Chapter Fifty-Eight #2
His eyes don’t leave mine. “You wrote hundreds and hundreds of pages about Deogal Attor.”
The name hits me like something alive. And suddenly I can see it.
Paper. Stacks of it. My handwriting spiralling harder and harder across page after page after page. Ink stains along the side of my hand. Cold coffee beside monitor light at three in the morning.
Deogal.
Deogal.
Deogal.
My stomach drops so violently I think I might black out.
“No,” I whisper again, but it sounds weaker now.
Because somewhere deep underneath the panic, something truly horrific finally starts opening its eyes.
The nights crash into me all at once after that. His mouth against mine. His hands. The weight of him leaning over me in the dark while my body opened for him like it already knew him.
My stomach twists violently.
No.
No no no—
My pulse starts hammering harder beneath my skin because suddenly I can see how impossible it sounds.
Heat floods my face so fast it burns.
Oh God.
What if he was never there?
The thought rips through me so brutally I nearly gag.
My breathing turns wet and uneven. Shame crashes through me so hard my vision pulses.
“No,” I whisper again, weaker this time.
But another thought arrives immediately after, sharp enough to cut through the panic.
He knew things. He did unexplainable things. He knew about the sound before it happened. He left fingerprints on me. He gave me a bracelet.
I freeze.
Where’s my bracelet?
I wrench my arm upward as far as the restraints allow. The breath leaves my lungs. A hospital identification band circles my wrist tightly enough to leave an angry red indentation beneath it. My name stares back at me in harsh black lettering beside a barcode and patient number.
A patient.
Not Doctor Ainsley.
Patient.
My stomach folds violently inward. The plastic crackles softly when I twist my wrist harder, staring at it like the words might rearrange themselves if I look long enough. My pulse starts climbing so fast my vision trembles around the edges.
My head jerks up suddenly toward Peter behind the glass.
“No.” My voice shakes harder now. “No, this can’t be happening! He’s real, Peter. He knew things he couldn’t have known. I’m not going crazy!”
My chest spasms around another breath.
“He needed me.” The words rush out desperately now, tripping over each other. “He told me things. He begged me to help him. He—”
My throat tightens.
I know people. I know lies. I know fear. I’ve built my entire life around pulling truth out of monsters.
“I can read people,” I choke out. “I know when someone’s telling the truth and he—”
“Jesus Christ.” Sean’s voice slices violently through the speaker. “Listen to yourself.”
Peter watches me carefully through the glass.
“No,” I breathe.
“You started losing time,” Peter’s voice drops low now. “You stopped sleeping. You started referring to places none of us recognised. Cells, Friars,” His eyes flick briefly toward my wrist again.
Pain answers immediately. A heavy, throbbing ache buried inside the joint itself, like the bone remembers being damaged even if my mind doesn’t. My stomach tightens violently around it.
I stop breathing.
Peter notices. His expression shifts for half a second before flattening again. “You kept insisting your arm had been broken before we ever restrained you.”
The fluorescent lights buzz overhead. My pulse starts climbing harder beneath my skin.
“No,” I whisper again, but it sounds thinner now.
Peter exhales slowly through his nose. “Then the fourth body was found.”
The room seems to contract around the sentence.
My mouth dries instantly.
“A therapist,” he says carefully. “That’s when we realised this wasn’t deteriorating.” His voice lowers further. “You were escalating.”
My heart slams violently against my ribs.
“No.”
“Rheda—”
“No!” The scream tears out of me hard enough to leave my throat burning. The restraints rattle violently as I jerk against them. “That was him! That was all him!”
My voice breaks apart completely after that. I can hear my own breathing echoing wetly around the interrogation room and humiliation crashes through me because I sound insane.
I sound exactly like the people we used to restrain in here.
My chest spasms around another breath.
“You saw him,” I choke out desperately. “You talked to him. Peter, please.”
Begging now.
God.
I’m begging.
“He’s real!” I choke. “He’s fucking real.”
There’s another flash across my mind.
A knife.
Something thick, crude. Dragging through flesh while someone screams. My vision blacks at the edges. I wrench against the chair so hard pain explodes through my wrists.
“Stop,” I gasp.
Because suddenly I can smell blood. Old blood. Thick and copper-heavy. Mixed with damp stone and burning herbs and human skin left too long near heat.
The room flickers.
“There has never been a patient called Deogal Attor admitted to this unit.” He spits the words slowly and every syllable cuts deeper.
“That’s not true.” The words tear out of me before I can hold them back. Tears spill hot and immediate down my face. “That’s not true. I saw him.”
My voice shakes harder. My whole body does.
“I watched him. He spoke to us. Peter, please—” The word catches horribly in my throat. Humiliating. “Please stop doing this.”
The room goes painfully still after that.
Even Sean stops moving. Peter looks at me through the glass and for one awful second I think he might break.
I see it flicker across his face—hesitation, grief, something dangerously close to guilt.
His mouth parts slightly like he’s about to say my name differently this time.
Hope opens inside my chest so suddenly it hurts.
Then the interrogation room door slams open. The sound cracks through the room like a gunshot.
My pulse stutters violently. Everything inside me changes at once.
I feel him before I see him.
Heat slides low through my body first, sharp enough to feel invasive, followed immediately by terror so cold it locks my lungs halfway closed. My skin tightens. Every nerve in me wakes up screaming.
No.
No, no, no—
My head turns anyway.
And there he is.
Deogal steps into the interrogation room with the calm, effortless certainty of a man entering somewhere he already owns. The fluorescent lights catch briefly along the sharp lines of his black suit as the door seals shut behind him with a heavy hydraulic hiss.
My lungs stop working. Relief detonates through me so brutally it nearly makes me sob.
He’s here.
Oh God, he’s here.
My body loosens around the sight of him before horror catches up. Every muscle unclenches at once like something inside me has finally stopped bracing for impact. Tears blur my vision harder.
Because if he’s standing there—then I’m not insane.
But the thought barely survives before something worse arrives.
He looks wrong.
There are no restraints. No bruises darkening his throat or wrists. No orange. He’s not trapped. He’s not damaged. The version of him standing in front of me now looks untouched by everything that destroyed me.
A tailored black fabric pulls cleanly across broad shoulders. A crisp collar. Dark hair pushed neatly back from his face. He looks expensive. Controlled. Even Peter straightens when he walks in.
And then his eyes find mine.
Everything inside me goes silent.
Because there’s nothing there. There’s no heat or fascination. None of that terrible intimate attention that always felt like being slowly undressed from the inside out. No trace of the man who watched me through the glass like he already knew exactly how I would break for him.
He looks at me the way Peter used to look at files, like I am something damaged sitting under observation.
The loss of it cuts so deep I physically flinch.
And the truly horrifying part—the part that makes shame crawl hot beneath my skin—is that even now, chained to this chair, drowning inside whatever nightmare this is, some pathetic starving part of me still reaches for him anyway.
Because at least he came back for me.