Chapter 11
Sera
I come back to myself in pieces.
First, the smell. Antiseptic and industrial. It's the smell of enforced cleanliness, which is really just the smell of someone else's control.
Second, the IV. A cold thread in the back of my left hand, taped down with clear adhesive that pulls at the fine hairs on my skin. My body is a dry creek bed accepting rain. The fluid moves through me, hydration reaching places that had gone papery and thin.
Third, arms. Someone is holding me with an arm across my waist, a chest pressed against my back that rises and falls in the slow, measured rhythm of a man who is not sleeping but is pretending to be still so he won't wake me.
I know this breathing.
Eddie.
He holds me to him with his full body, possessive but careful.
I don't open my eyes yet. I stay in the dark behind my lids and let myself have this—the warmth, the weight, the steady proof of another heartbeat against my spine.
A name sits on my tongue like a coin I can’t swallow.
Penelope.
I said it back in the hangar. I remember it now, or pieces of it, the way you remember fever dreams. James, alive and whole again, telling me the lock on the Seal of Dissolution recognizes only one voice.
So I said it. My name. The real one, the one I buried in a shallow grave in Kansas City and covered with a new identity.
Penelope.
I didn’t say it as a surrender. Or as a return to the girl who found herself trapped in an alleyway with the wrong man and paid for it in ways I’ll never forget. I said it as a claim. Self-recognition. Self-possession.
The Seal shattered. I remember that part clearly—the carved lines in the middle splitting, a sickly yellow light guttering out, the star collapsing inward like a house of cards hit by a breath that had been held for too long.
I think there was more to it than that, but…I don’t know what else I’m missing.
And then Daddy was there, everywhere, cold and vast and furious, and James's arms were around me, and Eddie's voice was saying something I couldn't parse because my body had finally decided it was allowed to stop fighting and promptly shut down.
Penelope.
I turn the name over in my mouth. It tastes different now, not like the chain Red Hands carved into concrete. It tastes like a room I locked and left, and now I'm standing at the door again, and the key is in my hand, and I get to decide whether to open it or walk away.
She's still in there. Penelope. The one who existed before him. The one who went to bars without calculating the cost, who drank without running threat assessments, who believed she’d come home as herself instead of in bloody pieces.
The young, innocent girl who had friends, a job, and laughter.
She's buried under everything I've built on top of her—the rage, the shadows, the custom-made morality, the taste for dangerous men—but she's not dead.
You can't kill the person you were. You can only bury them deep enough that you forget they're breathing.
Is that a bad thing? That she's still there?
I don't know. I genuinely don't know. But the possibility feels less like weakness than it used to.
I open my eyes.
I’m in a hospital, obviously, in a private room, which means Eddie pulled strings or flashed his badge or dropped panties with just his face. Maybe all three.
A window to my right shows late afternoon light, though that doesn’t help me place the time. How long have I been here?
The TV mounted in the corner is off. A plastic pitcher of water sits on the bedside table next to a foam cup with a bendy straw, and the sight of it makes my throat clench with a thirst so strong that I cough.
Eddie shifts behind me. The arm across my waist tightens fractionally.
"You're awake," he rasps.
"Yeah.” My voice sounds like someone ran it over gravel and then backed up to do it again. "Why am I here? Why am I not home?"
"Because you need to be here. You were severely dehydrated, had cuts on your arms and chest that needed cleaning and closure, and your blood pressure was not good when you first arrived here." His heavy exhale stirs my matted hair. "I wasn't taking chances with you."
"But…home…"
"Your home is not a hospital, Sera. Besides, right now, it has burst pipes and no windows and…." A pause. "Don’t worry about that part. I'll take you home when the doctor clears you. Not before."
I kind of want to argue, but my body is siding with Eddie on this one. The simple act of lying in a bed that isn't a concrete floor feels so obscenely luxurious that my muscles instantly reject any plan that involves standing up.
"And…Red Hands?" I ask.
"Contained," he says.
"Contained where?"
"Your house. James and Azhrael have him. He's secure. He's not going anywhere."
The things he's not saying fill the room like smoke. “Contained” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
Red Hands is alive. I told them alive. But alive covers a lot of territory between comfortable and praying for death, and I suspect the current state of him is closer to the latter.
Good.
I picture the hangar, the dark, my daddy’s vast, hungry presence filling every shadow. James's grin and the particular enthusiasm he brings to keeping things that belong to me exactly where I want them.
They’ll keep him alive just for me. I’m sure of it.
"And…Vincent?" I ask.
"Lying low." Eddie's voice flattens on the subject the way it always does, the sound of a man keeping his professional distance from a target he'd rather put a bullet in. "I haven’t heard anything from him, but I’ve heard plenty about him. He’s already guilty in the court of public opinion."
"That’s a brutal court to find yourself in," I say.
I would know. His actions put me in the same court, and it was awful.
I’d never heard more vile things said by complete strangers, never been called whore that many times.
They told me, “Even if he did do it, you deserved it,” both men and women, on the internet and in the halls of the courtroom, and somewhere between the first insult and the last, something in me stopped breaking and started sharpening.
