35. Ellie
ELLIE
I didn't sleep. I watched the shadows crawl across the ceiling, shifting from charcoal to a bruised gray until the sun finally hit the pines. Another day. People like to talk about new beginnings, but it’s just more of the same. The same body. The same lies. The same shitstorm.
The house is already humming. Jackson’s gear whirring downstairs. Voices. They’re moving on, planning the next move while I'm trying to remember how to be a person. The world doesn't stop turning. It keeps going round, with or without you.
I sit up, muscles protesting, spine clicking like a dry branch. My head still feels fuzzy, my limbs leaden, but something's different today. The pieces Grace tried to scatter are slowly fitting back together. Not the same as before, but functional.
A knock.
"Come in."
Kai enters, carrying a rugged black field kit.
He doesn't do the pitying head-tilt everyone else has been giving me.
He flips the metal latches and starts lining up his tools on a sterile blue cloth.
Tweezers, scissors, antiseptic. "Stitches out today, Ellie," he says cheerily. "Then you need to eat."
I pull up the hem of my shorts. The skin is a mosaic of yellow and sickly purple. The cuts are scabbing over, pinned together by black nylon thread. They look like a map of someone else's life.
I flinch, Kai’s hands are ice cold. It must be a doctor thing. He uses a pair of tweezers and small, curved scissors. I feel the sharp snip and I feel the thread sliding through my flesh, a slow, burning friction that makes my toes curl into the sheets. My breath quickens.
No. No. No.
"Not real," I whisper, staring at the mountain ridges in the morning light. "Not happening now."
Kai’s hand steadies against my thigh. He doesn't offer the kind of pity that makes me feel small.
He waits. He gives me the silence I need to find my breath again, his palm a heavy anchor until the room stops swaying.
When it does, he goes back to work. I watch the back of his head, his focus entirely on the physical repairs.
The flashback fades faster than yesterday. I take it as a win, even if it's a small one.
"It wasn't just the cuts. Not with Reed," I say. My voice sounds shaky. "He... he made sure he got what he wanted. He took things he had no right to... even when I said no."
"I suspected as much," he says, his voice a low rasp. He finally looks up, and the professional mask is cracked. The Southern drawl he uses as armor is gone. "The way you wouldn't let me near your hips... I was waiting for you to be ready to say it."
He puts the scissors down, his hand hovering over mine for a second before he pulls back. "I’m sorry, Ellie. I’m so sorry he did that to you. I’ll handle the screenings. The blood work. A pregnancy test. We'll handle it all."
"Thanks," I nod.
He finishes the last stitch with a precision that’s almost terrifying. When he finally pulls back, his eyes are dark, the blue of a storm about to hit.
"That motherfucker is dead, Ellie." He's still looking at the bruises, his eyes are bloodshot. "Killian killed him the night we got you out. He can't ever hurt you again. I just... I’m so sorry we didn't get to you sooner."
I look at him, at the way his hands are shaking now. The doctor is gone. This is just Kai.
"Does he know?" I ask, my voice barely a whisper.
"No," Kai says. He doesn't have to specify who. "If he had known, he would have made it last much longer. He wouldn't have walked away. He would have wanted to see the light go out, slow and painful."
"Don't tell him," I say. "Not like this. Not while he’s still looking at me like I’m his biggest mistake."
Kai looks at me for a long time. "I won't tell him. That’s your choice to make. But you can't carry this shit forever, Ellie."
Kai is right. I’ve spent twenty-six days in a cellar and a week in this bed, and I’m fucking done being the house project.
I’m sick of the whispers in the hallway and the way Killian watches me, his remorse so heavy it's fucking strangling me. He thinks he owes me. I don’t want his debt.
I want my life back. I'm a weapon they haven't figured out yet. Time to take the files.
"I want the files, Kai. All of them."
He looks at me then. Not as a patient. As a person who is done waiting.
"Eat first," he says. "You're going to need the strength for what's inside them."
He leaves, and I pick at the croissant. The flakes are dry, breaking against my lips and sticking to the sheets. It tastes like nothing, but I force it down anyway.
I find a stack of new clothes in the dresser: thick black leggings and a heavy gray hoodie, still in their plastic wrap.
Jackson must have prepped a 'go-bag' before the rescue. The material is stiff and smells like a warehouse. I catch my reflection in the glass as I change. I’m thin, collarbones jutting out, my skin the color of a bruised winter sky.
