Chapter Fourteen Elliot
The tablet screen flickers to life.
Jace's face fills the frame, and something in my chest splinters at the sight of him. He looks different. Harder somehow, like the edges of him have been sharpened by distance and desperation. There are shadows beneath his eyes, a tension in his jaw that speaks of sleepless hours.
"Hey." My name in his voice. An anchor in a sea of white noise.
"Hi." The words scrape out, thin and fractured. I try to sit straighter against the restraints, try to look less like something that's been hollowed out. "I'm still here."
Webb stands just out of frame, watching. Waiting.
"Forty-eight hours remain," Webb announces. "I trust you're making progress."
Jace's gaze never wavers from mine. "I am."
"Excellent. Then we have nothing further to discuss."
"Wait." The word rips out of me, raw and involuntary. "Please. Just one more minute."
Webb sighs, theatrical and weary. I watch him think about whether this serves his purposes, whether my desperation is useful to him.
"Thirty seconds," he decides.
Jace's expression shifts. Something flickers behind those grey eyes, something I've learned to recognize as the closest he gets to pain.
"I'm working on it," he says. His voice is careful, measured, stripped of anything Webb might use. "I haven't given up."
"I know." My throat burns. "I know you haven't."
"The wall," he says, and his tone drops, becomes something private despite the audience. "The one you built. Is it still standing?"
I think of the barrier inside my mind, the fortress I constructed around what we shared. Around the only happy memories I’ve ever had. Webb has thrown everything at it. Every memory, every trauma, every horror I've tried to bury. But the wall remains.
"Yes," I whisper. "It's still there."
Something shifts in his face. Not relief exactly. Something fiercer.
"Keep it standing. Whatever happens. Keep it standing until I get there."
"Time," Webb says, and the screen goes black.
I stare at my reflection in the dead tablet. Sunken eyes. Cracked lips. A face I used to know, now belonging to someone I don't recognize.
Webb tucks the device into his coat and studies me with detached curiosity.
"Touching," he remarks. "The way you look at each other. Like you actually believe he loves you."
I don't respond. I've learned that responding only feeds him.
"I've been reviewing the data from our sessions," he continues, circling the table with slow, deliberate steps.
"Your neural patterns when you think of him are fascinating.
The same regions that light up during trauma responses also activate during recall of positive memories associated with Harrison.
Fear and attachment, fused at the neurological level. "
His fingers brush the edge of the collar, a casual reminder of what he controls.
"You don't love him," Webb says. "You're trauma-bonded. Your brain has simply confused safety with affection because he happened to be the first person who didn't actively destroy you. It's a survival mechanism, nothing more."
"You're wrong."
The words surprise me. I didn't plan to say them.
Webb raises an eyebrow. "Am I?"
"What I feel for him isn't confusion. It isn't survival. It's—" I struggle for the right word, the one that captures something I barely understand myself. "It's recognition. Like finding a piece of yourself that died long ago."
"Poetry." Webb's smile is thin and cold. "How romantic. How utterly meaningless."
He moves toward the door, then pauses.
"We'll continue the extractions tomorrow. I've identified some promising new avenues—early childhood memories that might shed light on your particular pathology. Get some rest. You'll need it."
The door seals behind him.
And I am alone.
The silence is defeaning.
No hum of machinery. No distant footsteps. Nothing but the sound of my own breathing and the quiet tick of my heart.
I lie in the white glare of the overhead lights and think about Jace's face on the screen. The way he looked at me.
Keep the wall standing.
I close my eyes and try to find it. The barrier I built inside my own mind, the fortress where I've hidden everything Webb can't have. It's still there. Battered. Weakened. But standing.
Inside it: the weight of Jace's body next to mine in the dark. The sound of his breathing when he pretends to sleep. The morning he made me eggs and watched me eat without saying a word.
The night he destroyed me to rebuild me.
The promise he made before they took me.
I will come for you. I will always come for you.
I hold onto those words. I wrap myself in them like a blanket against the cold.
But the cold is winning.
The room is freezing. I am freezing.
Hell is freezing and it’s taking me with it.
A sob rises in my chest. I try to swallow it down, try to maintain the control I've learned is essential for survival. But the sound escapes anyway, high and broken, echoing off the sterile walls.
Then another. And another.
The dam breaks.
