Chapter Forty-Five
Rheda
I thought the photographs would make it stop.
I thought seeing what he had done, really seeing it, would cut something clean inside me. A doctor opened beneath surgical lights. A historian ruined across a library desk. A priest surrounded by the word mercy carved into stone. I thought horror would be stronger than want.
It’s not.
I’m still here, waiting for him. Desperate for more.
I haven’t slept in three days and I think I’m losing my fucking mind.
My head thumps violently like something is trying to break its way free. My lips are dry, cracked, and every time I breathe the cold air burns the back of my throat like it doesn’t belong.
I don’t shower in the morning. What’s the point? I can’t bear to turn on the tap. It’ll be too loud. Too aggressive. I don’t bother eating either. The thought of food is enough to make my stomach twist and acid creep up the back of my throat.
I have to see him again.
The thought horrifies me the second it arrives.
He opened a doctor like a body on an operating table.
He hunted therapists.
And still my body moves toward him like it’s searching for something.
Delaying only feels like torture.
The cold air hits me as soon as my front door slams shut. The world feels bitter today, like it’s in mourning. Even the sky is darker, frosted over with looming clouds that swell. I glance up at the greyness and pull my coat even tighter.
The whole walk feels wrong. Every person in a white coat suddenly stands out to me. A paramedic crossing the road. A nurse outside the pharmacy smoking beside the bins.
My pulse spikes every time I see one.
Doctors.
Therapists.
The photographs keep forcing themselves back into my head in ugly little flashes.
The opened chest cavity. The blue thread. MERCY carved into stone.
My breathing turns shallow.
What if he only talks to me because I’m next?
I catch my reflection in a polished café window. For a second, I watch myself move through it too, my own reflection pale and tired, a woman wearing her skin badly.
And then my chest floods with heat so suddenly it feels violently.
No.
I’m different.
He said so himself.
He needs my help. I’m going to save him. I’m the only one who understands him.
Standing where no one should be, still enough to feel unnatural, his shape cutting through the reflection like something the mirror should have rejected. Even distorted through glass, I know the shape of him.
Tall in the way danger is tall—impossible to ignore once you’ve seen it. Broad shoulders beneath a long dark coat that falls almost to his knees, the fabric hanging heavy and severe. His hood is up, his face half-lost to shadow, disguised enough that no one passing would look twice.
But I know it is him.
I know it with the same certainty I know my own reflection.
My body stops before my mind does.
Oh God.
He’s escaped.
The thought detonates through me so hard my knees nearly lock.
Heat floods my chest instantly after, sick and humiliating because beneath the terror, beneath the horror, something else rises with it...relief.
He came back.
I hate myself for that thought immediately.
The tension that has been wound inside me for days tears open all at once. My throat tightens so sharply I almost laugh, because the emotion is too big to fit neatly into one thing.
I stare at the glass because I am suddenly terrified of blinking, of doing anything that might give reality the chance to correct itself and take him away again.
How?
The question moves through me slowly, like something cold being poured directly into my bloodstream.
The facility is ten blocks away.
Ten blocks and reinforced steel and armed guards and cameras in every corridor and observation logs and sedation protocols strong enough to drop a man twice his size.
And yet....there he is. Standing behind me in the reflection like he has always belonged there.
Even through warped glass, even with the hood shadowing his face, I can feel it—the full weight of his attention settling over me like a hand at the back of my neck. That terrible focus. That unbearable certainty that when he looks at me, he is taking.
My pulse stutters, then climbs.
I’m moving before I realise it. Halfway across the road, I look up again.
But something about him feels different now, tighter. Even the morning light seems strange, too bright and too far away, like I am walking out of one life and into another.
I reach the other side.
Ten metres.
Eight.
Six.
Close enough that I should be able to see every detail of his face.
But something strange happens. Someone brushes in front of him, a young woman with her dark hair pinned back.
If she notices him, she doesn’t show it.
Her eyes are fixed on the little boy in a small, blue raincoat.
She holds out a napkin and tries to dab his face, but he squirms and protests.
There’s glass between us, but I can almost hear his shrill squeal.
I look back at Deogal.
But when I do...it’s empty.
He’s gone.
I stop so abruptly it feels like something inside me snaps tight.
Gone.
For a second, my mind refuses it, still trying to force his shape back into that space, as if staring hard enough might make reality correct itself.
The street stretches in both directions, too open.
Not enough people for him to disappear properly, but just enough to make every stranger feel suspicious.
Every dark coat. Every shadow. I turn, slower at first, then faster, dragging my gaze across everything that moves.
My heart is still slamming against my ribs. My pulse is sharp and frantic beneath my skin. I let out a breath I didn’t realise I was holding.
He was there.
I know it.
Someone bumps into me.
“Sorry,” I manage, feet already moving. I move through the streets on instinct alone, barely aware of where my feet are taking me. Traffic lights change. People brush past my shoulder with muttered apologies. Somewhere in the distance, a siren rises and fades.
None of it reaches me.
By the time the grey slab of the facility rises into view, my stomach is tight enough to ache. My chest feels heavier with every step.
