8. ~Vex~ #2
I knew Giselle—knew her well enough, knew the not-especially-secret thing she and this mountain of a woman had been carrying on in the laundry alcove for the better part of a year.
Omegas have needs, and a place like this strips us of every gentle way to meet them; I’ve never personally been moved by the woman-on-woman of it, but I’m not in the business of grading other people’s comfort, and theirs was a real thing.
Solid. Tender, even, in the way only desperate places can grow tenderness.
She loved Giselle.
The fury makes sense. The fury is, frankly, the only honest thing in this whole staged little tragedy.
Which makes me wonder, even now, even with my air running out: how did Giselle die?
The same drug that took Wren and Della, the quiet violet death dressed up loud? Or has the composer changed instruments?
I knew them better than either would have guessed.
I know everyone better than they guess; it’s the only hobby this place permits and I’ve pursued it with devotion. I knew that Annalise took the top bunk so Giselle wouldn’t have to climb on bad-knee days.
I knew Giselle hummed off-key when she was happy and went silent when she wasn’t, and that she’d been silent for a week before she died, which means she was frightened of something, which means she saw it coming.
Someone in this building made a gentle woman afraid, and then made her quiet for good, and now they’ve handed her grieving lover a reason to do their next murder for them.
It’s elegant.
I’d almost admire it, if it weren’t presently trying to crush my throat shut with another woman’s borrowed hands.
Something glints above me.
My vision is starting to spot and swim, the edges going soft and dark, but the glint is wrong enough to cut through it—a thin bright wink of moving metal where the cafeteria ceiling has no business holding anything bright.
I blink up past the contorted fury of her face, and for one disoriented heartbeat I am genuinely uncertain whether I’m hallucinating, whether the oxygen debt has started painting things, because surely there is not a long curved blade descending on a wire from the rafters, swaying with slow mechanical purpose, angled with what looks an awful lot like the intent to open us both like envelopes.
It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t belong in a sentence, let alone a ceiling.
A salvaged saw blade, maybe, or a length of industrial steel honed and hung—lowered by some patient mechanism timed to this exact moment, this exact pile of two struggling Omegas, this perfect tableau of the lunatic and her latest victim.
My starved brain turns it over even as the black closes in, and it reaches the only conclusion that fits: this was prepared.
Not improvised in a brawl.
Prepared, in advance, by someone who knew there would be a brawl, in this spot, at this hour—which means the fight itself was arranged, which means Annalise was aimed.
I claw at her wrists.
I get enough breath for exactly four words, and I spend them well.
“Annalise. Would. Look. Up.”
She doesn’t.
“You can go meet her,” she snarls, and bears down harder, and the black spots bloom into black continents. “Go keep my Giselle company, and I’ll finish beating you to death when I get there.”
Whistles are shrilling now, somewhere past the roaring in my ears, the guards finally remembering they have legs.
And I do the math the way I always do it, fast and cold even as the world narrows to a pinhole: stay here, and I either pass out and wake in whatever afterlife they assign to women like me, or I survive to be framed for a fourth corpse before nightfall.
Neither works for me.
So I stop being polite about it. I drive my knee up between her legs—which does precisely as little as you’d expect, anatomy being what it is, but it’s enough of a flinch to loosen the press of those thumbs by a crucial degree.
I gulp half a breath. I haul both knees to my chest, plant my bare feet flat against the soft give of her belly, and I kick, all the coiled spring of a dancer’s legs unloading at once.
She shrieks and goes up and back, peeling off me, and air floods in so sweet and total it nearly blinds me worse than the choking did.
I don’t waste it.
I roll, snap upright into a seated coil, and cartwheel forward off my hands—clearing the spot where I lay, flipping clean to my feet in the single fluid line my body has known since before this place ever caged it—precisely as the blade completes its arc through the air I just vacated.
There’s a sound the whole room makes when a body does something a body shouldn’t be able to do—a collective intake, half awe and half terror—and I hear it go up around me as I land, and I understand I’ve just shown them all a card I usually keep face-down.
A choking, half-conscious patient does not roll up into a clean tumbling pass and stick the landing a hairsbreadth ahead of a falling blade. The lunatic act has a seam in it now, and two hundred witnesses just watched it tear.