I cry like I haven't cried since I was a child, ugly and wrenching, my whole body shaking against the restraints. Tears stream down my temples and pool in my ears. Snot clogs my throat. I can't breathe, can't think, can't do anything but drown in the grief I've been holding back for years.
Not just grief for Jace. Not just grief for myself.
Grief for the boy I used to be, before the foster homes and the auctions and the basement. Grief for every moment of softness that was stolen from me. Grief for a mother I barely remember and a life I never got to live.
The door opens.
Webb enters, flanked by two guards. His expression is one of mild annoyance, like I'm a machine that's malfunctioning at an inconvenient time.
"This won't do," he says. "I need you functional for tomorrow's session."
I can't stop crying. I try, but the sobs keep coming, tearing through me like something with claws.
Webb sighs and pulls an injector from his coat. The same silver cylinder they used when they took me from Jace's apartment. The same cold pressure against my neck.
"Rest now," he says, almost gently. "We'll resume when you're more composed."
The needle bites. Warmth spreads from the injection site, radiating outward, softening the edges of everything.
The lights blur. The ceiling ripples. The white room folds in on itself like paper.
And I fall.
I'm five years old.
The kitchen smells like cinnamon and butter, the warm scent of Sunday morning pancakes. Sunlight pours through the window above the sink, catching the dust motes that drift through the air like tiny planets.
My mother stands at the stove, her back to me.
She's wearing the blue robe with the frayed edges, the one she refuses to throw away because it was a gift from my grandmother.
Her hair is loose, tangled from sleep, and she's humming something I don't recognize.
A song from before I was born, maybe. A song from a life I'll never know.
"Mom?"
She turns, and her face is exactly as I remember: soft and tired and full of a love that asks for nothing in return. She smiles, and the world feels safe.
"Morning, baby. You want chocolate chips in your pancakes?"
"Yes please."
I climb onto the stool at the counter and watch her work. The batter sizzles when it hits the pan. She flips the pancakes with a practiced flick of her wrist, catching each one perfectly.
"You sleep okay?" she asks.
"I had a bad dream."
"What about?"
I try to remember, but the details slip away like water through fingers. "I don't know. Something scary."
She sets a plate in front of me, pancakes piled high, chocolate chips melting into gooey puddles. She pours syrup in a spiral pattern, the way I like it, and sits down across from me.
"Dreams can't hurt you," she says. "They're just your brain sorting through all the stuff that happens during the day. Like cleaning out a closet."
"But what if the closet has monsters in it?"
She laughs, soft and warm. "Then you turn on the light. Monsters hate the light."
I take a bite of pancake. S and warm and perfect.
"Mom?"
"Yeah, baby?"
"Are you going to die?"
The question comes out of nowhere. I don't know why I asked it. But suddenly it feels like the most important thing in the world, like the answer will determine everything that comes after.
Her smile falters. Just for a second. Then it's back, steady and sure.
"Everyone dies eventually," she says. "But not for a long, long time. I'm going to be here to see you grow up, go to college, get married, have babies of your own. I'm going to be the most annoying grandma in the world. I'll spoil your kids rotten and send them home on sugar highs."
I laugh, but something in my chest feels heavy.
"Promise?"
She reaches across the table and takes my hand. Her fingers are warm, slightly sticky with syrup.
"I promise," she says.
The kitchen starts to fade. The sunlight dims. My mother's face blurs, dissolving into shadow.
"Mom? Mom!"
But she's gone. The warmth is gone. The smell of cinnamon and butter is gone.
I'm alone in the dark.
The auction house. My first one.
I'm standing on a platform under lights so bright they burn. There are people in the shadows, faces I can't see, voices I can't distinguish. Numbers being called out, climbing higher and higher.
I'm not wearing anything. My body is exposed, touched, assessed. A hand grabs my chin, forces my face up. Another hand runs down my spine, checking for defects.
"Pretty. Smooth," someone says. "Fresh. He'll do."
The numbers keep climbing. I try to remember how I got here, but the memories won't come. There's a gap in my mind, a blank space where time should be.
The gavel falls.
"Sold."
Hands grab me, drag me off the platform. I'm pushed through a door into a hallway that stretches forever, lined with doors that all look the same.
One of them opens.
A man and his wife wait inside with sick grins stretched over their faces. His pants are tented and she’s slowly stroking him through the fabric.
No. No no no no.