2. The Monster Wins
The Monster Wins
Summer
The rotor blades don't just make noise. Each rotation pounds through the metal beneath me, through the seat, rattling through my ribs, my teeth, and the base of my skull until it feels like my body has stopped being fully mine.
The vibration never stops. Every time I try to hold onto a thought—a plan, a memory, a single clear idea—it shakes loose before it can fully form.
The air inside the cabin smells of oil, metal, and something sterile and cold that reminds me of hospitals and evidence rooms—and underneath all of it, something else. Something that has no name but that I recognize the way you recognize your own voice on a recording.
Too close. Too familiar.
My fear.
I am breathing my own terror back in with every inhale and there is nowhere to put it, no way to dilute it, no one in this cabin who is going to help me carry it.
No one speaks.
The pilot's gaze never strays from the controls. His hands move with practiced precision, adjusting switches and checking instruments without hesitation. I watch him for several minutes, waiting for curiosity. Recognition. Discomfort. Anything.
Nothing comes.
When his eyes finally flick in my direction, it's brief.
The same sort of glance a delivery driver might give a parcel to make sure it hasn't shifted during transport.
Then he's looking away again. My stomach twists.
To him, I'm not a woman sitting three feet away.
I'm cargo. I watch him for another minute before the truth finally sinks in.
He isn't going to help me. He doesn't care where they're taking me.
As long as the helicopter lands where it's supposed to, his job is done.
And Jackson—
I force my eyes across the cabin.
He sits opposite me. Still. No fidgeting, no restlessness, no sign that anything about this moment is remarkable to him.
His hands rest loose in his lap. His gaze is directed somewhere past my shoulder—not at me, not at the window, not at anything in particular.
Just elsewhere. Like I'm not worth the energy of a glance.
But then I think of his eyes on me, and my stomach turns.
Memories of the warehouse. When he sat with his arms folded, his pistol on his lap and watched me peel Jacob's pajamas from my skin one layer at a time—watched me stand bare in front of him under fluorescent light while I told myself it was survival, just survival, not submission—and said perfect in a voice so quiet it barely reached me.
Like he'd been holding the word in his mouth for a long time and had finally found the right moment to let it out.
Just the way I pictured.
I press my fingers hard into the bridge of my nose, careful of the ones that might be broken. The movement alone sends flaring pain down my hand. It grounds me for half a second, cutting through the noise.
It doesn't last. Because the memory is already there. It doesn't wait to be invited. Jackson injured them before he touched me.
No.
Not touched.
Took.
The distinction matters. The distinction is everything.
There is a version of touch that asks something and a version that simply announces ownership, and what Jackson did was the second kind—hands that moved like they had already decided he had the right to my body.
My skin still holds the memory of it. My body keeps cataloging the violation the way it catalogs bruises—mapping the edges, returning to check if it's still real.
It is.
It will be for a long time.
Shame moves through me in a slow, nauseating wave. I know it isn't mine to carry, I know the fault doesn't live in me, but it doesn't matter. It settles anyway, sinking into my skin like dye, staining everything it touches. Everything inside me that used to feel like mine.
That part of me belongs to one person, and it isn't Jackson Moore.
It's Jacob Darnell.
His name surfaces the way it always does now—not with the old reflexive dread, not with the complicated tangle of hatred and want that used to accompany it.
Just with a kind of ache that I don't have a clean word for.
Something that arrived quietly somewhere between the moment I stopped running from him and the moment I started running toward him, and that hasn't left since.
And when he found me—
His face.
God, his face.
I have seen Jacob angry more times than I can count. I have seen him furious, cold, calculating, cruel, vicious in ways that left marks on my skin and on the parts of me that bruised without showing. I know his rage in all its forms. But what I saw through that glass was none of those things.
What I saw was a man coming apart.
Something unhinged. Something that didn't care what it destroyed or what it cost or what it left burning behind it, as long as it closed the distance.
He moved like a man who had already made his decision—not just about Jackson Moore, not just about this night—but about everything.
About what mattered. About what was worth burning the world down for.
Me.