I look like a mess. But I'm a mess with a pulse.
My legs are heavy. I take the stairs slowly, one hand on the rail. The hum of the house gets louder. The clicking of keys. The low, gravelly tone of Killian's voice. I stop for a second, my heart hammering against my ribs.
I push open the double doors to the living area.
It’s the most spacious room in the house, all floor-to-ceiling glass and exposed stone. The mountains are a backdrop of white and gray outside.
The luxury of the room is being buried under Jackson’s gear.
A portable server rack hums in the corner, and miles of black cable are taped down across the hand-woven rugs.
On one of the side monitors, a red-tinted thermal grid tracks the snowy perimeter of the house, marking the movement of the guards outside.
Jackson is hunched over a laptop near the massive stone fireplace.
Gabriel is pinning a map over the expensive wood paneling.
Killian is by the window. He looks small against the scale of the mountains. He doesn’t turn around, but I can see his shoulders lock.
"I'm here for the files," I say.
The room goes dead. Jackson stops typing. Gabriel drops a pushpin; it tacks against the floorboards with a sharp clack.
"Ellie," Gabriel says, his voice gruff. "You need to be resting."
"I've done enough resting. Show me everything you have."
The wood Killian chopped is crackling in the fireplace, but the heat doesn't reach me. Jackson and Gabriel are back to their screens.
Killian stays looking outside, his posture so rigid it looks painful. He’s giving me space, or maybe he’s afraid to see the look in my eyes after I’ve had more time with the truth.
"Show me, please?" I say.
Jackson slides the tablet across the table.
"Where do I start?" I ask.
Jackson gestures to the screen. "We've organized the data by their front identities.
Madhouse—the place where they held you—was registered as a high-end psychiatric wing called 'The Horizon Wing.
' Most of them are buried under the same layer of corporate corruption.
Private clinics, trauma retreats, long-term care for 'troubled' relatives. "
The Horizon Wing.
Yes. Of course.
It falls into place. I trace the watermark on the blueprints, it matches the letterhead from his study.
He co-founded a research trial at the Horizon Wing.
I remember him saying it was the most important work of his career.
I never understood why I wasn't allowed near the place.
Now I do. The Order had built the facility around his trial.
His research into trauma recovery was the cover, a legitimate academic anchor to keep the whole thing looking like medicine.
He thought he was pioneering something. He was just the reason no one asked questions.
"They used him, they built a slaughterhouse behind his legacy."
I pick it up. I scroll through dozens of files.
Men. Women. Some are barely adults. The photos of the things they did to them.
Metal braces bolted into jawbones for 'vocal suppression', eyes pinned open under strobe lights until the corneas were scarred, rows of brass terminals screwed directly into exposed skull with wires threaded into the raw gray matter to trigger synthetic terror on a fucking loop, makes me feel physically sick.
All broken. All remade into weapons with dead eyes.
The sheer scale of it, the endless scroll of vacant stares, makes my head spin until the room feels like it's swaying.
My stomach turns, but I keep reading.
"How many?" I ask, my voice sounding like it belongs to someone else.
"Over three hundred confirmed," Gabriel says quietly. "Seventeen facilities, all hiding behind high walls and legitimate medical licenses."
Three hundred people. Three hundred lives stolen, shattered, reformed into a goddamn army.
"And the ones who didn't survive conditioning?" I ask, though I already know.
Gabriel's silence is answer enough.
I force myself to keep reading. I scroll past the maps, searching for blood. I find a directory labeled Disposal / Archive 01.
"Subject: Hart, Gregory," it reads. "Status: Eliminated."
There’s a photo of the office. The mahogany conference table. A red circle is drawn around the sharp corner where he hit his temple. Below it, the log: K-17 confirmed. Staged as a domestic accident. Minimal cleanup required.
Staged. Fucking staged. Seven years of grief, and it was all just a mission log. A chore that needed a report. Minimal cleanup required. My father was a spill they had to wipe off a table.
Tears blur the screen, but I blink them back, the salt stinging my eyes as I scroll to the next folder. Hart, Eleanor. Status: Observation.
There is a photo of me at the cemetery at my father’s funeral. Some asshole standing behind a tombstone with a long lens while I was burying my father. They were measuring my grief like it were a data point. Waiting for the exact second I’d be vulnerable enough to take.