8. Chapter 8
I know who she is the moment she steps into the room.
Not because of recognition delayed by time or contact, but because I have already spent weeks thinking about her.
Sadie Morgan is far more beautiful in the light of my office than she was in the reflection of those mirrors.
I had looked her up the night she left Pitch.
I hadn’t planned to, and I don’t usually need to. Most encounters resolve themselves cleanly within predictable arcs with far more predictable outcomes. People come apart the way they always do when pressed correctly, but she hadn’t.
She didn’t at all, and that is the problem.
She survived me and I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t kill her.
That singular fact has been irritating me ever since.
She closes the door behind her softly, careful not to let it click.
A habit born from not wanting to announce herself as her steel-green eyes sweep the room before she commits to anything.
She chooses the couch across from me, settling near the edge instead of sinking back.
Her boots planted firmly and her knees apart just enough to be comfortable but not careless.
She doesn’t bother to remove her jacket either.
She’s… defensive, but I wouldn’t think entirely closed off.
I stay where I am, relaxed in the armchair across from her, posture open. No barrier between us or authority reinforced by furniture. I can’t help but to take her in again, and she looks so very different without the mask.
Her hair is a summer blonde, cut at the center of her back and uneven in a way that suggests she trims it herself or doesn’t care enough to correct it. It’s messy too, pushed back behind one ear unconsciously. Her eyes are warm, but observant even when she’s trying not to be.
Her skin is pale. The kind that belongs to people who live at night and sleep through mornings. A bartender.
I know, because I checked.
Her file was thin at first; surface-level information from her friend’s files, Imogen Tanners, another patient here.
I had no business going through my colleague’s file on her patient, but the moment I realized the connection between Sadie and Pitch, I’d done my digging.
Her friend talked quite a bit about her and the world that she was worried Sadie was living in.
When she mentioned her worry for her friend and the fact that she couldn’t afford therapy, I’d found my in.
I read the line twice just to be sure, then built a solution around it.
The pro bono program isn’t charity or altruism, it’s a net.
I weaved the trap carefully and made sure to structure it loud enough that Imogen would catch wind. I even let the other doctors freely select from the pool so it wouldn’t look deliberate. And when Sadie’s name crossed my screen, I selected her without hesitation.
I’d then made sure to schedule her after-hours, just in case she scratched my brain again.
I let the silence stretch now, watching how she settles into it. This silence tends to unsettle people more than questions ever do, and in that regard Sadie is no different. Her knee is bouncing, her foot rolled onto her toe of her boot to keep the bounce active.
“Sadie,” I hum at last. “I’m Dr. Dormsworth.”
Her eyes flick to mine from the plant she had been studying in my window—it’s fake, but that’s beside the point. I’ve never really had the care to nurture something, and that applies to plants or anything else that needs substance to keep functioning.
“Thanks for seeing me,” she replies. Her voice is steady and controlled. Just like she was in that mirrored glass before she slipped into whatever little beast writhes inside of her.
“Before we begin,” I continue, voice even. “I want to go over a few basics. These sessions are confidential within safety limits. There’s no obligation to talk about anything you’re not ready to.”
True, but mostly irrelevant. I’ve already worked out of her what I wanted before, and I have no doubt I can pry that pretty head open again. Whether it’s to pick it apart from pieces of her physical skull or from her voiced words, I haven’t decided yet.
She studies me closely and I don’t miss the stillness in her shoulders, the faint tightening at the corner of her mouth when I say ready. Survivors don’t trust that word all that often.
“Tell me, what made you decide to come in?” I push, easing into the cadence of the first session.
It’s meant as a baseline, open-ended and nonthreatening.
She hesitates, but I can see the wheels turning the same way they had in our first meeting. Choosing instead of reciting what she thinks is appropriate or right to say. Clever little fox, this one.
“I’m trying to get my life straight. Or at least pointed somewhere better.” She settles on and I tap my finger to the edge of my pen in thought. It’s a reasonable reply, but it’s incomplete.
I tilt my head slightly, encouraging without pressing. “What does ‘straight’ look like to you?”
A quiet huff of humor escapes her, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “Less stuck.”
Ah, there we are again. She had talked about complacency before. My eyes drift to her hands and how they move without realizing it, fingers working at the cuff of her jacket sleeve. The fabric shifts and silver flashes.
Fuck, the bracelet.
And there it is—my charm.
The plague mask sitting there against her delicate wrist in the most blatant claiming mark a man could leave outside of scars. Though I suspect Sadie would wear scars just as beautifully as she does my mask at her pulse.
