Chapter Eight Elliot
The nightmare comes back.
Same basement. Same chair. Same hands on my body, cold and clinical, taking me apart piece by piece. Moore's voice in my ear, soft and reasonable, explaining why this is necessary. Why I deserve it. Why I should thank him for the lesson.
I wake up gasping, clawing at the sheets, the phantom taste of rubber gag still thick on my tongue.
The room is dark. I'm alone.
No. Not alone.
Jace is in the doorway, silhouette sharp against the light from the hall. He doesn't move, doesn't speak. Just watches me the way he watches everything: patient, calculating, waiting to see what I'll do next.
"I'm okay," I say. My voice comes out cracked, barely human.
"You're not." He crosses to the bed, sits on the edge. The mattress dips under his weight. "But you will be."
I don't know if that's a promise or a prediction. With Jace, it's hard to tell.
"What time is it?"
"0430."
Too early to be awake. Too late to go back to sleep. I sit up, pull my knees to my chest, wrap my arms around them.
"I remembered something else," I say. "While I was dreaming. About the files."
Jace goes still. That particular stillness that means he's processing, analyzing, filing away data.
"Tell me."
"There was a man. Moore called him his accountant.
He came to the house every month with a briefcase.
They'd go into the study and lock the door.
" I close my eyes, reaching for the fragments.
"I heard them talking once. Something about transfers.
Shell companies. A name that sounded like a place. Syrus? Cyprus?"
"Cyprus." Jace's voice is flat. "Offshore accounts."
"Is that important?"
"It's a thread." He stands, moves to the window, pulls back the curtain an inch. Grey light seeps through. "The accountant. Do you remember what he looked like?"
I try to picture him. The image is blurry, filtered through years of trauma and dissociation.
"Thin. Balding. He wore glasses with gold frames. He had a mole on his left cheek, near his ear."
Jace is quiet for a long moment. Then he turns, and there's something in his expression I haven't seen before. Something almost like satisfaction.
"I know who that is," he says.
His name is Gerald Whitmore The Fourth.
Jace pulls up the file on his laptop while I sit on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, watching the data scroll across the screen. Financial records. Property holdings. Employment history.
"He works for a consulting firm downtown," Jace says. "Officially, he manages investment portfolios for high-net-worth clients. Unofficially, he launders money for half the Custodians on the East Coast."
"Including Moore?"
"Especially Moore." Jace closes the laptop. "If anyone knows where the files are stored, it's him. And if I can get that information, I can give Abernathy something concrete. Something that proves your value beyond fabricated intelligence."
The way he says your value makes my stomach turn. Like I'm a commodity. An asset to be leveraged.
But that's what I am, isn't it? That's what I've always been.
"How do you get it out of him?"
Jace looks at me. His expression doesn't change, but something shifts behind his eyes. A coldness settling into place.
"The same way I get everything out of everyone."
I don't ask him to elaborate. I don't want to know.
But I'm about to find out anyway.
He gets up and shuffles to the kitchen, opening and closing drawers hastily. I follow him and make a cup of coffee.
"You're coming with me."
I'm holding a cup of coffee I haven't drunk, watching Jace load a bag with items I don't want to identify.
"What?"
"The Ministry is due to come back for the welfare check. It’ll likely happen the minute I leave because they’re watching the feeds." He doesn't look up from his work. "If I leave you alone, they'll take you before I get back."
"So I'm supposed to... what? Watch?"
"You're supposed to follow my lead. Stay quiet. Stay out of sight." He zips the bag, slings it over his shoulder. "Can you do that?"
I want to say no. I want to tell him I can't be part of whatever he's planning, can't witness whatever violence he's about to inflict. But the alternative is worse. The alternative is the Ministry, the transport van, the holding cells.
The alternative is going back.
"Yes," I say. "I can do that."
He nods. No praise, no reassurance. Just acknowledgment.
"We leave in ten minutes. Dress warm. It's going to be a long night."
The drive takes forty minutes.
Jace doesn't speak. He keeps his eyes on the road, hands steady on the wheel, body relaxed in a way that seems almost unnatural. Like he's conserving energy for what comes next.
I watch the city slide past the window. Streetlights. Closed storefronts. Empty sidewalks slick with rain. Everything looks grey and dead in the predawn darkness.
