Chapter 17
Jude
Kennedy's office smells like leather and ambition. The diplomas crowd the wall behind his desk—Harvard, Johns Hopkins, a fellowship certificate from some institute I've never heard of—positioned so every patient who sits in this chair has to stare at them for fifty minutes.
I've been staring at them for three years.
"Let's talk about progress," Kennedy says, clicking his pen. Click. Click. Click. "Your behavioral scores this quarter have been exemplary."
"Thank you."
"Medication compliance at ninety-four percent. No incidents since the unfortunate situation with Officer Dutton." He doesn't say Rick's name. Doesn't acknowledge that the unfortunate situation involved a guard threatening to follow Hope to her car. "The board will be pleased."
I watch his hands. The pen moves between his fingers in a pattern he thinks is casual—index to middle, middle to ring, back again. A nervous habit he's never managed to break, despite the dozens of articles he's published on patient observation techniques.
He's written a book about me. Two hundred and thirty-seven pages on criminal psychopathy and institutional rehabilitation, my case study threaded through every chapter. I've read it twice. Kent brought me a copy after publication, curious what I'd think.
What I think is that Kennedy's been sitting across from me for three years and still hasn't asked the right question.
"I'd like to explore something today," he says. "Your early post-military period. The year between your discharge and your first... incident."
"The year I decompressed."
"Yes." He makes a note. "You've described it that way before. Can you tell me more about what decompression looked like for you?"
The game begins.
This is what Kennedy doesn't understand—what he's never understood, despite the diplomas and the book and the forty-seven therapy sessions we've shared.
He thinks he's mining for breakthroughs.
He thinks the questions he asks and the silences he leaves are sophisticated clinical techniques designed to unlock my psyche.
He's wrong.
Every crumb I've fed him has been deliberate and measured, designed to give him enough to write his papers and build his reputation while revealing nothing that matters.
He wanted childhood trauma, so I gave him Frederick's coldness in careful doses—enough to support a theory, not enough to expose the truth.
He wanted military history, so I described deployments in language sterile enough for academic citation.
He's built his career on the version of me I've allowed him to see.
The real version would end it.
"Decompression," I say, settling back in the chair. "Adjustment. Reintegration into civilian life. All the words the VA uses when they don't want to say what's happening."
"And what was happening?"
"I was learning to wait."
Kennedy nods like this means something. His pen scratches across the notepad—I can read his handwriting upside down. Stillness as coping mechanism. Possible dissociation?
He's so far from the truth it's almost funny.
The year after my discharge wasn't a decompression. It was reconnaissance. I spent twelve months learning to move through the civilian world without the structure of the military, without the sanction of orders, without the convenient framework that had made killing easy and justified.
I was learning to hunt alone.
"The transition must have been difficult," Kennedy prompts. "Losing the structure, the purpose—"
"The military gives you a target and permission. Remove both and you have to find your own way."
He looks up from his notes. Interest crosses his face, or the first tremor of unease. But he's too invested in his theories to hear what I'm saying.
"Your own targets," he repeats. "Meaning goals? Professional aspirations?"
"Meaning whatever keeps you moving forward."
I let the silence stretch. Kennedy fills it the way he always does—more questions, more probing, more attempts to fit me into the diagnostic framework he's already constructed.
He needs me to be what his book says I am.
Anything else would require revision, and Kennedy doesn't revise. He doubles down.
"I've been reviewing some of the case files associated with your post-discharge timeline," Kennedy says. "Harold Devins, for instance. CEO of Meridian Capital."
He's watching for a reaction.
"What about him?"
"He was found dead in his home six years ago. Four months after your discharge. The investigation never produced a suspect."
"It didn't."
"I'm not suggesting anything, Jude. I'm interested in your perspective. You were living in the area at the time. Did you follow the case?"
Kennedy thinks he's fishing. He has no idea he just opened a door he can't close.
"I didn't follow it," I say. "But I know all about it."
His throat moves as he swallows. The pen has gone still between his fingers, and his pulse jumps at his temple. This is the closest I've come to honesty in three years, and the part of him that isn't blinded by ambition knows it.
"I think," he says, "that you're trying to tell me something."
"I've been trying to tell you something for three years, Kennedy. You just haven't been listening."
I lean forward. Not much—just enough to shift the distance between us, to remind him that the bolted-down furniture and the guard outside the door don't mean what he thinks they mean.
"Harold Devins was a philanthropist," I say. "Donated to children's hospitals, sat on nonprofit boards, gave speeches about corporate responsibility. The newspapers called him a pillar of the community."
"I remember."
"Do you remember what else he was?"
Kennedy doesn't answer.
"He beat his wife. For eleven years, every time a deal went wrong or a board meeting didn't go his way.
Margaret Devins wore long sleeves in July and told everyone she was clumsy.
" I watch Kennedy's face as I speak, reading every shift in his expression.
"The foundation photo—the one that ran in every paper after his death—showed him sitting at the head of his dining room table.
Mahogany, eighteen feet long, built to make everyone who sat at it feel small. "
"Jude—"
"He thought he was king of that table. King of his house, king of his company, king of Margaret's broken ribs and fractured wrists. Nobody ever told him different because nobody could."
The silence in the room is absolute. Kennedy's breathing comes too fast, too shallow. The fluorescent lights hum. Footsteps pass in the corridor outside.
I feel his fear.
"I sat across from him for four hours," I say. "In that dining room, at that table. Watched him realize, piece by piece, that being king of a table doesn't matter when someone bigger decides to take the throne."
Kennedy's hand moves toward the panic button under his desk—a twitch, an aborted gesture—before he forces it back to the armrest.
