Chapter 6 James
James
I’ve been watching her breathe for three hours straight.
The monitor’s blue wash makes her skin look like something I’ve fished out of the North Sea—pale, luminous, wrong for this shite fluorescent coffin of a petrol station. My Prayer behind the counter, boxed in where I can see but cannae touch. Nae yet.
I tweak the feed, sharpen, boost the contrast. It’s no cinema, but it’s her.
“There ye go,” I whisper when she tucks her black hair behind her ear—wee tell, that. “Do it again for me, lass.”
On the second monitor I’ve got her greatest hits spooling.
Her stepping out her Kansas City house for the first time in five years.
Her walking from her new house to the car four days back.
Her dropping her keys last week and bending—Christ almighty—to pick them up outside the pumps.
I’ve catalogued every heartbeat since before she arrived in Wichita and after. Hard drive’s near bursting with her.
On the live feed, she’s half smiling at a customer, some manky bawbag buying fags and a couple energy drinks. Her mouth stretches; her eyes stay dead. It’s her deranged Wednesday Addams smile, if Wednesday worked in customer service.
“Dinnae give him that, Prayer,” I say. “I ken that smile’s nae yours.”
My pedo-looking white van reeks of cold chips and pine air freshener. Nae back windows, the front tinted to sin. Parked behind the abandoned paper mill where nae bugger comes nosing. Where I can watch in peace.
When the punter leaves and her face folds back to blank, I lean in. That’s better. Truer.
I open my laptop, my fingers on the keys by muscle memory. Her online ghost still sits there on the screen. PrayWhileIMoan. What a username, eh? Found it on the kinky erotica sites, then buried deeper in a survivors’ forum, the kind where lassies post what they cannae say out loud.
Her words weren’t like the rest. Most of them typed about healing, therapy, recovery, all that patter. My Prayer wrote about revenge like scripture.
I’m going to find him and unmake him the way he unmade me.
The second I read it, I kent her. Kent she was mine.
Tracing the IP was child’s play. Folk think the internet’s a void ye shout into, and it eats the noise. But I listen. I’m always listening. I followed her digital crumbs same as the ones she left in the real world.
It’s nae stalking. It’s knowing her first. Understanding her before she understands herself. And I ken exactly what she’s doing in Wichita.
“She called herself ruined,” I tell her frozen face. “But I see the cathedral buried underneath.”
I trace her outline on the glass. The bruised smudges under her eyes. The fullness of her body, like she’s armoring up, making herself bigger, harder to hurt.
Her boss strolls into frame, a walking dobber called Rick. Or Randy. He crowds behind the counter, too close. His hand skims her lower back as he reaches past.
I go still. “That clown’s nae clue whose skin he’s pawing.”
Rick/Randy’s hand lingers. Penny then, Sera now, my Prayer forever, slides away, a tiny shift only a man who studies her like gospel would see. Her shoulders tighten. Her chin ticks toward the door.
I dinnae charge in, cape on. I just mark it in the journal, circling his name above the address I’ve already pulled. Next to his schedule. His drink pattern. The fact he lives alone.
Some problems sort themselves if ye give them time, but I’ll step in if I must.
I stretch, cramped in the van’s belly. The wall by my makeshift desk is a shrine—photos from a distance, screenshots from socials before she scrubbed them, a lock of blonde hair—nae the black dye—pinched off her pillow in Kansas City right before she bolted.
My notebook sits open, full of her rhythms:
Coffee at 3:42 p.m. before shift
Break at 7:15, sits out the back and smokes
Checks over right shoulder more than left
Touches throat when she lies
Locks the car twice—bleep-bleep
Whispers to herself when alone
“I want her alone,” I murmur, finger on the fresh entry. “Unguarded when she sees it.”
In the corner, a wee box sits wrapped in brown paper. No pretty bows just yet. It cost me hours to procure, and it’s nearly right.
I heft it, weigh it. Inside’s the first message. The first real one anyway.
It speaks our shared tongue: rage and violence.
I heard it in her posts. Felt it thick in the air of her Kansas City house, the way it rotted and festered the rooms from the inside.
Five years she never crossed the threshold.
Then one day she walked out with a duffel and her keys, a perfect storm with legs.
I’ve nae been that buzzing in my life.
I peel the paper back, check the gift one last time. Everything perfect. Everything in place
I rewrap the package, securing it with twine.
On the live feed, Sera’s shrugging into her coat, right on schedule.
I touch the pixel glow of her face.
“I’ll leave it where ye’ll find it,” I whisper. “And when ye open it, ye’ll ken ye were never unloved.”
I turn the key. Engine rumbles. Soon, she’ll see there’s someone who sees her. Someone who kens what justice means in the real world.
Prayer doesnae need saving.She needs someone who’ll help her burn it all down.
And I’m already on fire.