I swipe my badge and move through the first security door. Then the second. My pace quickens without meaning to.
When I reach the observation room, it’s already alive. Voices murmur. Monitors hum. The interrogation feed is active.
My lungs stall.
They’ve started without me.
Peter is already settled across Deogal, posture crisp, hands folded neatly on the table. Mike and Sean flank the walls like statues, weapons at the ready. The room throbs with that familiar, unbearable silence, the kind that presses against my ears until I feel like screaming just to shatter it.
Then Peter speaks. He asks a few simple questions but none of them settle in my thoughts. They slide past me like water over glass.
I glance at the clock.
07:03 am.
My shift starts at 7:30am.
And yet, they didn’t bother waiting.
This thought grips me in a violent embrace. For a moment, I simply stare at the numbers like I’ve misread them. My brain scrambles for logic, but finds none.
We always start together. That’s the routine. Mike, Peter, Sean and me.
It shouldn’t matter. Not really. Peter’s in charge. It’s his case and I’m just advising, but something sharp twists in my chest. It’s bitter and childish and impossible to ignore.
Did they decide they didn’t need me?
Or maybe Peter finally looked at those photographs properly. Maybe he finally realised leaving me alone with Deogal was a mistake.
My chest tightens. Maybe he saw the way Deogal watches me. Maybe he saw the way I watch back.
Or what if Mike told them about yesterday?
That possibility lands violently.
I lower myself slowly into the chair. The plastic creaks faintly under my weight.
Minutes drag past, swollen and heavy, each one stretching longer than it should.
I check the time again.
07.03am.
My brains churns.
I’m suddenly aware of how cold the room is, how devastating the silence is on my loud brain. I reach across my body to soothe but it doesn’t work.
I look at Deogal. And my breath catches slightly.
The glow of the lights washes over his face, casting deep contours and shadows below his cheekbones. I look at his lips before I can stop myself. Dark and swollen, His eyes are ringed, hollow, gaze locked on the desk in front of him. I try to read him and fail.
For a second, I simply stare at him, my mind trying to reconcile the image in front of me with the one burned into my memory from half an hour ago. The man from my dream.
How can he be three people at once? In three different spaces?
How can he follow me like he’s sown himself into my shadow?
How can he reject me in three different bodies?
My fingers curl slowly against the armrest of the chair.
I inhale, but before I can make too much sense of it all, something inside of me tightens. The anger is sudden and white-hot, rising so fast it scares me. My nails bite into my palms now. I don’t recognise this feeling—this raw, desperate need to break the stillness, to force him to acknowledge us.
Me.
It doesn’t feel like my thought.
It arrives too fast, too sharp, like something placed directly into my head rather than born there. For a second I just sit with it, staring at the glass, my pulse thudding hard enough to make my hands shake.
Three days.
Three days of silence.
Three days of lying awake in the dark, waiting for him. Three days of second-guessing every word, every look, every mistake. Three days of being ignored like I am the one begging, the one left pacing the edges of absence like some pathetic, starving thing.
I look at him sitting there beneath fluorescent light and suddenly the photographs overlap him perfectly.
Blood beneath his fingernails. The opened doctor. The therapist report. The priest hanging against stone.
My stomach knots violently.
He should disgust me. He should terrify me enough to make this easy.
Instead, all I can think is look at me. Please fucking look at me.
I reach for the microphone.
Even as I do it, I know I shouldn’t. I know exactly how reckless it is, how unprofessional, how insane. I should sit down. Breathe. Let the feeling pass. Pretend I still have control over myself.
But I don’t. Not where he is concerned.
My hand closes around it anyway, fingers tightening too hard, and before I can stop myself—before pride or reason can drag me back—my thumb presses the button.
The click sounds far too loud and suddenly, there is no taking it back.
“Speak.” The word tears out of me sharper than I mean it to, slicing clean through the room before I can soften it.
My hand tightens around the microphone.
“God damn it, I know you can,” I say, louder now, my voice cracking against the glass between us. “Speak.”
It isn’t a request. It sounds too close to pleading, too close to fury.
Too close to confession.
Silence follows. Every head turns to face me. All but his, and it’s fucking devastating.
Peter whirls in his chair, eyes wide, fury and alarm colliding on his face as he looks straight at the glass. His lips pull tight, jaw popping. I see the displeasure spreading across his face. I can almost hear the words you’re fired being screamed through my mind.
I’ve broken protocol.
It kicks in properly now.
Oh, fuck. I’ve broken protocol!
The room goes deathly silent. The quietness cuts more violently than it did before.
My cheeks burn.
The anger dissipates into blind-hot fear.
I release the microphone button sharply, and stagger backwards, almost knocking the chair and myself over. I scramble upright, heart thrashing against my ribcage. Nausea rises high. For the first time in days, I feel sober. Adrenaline slices through the fog. Sharp. Insistent.
I hold my breath. I wait for Peter’s dismissal.
Deogal doesn’t move. At first.
Then—slowly, deliberately, he lifts his head. His eyes find mine. A smile touches his mouth, slow but coy.
“You got me,” he says softly.
The words crawl through the room like a living thing.
Nobody breaths.
But everyone heard it too.