Chapter 14 Shay
Shay
Days continued to dissolve into one another.
Tom delivered meals three times a day.
Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Breakfast, lunch, dinner.
The rhythm should have helped me keep track, giving me something solid to hold onto. But the meals themselves had begun to blur together—the food cooling untouched on the plate, Tom’s increasingly desperate pleas forming a kind of white noise I’d learned to tune out.
There was a moth.
Small and brown, utterly unremarkable except for the fact that it had somehow found its way into this concrete tomb.
I’d been watching it for what felt like hours, though that too was impossible to verify.
It circled the single exposed bulb overhead in lazy, hypnotic loops—rising and descending in a pattern that should have been boring but wasn’t.
Sometimes it would land on the rough concrete wall to rest, wings folded flat against its body.
Then, after a few minutes of stillness, it would launch itself back into the air and resume its pointless orbit around the light.
I understood the impulse. The need to keep moving even when there was nowhere to go.
The moth never seemed to learn that the light would burn it if it got too close. Never adjusted its trajectory, never flew toward the shadows where it might actually be safe. It just kept circling, pulled by some primal instinct toward something that would eventually destroy it.
Stupid thing.
I watched its shadow dance across the wall—grotesquely enlarged, distorted by the angle of the bulb. A monster’s shadow cast by something small and harmless.
The concrete floor was cold beneath me, leeching warmth from my body even through the thin mattress Tom had provided. My joints ached from sitting in the same position for too long, but I couldn’t bring myself to move.
“Would you please eat something?”
Tom’s voice cut through my thoughts. I hadn’t heard him come down the stairs, too focused on the moth’s aerial dance.
He was holding another plate. The smell hit me before I could turn away—something with garlic and herbs.
My stomach clenched involuntarily, a sharp pang of hunger I immediately resented.
The food always smelled good. That was part of the torture, I suspected, though I doubted Tom saw it that way. He probably thought he was being kind.
“No.”
I didn’t turn to look at him. Kept my eyes on the moth.
Tom sighed. “If you won’t eat, you’re going to leave me no choice.”
A bit of frustration bled through his voice, fraying the edges of it. I’d noticed that happening more often lately—those little cracks in his composure, small fissures where emotion leaked through.
Good. I hoped he was suffering. Hoped every uneaten meal felt like another stone added to whatever guilt he might be carrying.
I was still alive.
For whatever reason, he hadn’t killed me yet.
I wondered if that meant something.
Wondered if I should care, either way.
“What?” I finally turned my head to face him. “Are you going to force-feed me? Shove a tube down my throat?”
“If I have to.” He took a step closer, and I saw how exhausted he looked. Shadows carved hollows beneath his eyes. His hair was disheveled, shirt wrinkled like he’d been wearing it for days. When had he last slept? When had he last taken care of himself?
Why did I still care?
“I’d really like to see you try,” I said.
It was an empty threat on both sides, and we were both aware of it.
I didn’t have the strength left to fight him—that initial rage that had burned so bright and hot had cooled to ash, leaving only this hollow, echoing emptiness.
And he didn’t have it in him to hurt me again.
I could see it written all over his face.
I would have found his psychological profile interesting if I weren’t the one experiencing it firsthand.
Or maybe I was wrong.
Maybe he’d still do it, force a feeding tube down my throat, repercussions be damned. It wasn’t like I could do much about it. I’d been wrong about him before, and look where that had gotten me.
The moth landed on the edge of the plate Tom had set down, its tiny feet finding purchase on the ceramic rim, and he waved it away with an absent gesture. Confused and disoriented, it took flight again.
I watched it spiral upward.
“What are you doing?” The question emerged quieter than I intended. “How long are you planning to keep me here? If you haven’t changed your mind about killing me, that is.”
“I’ll never kill you.” Tom’s voice was absolute, certain in a way that wasn’t the least bit reassuring.
“You’ll have to,” I said with the same certainty, tone almost gentle. “You’ll have to kill me eventually.”
I saw him flinch, the casual mention of my own death hitting him like a physical blow.
“People will notice I’ve disappeared. Someone will come looking.”
“Not yet, they won’t.” His voice was steady, assured.
He’d thought this through. “You’re currently taking some time off.
Detective Keller agreed to cover for you.
And you don’t have many friends—you’ve always been private about your personal life.
You don’t speak to Naomi that often. And the only other person in your life is your cousin, but she’s used to not hearing from you for weeks at a time. Months, even.”
I’d always known my antisocial tendencies would bite me in the ass eventually.
I just hadn’t expected it to be quite like this.
The moth had found the light again, was beating its wings frantically against the hot bulb. I could hear it—the soft, desperate tap-tap-tap of its body hitting glass.
Stop that.
“What?” Tom leaned forward slightly.
I wasn’t aware that I’d spoken out loud.
“Nothing.” I pulled my attention back to him, drawing my knees to my chest. “What are you doing, Hayes?”
The use of his last name made something flicker across his expression—pain, maybe, or recognition that the distance between us had become insurmountable.
We were no longer Tom and Shay, no longer lovers or even friends.
We were captor and captive now. Detective and serial killer.
The gulf between those positions was too wide to bridge.
“I’m trying to…” He ran a hand through his hair, messing it up even more. The gesture was achingly familiar. I’d seen him do it a hundred times when he was frustrated, when he was thinking, when he was trying to find the right words. “I need you to understand.”
He looked desperate, unraveling at the edges in a way that should have worried me. But it just made me feel tired. I couldn’t find it in myself to care anymore, couldn’t muster the energy for concern.
“That’s never going to happen.” I let my head fall back against the concrete wall, felt the cold roughness against my skull. “You might as well shoot me now and get it over with.”
There was a pause.