"Around hour three, he stopped looking down at me. Started looking up. That's how you know it's over—when the entitlement cracks and there's nothing underneath but the same terror everyone else feels."
"Frederick." Kennedy's voice is hoarse. "Your father."
"Seventeen men who looked like him, talked like him, carried themselves like him. All practice. Frederick was the end goal."
He reaches for the button this time. Doesn't try to hide it.
"Sit back," he says. The authority he's cultivated for decades is crumbling at the edges.
I could be on him in two seconds. Less, maybe—the desk is wide but not wide enough, and his chair is positioned wrong. Three years of sessions and he still doesn't understand basic spatial dynamics, still in the wrong spot every time.
His hand is on the button but he hasn't pressed it. The door is twelve feet behind me. The guard's response time, based on the seventeen drills I've observed, averages nine seconds.
I could do a lot in nine seconds.
"There's a self-assessment form," Kennedy says, his voice steadier now, clinical again. "I need you to complete it before our next session. Standard protocol for the board review."
He reaches for a folder on his desk, leaning across the space between us without thinking about it. His throat is right there. Close enough that I could feel the pulse under his jaw if I reached out.
The count runs.
One second. His pen is in his right hand, useless as a weapon. Two seconds. The guard outside the door is talking to someone, his attention divided. Three seconds. Kennedy's Adam's apple bobs as he swallows, and I imagine how easy it would be to crush it.
Four seconds. Five.
He holds out the form.
I take it. Sign my name at the bottom without reading a word.
"Remarkably thorough," I say, handing it back.
Kennedy's hand trembles as he accepts the paper. He doesn't look at my signature. Doesn't check that I've completed any of the fields. Just slides the form into his folder and holds it against his chest.
"I think," he says, "we should end early today."
"Of course, whatever you think, Dr. Kennedy."
I stand. The movement is slow, controlled—nothing the cameras or the guard would read as threatening. Kennedy doesn't stand with me. Doesn't walk me to the door the way he usually does, pretending we're colleagues.
We both know we're not.
"Dr. Kennedy."
He looks up.
"She asked me how I slept. Day one, fifteen minutes into our first session. Nobody's ever wanted to know if I slept."
His brow furrows. "Who?"
"Hope. The monitor you've been trying to limit my contact with.
The woman you mentioned in your last report to the board—concerns about unhealthy attachment patterns, I believe you wrote.
" I watch him. "She asked a simple question, and in fifteen minutes she learned more about me than you have in three years. You know why?"
He doesn't answer.
"Because she doesn't come at me sideways.
She doesn't put on a show. She walked into my cell and looked at me like I was a person, and she asked a question because she wanted to know the answer.
" I pause at the door. "You've never once asked a question you wanted answered.
You ask questions that support your thesis and your books on me. "
"Jude." His voice is thin. "What you said about Harold Devins—"
"Was a hypothetical. Creative speculation about a cold case. Nothing you could ethically report without compromising patient confidentiality." I smile, and I watch the color drain from his face. "Have a good afternoon, Dr. Kennedy."
The guard escorts me back to Ward C. The corridor is the same as it always is—white walls, the smell of industrial cleaner that doesn't cover what's underneath.
I think about Kennedy sitting alone in his office, clutching his folder, trying to convince himself that what just happened was a therapeutic breakthrough rather than what it was.
A reminder.
He's built his career on studying predators from a safe distance.
Written papers, given lectures, collected awards from institutions that believe understanding evil is the same as containing it.
And the whole time, he's been sitting across from the real thing, protected by nothing except my decision to let him live.
Sixty percent—that's what he's gotten from me in three years.
Sixty percent of a mask, designed to give him enough to feel successful while hiding everything that matters.
The kills, the methods, the year of hunting that taught me what I was.
Frederick at the head of his own table. My signature—always the head, always the seat of power, always the message written in the placement of the body.
You thought you were king and I proved you weren't.
Kennedy got sixty percent. The board, the system, everyone who thinks they're seeing me clearly—they got sixty percent.
Hope got more in fifteen minutes than Kennedy has in three years.
She got the truth I didn't even know I was telling—that I'm tired, that the noise inside my head quiets when she's near, that her presence does something to me that three years of chemical restraints and institutional protocols never managed.
Kennedy will file his report. He'll mention his concerns about attachment patterns and recommend continued monitoring and suggest that my progress, while notable, requires ongoing supervision.
The board will read it and nod and check boxes, and somewhere in the margins of their decision, Hope's name will appear as a footnote to my pathology.
They'll never understand what she really is to me.
The door to Ward C opens. Gage is at the security desk, eyes on me as I enter. He doesn't say anything, but he's sitting too straight, watching too hard. The questions are all over him.
What did you tell Kennedy?
What did you say about her?
He's been different since the day room. Since he stood at the door and watched me touch her and couldn't do anything about it. The anger is still there—in the rigid line of his shoulders, the way his fingers curl when I walk past—but it's mixed with resignation now.
He's starting to understand that this isn't a competition he can win.
Not because I'm better than him. Because Hope has already made her choice, even if she doesn't know it yet.
She chose the first time she walked into my cell and looked at me.
Every session that ran long, every question off-script, every inch she leaned closer instead of away.
She chose when she let me touch her with Gage standing at the door and didn't say stop.
Kennedy can recommend whatever he wants. The board can deliberate. Gage can offer her everything I can't. A front door. A restaurant. A life that doesn't come with a case file.
None of it matters. Soon I'll be free if all goes to plan.
I walk to my cell and lie down on the narrow bed and close my eyes. I gave Kennedy too much today. I know exactly why, and I don't care.