"You don’t have to worry." Eddie’s thumb traces a slow circle on my hip through the hospital gown. "There's a guard outside your door. Officer Palmer. She's solid. I trust her."
"You trust someone?"
He sighs a laugh. "I trust about four people in this city. One of them is currently in my arms, one is Officer Palmer, one is a big brute who is probably terrorizing a serial killer in your basement with a smile, and the fourth is quite possibly the devil."
“All of those sound very trustworthy.”
He presses a kiss to my earlobe. “Well, maybe just keep that list to yourself for now.”
I almost smile. The muscles remember the shape but can't quite commit to it.
I blink down at my hands clenching the sheet around me.
The red is gone from both hands, every nail scrubbed clean, down to the quicks, not a trace of Crimson Kiss left on me. Someone was thorough, careful, and they did it while I was unconscious because they understood what that color meant on my hands without anyone having to explain it.
I stare at my bare nails in the dim light. Ten small, clean, unpainted surfaces. Ten tiny declarations of this was undone. This was not allowed to stay.
My throat closes at the simplicity of that action. The kindness with which it was done. The depth of how much that means to me.
"Eddie," I whisper. “You took it off.”
"First thing," he says quietly.
The sound I make is not a sob. I don't sob.
I haven't sobbed in years, since Kansas City, since the version of me that knew how to cry without it feeling like a structural failure.
But something cracks behind my sternum, a small, clean fracture, the kind that lets light into a place that's been sealed shut.
My breath hitches, and my eyes burn. I press my bare fingertips against his hand on my waist and hold on.
He just pulls me closer, tucks my head under his chin, and continues to hold me.
This must be what it feels like when someone fights for you in a language you didn't know you spoke.
Another cough wrenches from my throat, and I reach for the water on the bedside table. Eddie beats me to it. He rises, skirts the bed, pours, and holds the cup so the bendy straw reaches my mouth without me having to lift my head.
I drink. The water is room temperature and tastes like plastic, and it is the best thing I have ever put in my mouth.
And that’s really saying something.
He retakes his spot in bed, and I put my head on his chest. The heart under my ear beats steady, steady, steady, and soon I close my eyes.
The dream comes fast, the way bad ones always do, with no preamble, no slow descent, just a door slamming open in the dark.
Vincent is standing in the hospital corridor.
He's wearing his sheriff's uniform, his badge catching the fluorescent light.
His face is arranged in that expression of concerned authority that makes people trust him, that makes them step aside, that makes them say, “Of course, Sheriff. Right this way.”
He walks toward my door and smiles at Officer Palmer, who is just a blur.
She instantly opens the door for him and steps aside.
The light from the corridor spills across the hospital floor in a long yellow rectangle, and his shadow stretches ahead of him, reaching for my bed before his body does.
Behind him, in the corridor, Red Hands stands under the flickering fluorescent. He follows Vincent inside.
They don't speak to each other. They move in parallel the way predators do when they've agreed on the same prey. Two hungers aimed at the same point.
Vincent reaches my bedside and looks down at me.
"Ready, Penelope?" he says and undoes his belt buckle. “I won’t fuck you until you bleed this time. I’ll fuck you until you’re dead.”
I try to scream. My mouth opens, but nothing comes out. The shadows under my skin don't answer. The cold fire is gone. I'm empty, hollowed out, a woman with nothing, watched by two men who believe they own different parts of her.
Red Hands prowls closer, trailing his fingertip along the wall and leaving a red smear behind.
A lit cigar appears in Vincent’s hand as he crawls on top of me, his pants around his ankles. The mattress dips under his weight.
I can’t move, can’t breathe.
Red Hands holds a hooked scalpel as he stalks closer. “Who do you think will kill you faster, Penelope? Him or me?”
Vincent reaches his cigar between my legs, the cherry-red tip lighting the room and casting a glow onto my red-painted nails.
His tongue snakes out and licks the seam of my mouth. “You’ll taste better when you burn.”
Pain erupts between my legs.
I wake up, gasping.
The room is dark. Real dark, not dream dark. The window shows a sky bruised purple with late evening. The IV is still in my hand. My fingernails are still clean.
Other than Eddie, I’m alone. His arm tightens around me at my gasps, his body going alert in that instant-awake way of someone trained to surface from sleep ready to fight.
"Sera, hey, it’s okay," he says. "You're here. You're safe. I'm here."
My heart slams against my ribs. My skin is slick with sweat.
I curl into him and press my face against his chest. He’s real. He’s here. He’s not a dream.
"I have you," he murmurs, stroking my hair.
I press closer. His heart beats against my cheek, steady and sure.
"Can you stay?” It comes out smaller than I want it to.
"I'm not going anywhere." His lips brush my temple. "Sleep, Sera. I'll watch."
I close my eyes, but the dream lurks at the edges, like Vincent and Red Hands are waiting for me to slip back under.
But Eddie's heartbeat holds.
And eventually, I let it carry me down.