“Except that’s not your MO, is it? You don’t use guns. They are too impersonal, is that it?”
I kept my eyes on the ceiling, tracking the cracks in the concrete.
“Tell me what to do,” Tom said, his voice cracking slightly. “How can I convince you? What do you need to hear?”
He looked like a man drowning in open water, reaching for anything that might keep him afloat just a few seconds longer. Once upon a time, that would have triggered every protective instinct I had, made me want to gather him close and promise everything would be okay.
Now, I just felt numb.
“I’ll stop killing.” The words tumbled out of him in a rush, desperate and raw. “Would that be enough? If I stopped. If I promised never to do it again. If I—could you—”
I shook my head before he could finish, cutting off whatever plea he’d been building toward. “No, you won’t.”
“I will.” He took a step forward, then stopped himself, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. “I swear to you, Shay. I’ll never do it again.”
“You, you will,” I said it with absolute certainty, with the confidence of someone who’d spent years studying people like him.
“I told you once, didn’t I? Back when I was still profiling the killer.
Before I knew it was you. I said that they wouldn’t stop, not even if they messed up.
Not even if they got close to being caught. That it’s just your nature.”
The moth had given up on the light temporarily, and was resting on the wall now. Its wings opened and closed slowly, rhythmically.
“You think you have a strong moral code that makes you better than the rest.” I kept my eyes on the moth, found it easier to say these things without looking at him.
“You see yourself as some sort of vigilante, killing only the people who deserve it. You may even genuinely believe you’re doing the right thing.
That you’re making the world a better place, one murder at a time. ”
I paused, letting the words sink in.
“But the truth is, you only do it to feel better about yourself. To justify something you were going to do regardless. You kill because you like to kill. It’s as simple as that.”
When I finally looked at Tom, there was something raw and exposed in his gaze. Wounded. Like I’d reached inside his chest and yanked out something he’d kept carefully hidden, even from himself.
It made me want to reach out, cup his face in my hands. Made me want to take the words back, to comfort him in any way I knew how. To hug him, breathe in his scent and never let go.
I’d sooner kill myself than do that, however.
That impulse was just a fantasy, something that had never really existed in the first place.
The Tom I’d loved—if I’d even loved him, if any of it had been real—was as much an illusion as everything else.
A character he’d played. A mask he’d worn so convincingly I’d never thought to look beneath it.
The moth took flight again, and I tracked its movement with my eyes. Up toward the light, then away. Closer, then retreating. An endless, pointless dance that would only end one way.
“Is that what you think?” Tom’s voice was barely above a whisper. “That I enjoy it?”
“Don’t you?”
He didn’t answer. Couldn’t, probably, because we both knew the truth, even if he’d never admitted it aloud.
Even if he’d wrapped his killing in noble intentions and righteous justifications, somewhere beneath all those careful rationalizations was a simple, terrible truth: he did it because he wanted to.
Because something broken in him found satisfaction in watching life drain from a body.
In playing god. In deciding who deserved to live and who deserved to die.
“You should eat,” he said, falling back on the familiar refrain. Like if he could just get me to eat, everything else would somehow work itself out.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Shay—”
“Don’t.” I closed my eyes, unable to look at him anymore. “Just don’t.”
I heard him move. He hesitated, standing there for a long moment. I could feel his eyes on me, could sense the weight of everything he wanted to say pressing in on the space between us.
“I love you,” he said it quietly, like the words themselves might shatter something—in him or me, I didn’t know. “I know you don’t believe me. I know you think it’s a lie, just another manipulation. But it’s not. It’s the only true thing I have left.”
I kept my eyes closed. I didn’t respond, not wanting to give him anything—not acknowledgment, not absolution, not even anger.
Because what was I supposed to say to that?
That there were still moments, even now, when I felt that treacherous pull toward him.
What did it say about me that I could still feel anything for him except hatred?
That despite everything—the lies, the captivity, the violence—some part of me still responded to his voice, still remembered what it felt like to be held by him?
That I had it in me to love a monster?
The moth was on the bulb again, its wings beating frantically in that desperate, futile way, trying to merge with the light. Trying to become one with the thing that would kill it.
Stop. Please stop.
It didn’t listen to my silent plea. It just kept throwing itself against the glass, over and over, driven by instinct it couldn’t resist.
I watched it until my vision blurred.
Time passed. I didn’t track it.
Eventually, the moth fell.
Dropped out of the air like a stone, landing somewhere on the concrete floor in the darkness beyond the light’s reach.
I stared at the space where it had been moments before, at the empty air that suddenly felt vast and terrible.
Was it dead? Or just exhausted, gathering strength for another attempt? Was there even a difference at this point?
My throat was tight, and not from the bruising Tom had left there. My eyes burned. I hadn’t cried yet—hadn’t let myself, wouldn’t give him that satisfaction of that intimacy. But the tears were there, pressing behind my eyes with physical force, demanding release.
I buried my face in my knees and focused on my breathing.
In. Out. In. Out.
Just keep breathing. That’s all I had to do. Just keep breathing and wait for an opportunity to present itself. Wait for him to make a mistake. Wait for something—anything—to change.
But what if nothing changed? What if this was it—this basement, this half-life, this slow erosion of everything I’d been?
What if the moth had understood something I was still refusing to see—that the only real choice was how you met the inevitable end?
I pushed the thought away with effort, dragging myself back from that edge. Not yet. I wasn’t giving up yet. I wouldn’t give him that victory.
But the fight had gone out of me, and all that remained was this heavy, aching sadness. This grief for something I’d never really had. For a relationship built on lies. For the person I’d thought I was in love with, who’d never existed at all.
I closed my eyes and tried not to think about the moth lying broken somewhere in the shadows.