Chapter Fourteen Elliot #2
I try to run, but my legs won't move. I try to scream, but my throat is locked. He smiles and reaches for me, setting me directly on top of his lap, stroking my hair, my body, traveling between my legs.
"Welcome home," he says.
The dream shifts.
The apartment.
Jace's apartment. I recognize the sparse furniture, the sealed windows, the carefully ordered space that reflects a mind that doesn't know how to be messy.
I'm sitting on the couch, knees pulled to my chest, watching the door.
Waiting.
The lock clicks. Three deadbolts disengage in sequence. The door opens.
Jace enters.
But he's wrong. His face is blank, emptier than I've ever seen it. His eyes are flat grey coins, reflecting nothing, absorbing nothing. He moves like a machine, all precision and no presence.
"Jace?"
He doesn't respond. He walks past me like I'm not there, goes to the kitchen, starts pulling things from the fridge. The same routine I've watched a dozen times. But now it feels hollow. Automated.
"Jace, please. Look at me."
He turns. His eyes meet mine, and there's nothing in them. No recognition. No warmth. No flicker of the thing I thought I saw growing between us.
"Asset number 437," he says. His voice is flat, mechanical. "You have been designated for disposal. Please remain calm. This will be easier if you don't resist."
"No." I'm on my feet, backing away. "No, that's not you. That's not who you are."
"I am what they made me." He advances, reaching for something at his hip. A knife. The same knife he kept in the second drawer, the one he left for me to find. "I have no capacity for attachment. No capacity for care. I am a weapon. Weapons do not feel."
"You felt something. With me. I know you did."
"Negative. You were a variable. An anomaly. A malfunction to be corrected." He raises the knife. "Correction in progress."
I wake up screaming.
The sedative is wearing off, leaving a metallic taste on my tongue and a fog in my thoughts. My throat is raw from screaming. My cheeks are wet with tears I don't remember crying.
I stare at the ceiling and try to separate dream from reality.
My mother is dead. She died when I was six, a year after that morning in the kitchen. Cancer. Quick and merciless. She promised she'd be there, and then she wasn't, and nothing has been safe since.
The auction was real. The couple was real. The basement, Moore, the chair, the instruments, the eighteen months of learning how to survive by not being present—all real.
Jace is real too. But which version? The one who held me through the night, who marked my body with his teeth, who said he wanted to keep me safe? Or the one in my dream, hollow and mechanical, reaching for a knife?
Asset number 437. Designated for disposal.
Is that what I am? Is that what I've always been?
I close my eyes and try to find the wall. The barrier I built. The fortress that holds everything Webb can't touch.
It's still there. But the foundations are cracking. The stones are shifting. Every session, every extraction, every forced march through my worst memories takes a piece of it away.
How much longer can I hold?
How much longer before the wall comes down and there's nothing left of me but fragments?
Keep it standing, Jace said. Whatever happens.
But what if I can't?
What if Webb breaks through and finds the thing I'm protecting and destroys it, and then there's nothing left worth saving?
What if Jace comes for me and finds only an empty shell, a body that breathes but doesn't live, a collection of trauma responses with nothing underneath?
Would that be worse than dying?
I think about the collar around my neck. The button Webb carries. High settings stop the heart, he said. Quick. Clean. Painless compared to everything else.
Would it be so bad?
To just... stop?
To let go of the wall and the memories and the desperate, exhausting hope that something good might still be possible?
My mother promised she'd be there. She wasn't.
Jace promised he'd come for me. What if he can't?
What if I'm just going to keep getting passed from monster to monster until there's nothing left of the person I used to be?
The questions circle in my head, vultures waiting for something to die.
I don't have answers.
I only have the wall, and the promise, and the fading memory of grey eyes that looked at me like I mattered.
Keep it standing.
I try to summon his face. Not the nightmare version, empty and mechanical. The real one. The one that watched me eat eggs. The one that pressed his forehead to mine and breathed the same air. The one that whispered good boy in the dark and made me feel like those words could be true.
The real Jace isn't empty. He's just... different. Wired wrong, maybe. Built to be a weapon and discovering, slowly, painfully, that he might be something else too.
Like me.
I was built to be property. Conditioned to serve, to obey, to disappear into whatever shape my owners needed me to be.
But somewhere in the wreckage, something survived.
Some fragment of the boy who ate pancakes with his mother on Sunday mornings, who believed in promises, who thought the world could be safe if you just found the right person to hold onto.
That fragment found Jace.
And Jace, broken as he is, hollow as he claims to be, found me.
Maybe that's not love. Maybe Webb is right, and it's just trauma and timing and two damaged people clinging to each other because the alternative is drowning alone.
But if it's not love, it's something close enough that I can't tell the difference.
Something worth protecting.
Something worth holding onto, even when everything else is being stripped away.
Keep the wall standing.
I take a breath. Then another.
Somewhere out there, Jace is working on a plan. Killing people. Finding angles. Doing whatever it takes to get me out of here.
I have to believe that. I have to hold onto it, the same way I hold onto the wall.
Because the alternative is letting go.
And if I let go now, after everything, it means they win. Moore wins. Webb wins. Every monster who ever looked at me and saw property instead of a person wins.
I won't give them that.
Not yet.
Not while there's still a chance.
The lights blaze overhead, white and merciless. The collar sits heavy on my throat. The restraints bite into my wrists, a reminder of how little control I have.
But inside my head, behind the wall, there's a space that belongs only to me.
A space where my mother makes pancakes and the sun comes through the window.
A space where Jace holds me in the dark and doesn't let go.
A space where I am more than what they made me.
I close my eyes and go there.
The wall holds.
For now.