We pull into an industrial district on the outskirts. Warehouses, storage facilities, the kind of buildings where bad things happen, and no one hears. Jace parks behind a rusted shipping container, kills the engine.
"Stay here," he says. "Lock the doors. If anyone approaches the car, honk twice and drive. The keys are in the ignition."
"Drive where?"
"Anywhere. Just drive until I contact you."
He's out of the car before I can respond, the bag over his shoulder, moving toward a squat concrete building with boarded-up windows. I watch him disappear through a side door.
Then I wait.
The first scream comes twenty minutes later.
I don't recognize it at first. It's too high, too raw, more animal than human. It cuts through the silence of the car, muffled by distance and walls but still clear enough to make my skin crawl.
I grip the steering wheel. Count my breaths. In. Out. In. Out.
Things I can see… uhhh, snow… rust…
Things I can hear—
Another scream. Longer this time. It rises to a pitch that makes my teeth ache, then cuts off abruptly. The silence that follows is somehow worse.
He's doing this for me. He's hurting someone to keep me safe.
The thought should horrify me. It does horrify me. But underneath the horror, there's gratitude.
I hate myself for feeling it.
An hour passes. Then two.
The screams come and go, each one slightly different. Sometimes short and sharp, like a dog's yelp. Sometimes long and wavering, building to a crescendo before collapsing into sobs. Once, I hear words. Begging. "Please" and "stop" and "I'll tell you anything."
Jace's voice never carries. Whatever he's saying, whatever he's asking, it stays inside those walls.
I think about running. Starting the car, driving away, disappearing into the grey morning. I could do it. He gave me the keys. He gave me permission.
But where would I go? Back to the Ministry? Back to Moore? Back to the auction block, waiting for another monster to claim me?
At least this monster is keeping me alive.
I stay in the car. I wait. I try not to count the screams.
When Jace finally emerges, the sun is coming up.
He walks toward the car with the same controlled stride as before, but there's something different about him now. A looseness in his shoulders. A satisfaction in his posture that wasn't there when he went in.
And blood. There's blood on his hands, his forearms, spatters across his shirt. It's dark, almost black in the early light, and it gleams wetly as he moves.
He opens the driver's door, slides behind the wheel. The smell hits me immediately: copper and salt and something organic and wrong.
I press myself against the passenger door. My heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my throat.
Jace looks at me. His expression is calm, empty, utterly untroubled.
"I got what I needed," he says.
I can't speak. I can barely breathe.
He starts the car. Pulls out of the lot. Drives.
I don't ask about the man in the warehouse. I don't ask if he's still alive.
I already know the answer.
We stop at a rest area thirty miles outside the city.
Jace parks near the back, away from the few other vehicles scattered across the lot. He reaches into the backseat, pulls out a clean shirt, a bottle of water, a pack of wet wipes.
I watch him strip off the bloody shirt, ball it up, stuff it in a plastic bag. His torso is scarred, I notice. Old wounds, long healed, layered over each other like a map of violence. He doesn't seem to notice me looking.
He pours water over his hands, scrubs at the blood with a wipe, pours more water. The process is methodical, practiced. He's done this before. Hundreds of times, probably.
When he's clean, he pulls on the fresh shirt and turns to face me.
"Ask," he says.
I shake my head.
"You want to. I can see it." His voice is flat and bored. "Ask."
I swallow. Force the words out.
"What did you do to him?"
"I extracted information."
"How?"
He's quiet for a moment. Then he reaches into the bag, pulls out a small case, opens it. Inside, arranged in neat rows, are tools. Scalpels. Pliers. Needles of various sizes. A small blowtorch. Things I don't have names for, things I don't want to have names for.
"Humans have approximately 206 bones," he says. "Each one can be broken in multiple ways. Some breaks are clean, quick, recoverable. Others are not." He closes the case. "Gerald Whitmore now has 197 intact bones. The other nine will never heal properly."
My stomach lurches. I taste bile.
"You broke his bones."
"I started with his fingers. The small ones first. Each break is a question.
Each answer determines whether the next break is necessary.
" He says it like he's explaining a math problem.
Like there's a formula, a logic, a system.
"He was stubborn at first. They usually are.
Then I moved to his feet. The metatarsals.
Do you know how many nerve endings are in the human foot? "
I don't answer. I can't answer.