay here alone.
My eyes slide shut. I don't have the strength to hold them open any more.
“Please. Just find me.”