She kept it though, which is curious in itself.
No rule requires that you do so and there isn’t an expectation that suggests you should.
No rational explanation exists that she could articulate I’m sure, but she had kept it.
And that sends a little zing up my spine that I don’t quite know how to sort through in this moment.
I lift my gaze back to her face as if nothing has happened. Curiosity works best when it stays quiet.
We move through safe ground next; work schedules, sleep habits, a childhood outlined broadly enough to be accurate without exposed. She answers my questions with precision, offering just enough truth to satisfy my question but never really answer it.
Little fox was the perfect nickname. She’s agile in the way she bends and warps her replies, and it would be irritating if it weren’t immensely satisfying how easy those half-truths roll off her tongue.
My mind drifts to what other things that tongue might be capable of and I immediately snap that thought off before it forms, because that’s a complication I do not need.
For a moment—brief and intrusive—I consider how easily this could end.
How simple it would be to remove the variable she’s introduced into my thoughts.
No one really knows her outside of Imogen, and sure she might cause a stir when her friend disappears, but eventually she would move on.
It’s after-hours and everyone has left, I’d already checked the feeds and dismissed my receptionist. There aren’t cameras in the office and her throat is so very slender.
I already know my fingers lock around them easily and all it would take was one crack and order would be restored.
It’s clean and efficient, it wouldn’t even have to be messy. Though I suspect she might fight.
My jaw nearly ticks when my mind immediately rejects the idea as quickly as it rears its head. Sadie would not become a disappearing act. Not when some part of me wants her to be the anomaly sitting six feet away from me, wearing proof of a night she seems to want to place behind her.
“Tell me about your family,” I circle back to keep my mind from spiraling off into tangents it wishes to take.
Her mouth tightens, but she gives in. “It was just my mom. Mostly.”
I hum and keep from tapping my pen to the page. I already know this much about her and there’s no need to pretend that I need to write it down to remember. My mind gobbles anything she spits at me and commits it to memory on principle alone.
“And your father?”
She lifts her shoulder in a shrug. “Never met him.”
No, that doesn’t seem to be her wound. She doesn’t scream that she’s been hurt by daddy.
“She had… boyfriends,” Sadie adds. “A lot of them.”
Revolving door would be a more accurate term, but I’m not going to point out that I already know it .
“And how did that feel?” I ask mildly, settling deeper into the chair.
Her eyes narrow on mine for the basic question, but she looks away before answering. “I don’t know. Loud and unstable? You learn how to stay out of the way.”
“And did staying out of the way keep you safe?” I challenge.
“No. It just kept things… survivable.” She admits.
I watch her fingers as they drift to the bracelet again unconsciously. The charm taps softly against the chain, a grounding behavior she hasn’t named yet.
In the mirror room, I’d asked her what scared her and she hadn’t answered. Now, she’s circling that same question in a different form.
“When people grow up in unpredictable environments they often develop a high tolerance for chaos. Stability can feel empty. Or worse—dangerous.” I offer her.
“And when intimacy is introduced,” I continue, my tone unchanged, “it can feel either overwhelming or meaningless. Sometimes both.”
She swallows and I wonder if she realizes I’m talking about what she said in that room about lacking connection. She shifts as she ponders her reply and I give her the moment to formulate it.
“I don’t really do expectations. I don’t want to owe anyone anything.”
It’s not really connection alone then, it’s the pressure and risk that comes along with it.
That much I had figured and it’s nothing new, but for her—this conversation is new.
She clearly has no idea who I am or that I am Plague.
If she had realized it, I have no doubt she’d have run for the hills at this point.
Though, she did have a way of surprising me.
So all we are really doing is getting the same questions and answers, just dressing them differently.
I lean forward, not enough to invade, just enough to signal focus. “Do you feel pressured easily?”
Her eyes snap back to me from whatever she had been focusing on over my shoulder, and I think she feels the echo of that question.
“No,” she bites, a little too quickly.
She’d answered me differently in the mirrored room and I file that discrepancy away.
“That’s something we’ll explore,” I say smoothly. “Patterns like these don’t form in isolation. They’re adaptive and useful. Until they aren’t.”
She nods, absorbing it like it’s something she can carry home and examine later.
“We’ll take this slowly though. There’s no rush.”
It’s a lie, but a necessary one. I am going to peel her open and leave her raw and exposed. It’s just a matter of which session and how far she can be pushed before she inevitably pushes back. Though there might be thrill in seeing her do so.