I’ll pay for that later.
Later is a problem for a girl who isn’t currently being hunted by physics.
I land and spin to face her, breathing hard, and Annalise—furious, humiliated, witless with grief—staggers up and pivots back toward me to reset for round two.
Wrong move.
She steps back into the swing of it, and the whole cafeteria watches the long curved blade catch the light one last time and follow through—clean, silent, obscene—drawing itself across her midsection on the back half of its pendulum.
For a suspended instant nothing happens, the way nothing happens in the held breath between the lightning and the thunder. Then the line it left behind opens.
Her shriek dies in her throat. And the first dark welling of blood begins its slow inevitable journey toward the floor, pooling bright against the institutional grey while two hundred mouths fall open in the same silent O of horror.
My eyes lock on hers, and I watch the shock arrive in her like dye in water.
And I understand, all at once, the thing that’s been itching at the edge of this whole staged afternoon.
“You didn’t set that up,” I say softly, almost to myself, my gaze flicking up to the swaying wire, the rigged and waiting blade, the patient murderous geometry of it.
She didn’t hang that.
She isn’t clever enough, isn’t cold enough, isn’t anything but a grieving animal pointed at me like a loaded gun by a hand neither of us has seen.
Someone built this. Wound the spring and aimed the edge and turned a heartbroken Omega into the trigger, content to lose her in the firing if it meant burying me under one more body.
The puppeteer.
Composing again.
And sloppy enough, this time, to leave brushstrokes.
Three quiet kills, each one a small immaculate poem, and now this—a public spectacle, a rigged blade, a grief-mad pawn, a syringe in the open. The composer has stopped writing in their elegant private hand and started shouting.
That isn’t confidence.
That’s fear wearing confidence’s coat.
Somebody decided that the slow, patient framing of me had run out of time, that I needed to be dead and disgraced today, this hour, in front of witnesses—and the only thing that changes a careful plan into a desperate one is a deadline nobody told me about.
I tuck it away beside the rest, this single most valuable thing the whole bloody afternoon has given me: my enemy is on a clock now.
And frightened things, like loud things, make the mistakes that get them caught.
Then the world tips, gently, the way a boat tips when someone steps aboard behind you.
Something is wrong with me.
A cold thread of wrongness, unspooling from—I lift my hand to my neck before my mind has caught up to my fingers, and I close them around a thin metal sliver buried just below my jaw, and I pull.
A needle.
A syringe, slim and surgical, that Annalise drove into me sometime in the chaos of those crushing hands, and that I never felt for the strangling.
She’s grinning at me through her own ruin, blood at the corner of her mouth, dying and delighted.
“Got you,” she seethes. “Got you, bitch.”
I look down at the thing in my fingers. And here is the detail that turns the whole game, the detail my dimming, racing, gloriously stubborn mind seizes on even as the cold climbs my arm: the barrel is only half-empty.
She got perhaps half the dose into me before I tore her off. The other half is still sealed inside, a perfect little sample of whatever is currently rewriting my chemistry, and a sample is evidence, and evidence is the one gift I can still give the men I’ve decided are mine.
This is the calculation that survives even as the rest of me starts to fail, the cold machine ticking under the spreading frost: a full syringe in my hand, and a guard will bag it and lose it in an evidence locker that answers to whoever profits from my guilt.
A small dose, deliberately preserved, left in plain view at a scene a certain undertaker will be summoned to within the hour—that, no one can quietly disappear.
So I make it disappear myself, most of it, on my own terms. I become the only person who could have tampered with the proof, and I tamper toward the truth.
Allow them try to explain why the prime suspect destroyed the very thing that would convict her. Let them choke on the arithmetic the way I’m choking on this drug.
I laugh.
It comes out cracked and wrong and surely looks unhinged to every staring face in the room, the lunatic cackling over a dying woman, but I don’t care how it reads, because the cameras can have this one. I hold the syringe up where Annalise can see it.
I depress the plunger, slow and deliberate, and let most of what remains drip wasted onto the tile—leaving only a small, deliberate, analyzable dose behind in the barrel.
Just enough. Just enough for a certain undertaker with a reagent card and a decade of secrets to walk into this scene and read it like a confession.