He was burning the world down for me.
If I could have reached him—if there had been even half a second, even the smallest seam in what was happening—I would have jumped.
I wouldn't have thought about the fall. Wouldn't have thought about the distance to the ground or the speed we were moving or the probability of survival.
I would have taken the chance and let the consequences sort themselves out.
Because anything—anything—would have been better than watching him get smaller through that glass while Jackson Moore sat less than three feet away from me and felt nothing about it at all.
But there was no seam.
Jackson's grip doesn't leave room for seams.
Even now, strapped into this seat, the helicopter carrying me toward something I'm not ready to face, my body still reaches for him.
The helicopter jolts violently beneath me.
The sudden drop tears me away from the window, my shoulder slamming into the cabin wall hard enough to make the breath explode from my lungs.
The cold glass disappears beneath my fingertips as instinct takes over, my hands grabbing for anything solid while the aircraft steadies itself again.
"Getting gusty up here," the pilot says through the headset. Voice calm. Almost bored. The measured tone of someone reporting mild inconvenience. "Might feel some movement."
Reality crashes back into me.
The roar of the engine is deafening. The air is thick with the smell of aviation fuel and hot metal, every breath tasting sharp against the back of my throat. My pulse pounds so violently that it almost drowns out the blades overhead.
Jacob is gone. The fog swallowed him. And I'm still here.
A fresh wave of panic climbs my spine as I force myself to breathe through it, each inhale trembling so badly it catches halfway into my chest. My heart refuses to slow, battering against my ribs as though it can somehow break free and escape without me.
I lift my head. Jackson is watching me.
He hasn't said a word since we left the ground.
He doesn't need to. His silence is somehow worse.
More calculated. He sits opposite me with the same unnerving composure he'd worn inside the house, one arm draped lazily across the seat beside him as though this is nothing more than another journey. Another successful transaction.
The thought hits so suddenly it steals what little air I have left.
Mama. Papa.
Their faces rush into my mind with such brutal force that it feels as though someone's wrapped both hands around my throat.
I see Mama smiling across the kitchen table, brushing a loose strand of hair behind her ear while she laughed at something Papa had said.
I hear the familiar warmth in her voice, the way she always called my name when dinner was ready, the gentle teasing that made our house feel safe even on its hardest days.
Then Papa.
Standing in his office with his tie hanging loose around his neck after another late night, rubbing tiredness from his eyes before opening his arms for one of his impossible bear hugs. The kind that made me roll my eyes even as I hugged him back. The kind I always assumed I'd have forever.
My chest caves inward, because all I will ever have are memories. Fragments. Echoes. Ghosts.
Jackson didn't just kill them—he stole every tomorrow they were supposed to have.
Every birthday.
Every Christmas.
Every phone call I would've made when life became too heavy.
Every chance to tell them I loved them one more time.
A sob claws its way into my throat, but I bite down on it so hard my jaw aches. Crying won't bring them back. It won't stop the man sitting opposite me. It won't change the fact that I'm trapped thousands of feet above the ground with the monster who orphaned me.
My fingers curl into my palms until my nails bite through my skin. Letting the pain ground me in some twisted way.
I won't give him my tears. Not now. Not while he's watching. Because if grief is all I have left of them… He doesn't get to take that too.
Something is taking root beneath the grief and the fear.
It doesn't arrive all at once. It unfurls slowly inside me, tightening around my ribs like ivy finding cracks in stone.
Every lie. Every bruise. Every person who's tried to own me, silence me, or decide who I should become has fed it, piece by piece, until I barely recognize the frightened girl who once believed monsters only existed in bedtime stories.
My gaze stays fixed on Jackson. He doesn't look at me. Doesn't speak. Doesn't acknowledge the devastation he's left behind as though taking lives is no more significant than crossing another item from a list.
This requires nothing at all.
A painful ache blooms in my chest. God... I don't want to be this version of myself. I don't want to sit across from a murderer and wonder whether hatred burns hotter than fear. I don't want my hands to curl into fists every time I look at him. I don't want violence to feel understandable.