28. Ellie #2
"This accelerated dosage will be unpleasant." She inserts the needle into my IV line. "But necessary."
The needle slides in. I don’t feel it. I feel everything else instead.
Heat. Fire. Poison.
My back arches, not because I choose to move, but because my body moves on its own. A puppet. Grace pulling the strings.
The drug spreads. Thick and wrong. It's a toxic flood swallowing my memories. It fills places that should be empty. Empties places that should be full.
One. My fingers go numb.
Two. The ceiling is breathing.
Three. Reed’s face multiplies. Two Reed’s. Four. Eight.
Four. I’m drowning without water.
Five. This is what dying feels like.
But I don’t die. I never die. That’s the worst part. I keep not dying.
Grace’s voice cuts through the chemical haze: “Identity dissolution initiated.”
Identity. I had one of those once. Dr. Eleanor Hart. Her father’s daughter. Someone who loved a man named—
No. Don’t think his name. Grace took that name. Poisoned it. Every time I think of him, I see her father dying. See myself opening my legs for his killer.
I am the betrayal.
The drug pulls me under. Down where the lights can’t reach. Down where even counting can’t save me.
Something in my body won’t stop fighting.
Not my mind. My mind surrendered days ago. But my body, the stupid, stubborn, broken thing, won’t let go.
When Grace says “prepare for primary imprint,” something deep in my nervous system says: No.
Not words. Not thought. Just a reflex. The way a dying animal still breathes.
I’m that animal. Still breathing when I shouldn’t. Still counting when the numbers don’t matter.
One. Killian’s voice said my name.
Two. Before Grace poisoned that memory.
Three. Before I learned what he is.
Four. What I am for loving him.
But his voice. I can still hear his voice.
Not the words. Not what he said. Just the sound. The frequency. The particular vibration that meant: You’re real. You exist. You matter.
I hold onto that sound. Not because I’m fighting Grace. But because it’s the only thing in my head, that isn’t her voice or Reed’s hands or the scream of electrical current.
It’s not resistance. It’s survival. There’s a difference.
Grace doesn’t understand the difference.
Through my own strangled gasps, I hear Grace's voice, reciting what sound like programming commands.
"Identity dissolution initiated. Prepare for primary imprint sequence."
My consciousness fractures. Memories blur with hallucinations. I see my father's face. Then Killian's. Then strangers with the Order's brand burned into their chests. I feel myself coming apart. Core personality structures dissolving under Grace's chemical assault.
"You were right earlier." Grace's voice distorts through the drug haze. "You won't live to see the end of this, not as Eleanor Hart. That person ceases to exist today."
Something crashes against the door, once, twice. Metal groans, hinges straining.
"Too late," Grace murmurs, preparing the final syringe. "Sixty more seconds and the primary bonding will be complete."
The door explodes inward in a shower of metal and concrete dust.
I don’t scream. I don’t have screams left.
A man enters. Blood on his face. Not his blood, I don’t know how I know that. I just know. The way I know Reed’s footsteps. The way I know Grace’s perfume.
This man is different.
He’s looking for something. His eyes sweep the room. The monitors. Grace. The chair I’m strapped to.
Then his eyes find mine.
Something in his face breaks. Cracks open. And I see…
Storm-gray.
I know those eyes. I’ve seen them. I’ve memorized every fleck of silver, every line of dark iris. Fifty-three different grays, depending on the light. On his mood. On how close he was to letting the darkness win.
Killian.
The name forms, but I don’t trust it. Grace put names in my head before. Implanted memories. Made me believe things that weren’t real.
Is he real?
His mouth moves. Words come out. “Step the fuck away from her.”
His voice. That frequency. The one I held onto in the drug haze.
Real. He’s real.
But I can’t feel relief. Can’t feel saved. Those emotions were tortured out of me somewhere between the water and the electricity and Reed’s hands.
I feel… nothing.
I watch a man across the room. A woman with a syringe. A chair with a body that used to be mine.
I’m up near the ceiling tiles again. Seventy-four of them. Safe up here where hands can’t reach.
Down there, the body starts to shake. Tears spilling from its eyes.
The man with storm-gray eyes looks at that body like it’s breaking his heart.
But I don’t have a heart anymore.
Grace took that too. He moves with impossible speed. One moment he's at the door. The next he's across the room, Grace's wrist caught in his grip, the syringe suspended inches from my IV line.
"I said," his voice drops to something quieter, more dangerous. His face inches from hers. "Step. The. Fuck. Away. From. Her."
The last thing I see before darkness claims me isn’t Grace’s face.
It’s the bird.
The water stain from my cell. Shaped like wings in mid-flight. Forever trapped in that moment between earth and sky. Never landing. Never free.
I’m that bird.
I’ve always been that bird.
Grace’s voice fades. His shouts fade. Everything fades except the bird, and I finally understand what it was trying to tell me all those nights I stared at it while Reed…
We’re the same. Both of us caught mid-flight. Both of us never landing.
But maybe never landing means never falling.
Maybe that’s freedom too.
The darkness takes me, and I go willingly. Up near the ceiling tiles. Through them. Higher.
Flying.
Finally, flying.