Chapter 3
Chapter
Three
HALLOW
The morning isn’t a sunrise; it’s a chemical awakening.
They pumped me full of something blue and viscous at four in the morning—a “stabiliser” that feels like liquid lead in my veins.
My limbs are disconnected from my brain, dangling from my torso like the strings of a marionette left out in the rain.
The world is a blur of high-contrast whites and nauseating greys.
I’m not walking. I’m being hauled.
Miller has his hands under my armpits, his fingers digging into the fresh bruises he left yesterday.
He smells of fear and cheap soap, his touch hurried, as if he’s afraid the doctor might see him touching the “private collection.” I want to spit on him, but my mouth is a desert, and my tongue feels like a heavy, dead thing resting behind my teeth.
The cafeteria isn’t a cafeteria. It’s a stage.
The air here is cold—biting, sterile air that makes the thin cotton of my gown feel like nothing. They drop me into a chair at a small, isolated table in the centre of the room. My head lolls to the side, my hair a matted bird’s nest of dried sweat and the copper tang of yesterday’s violence.
Across from me sits Aris.
He looks perfect. He’s wearing a charcoal suit that probably costs more than the life insurance policies of everyone in this building.
He’s cutting a piece of dry toast with a silver knife, the precision of his movements making my stomach roll.
There’s a plate in front of me: a bowl of grey oatmeal and a single, bruised apple.
“Eat, Hallow,” he says, his voice a smooth, terrifying caress. “We need to maintain your strength. A masterpiece is no good if it withers.”
I stare at the oatmeal. It looks like the insulation they pull out of the walls. I look up at him, my one good eye tracking him through a haze of sedative-induced static.
“Is this the part where I thank you?” I rasp, my voice a jagged ghost of its former self. “Should I get on my knees and tell you how much I enjoyed the way you dissected my soul between my legs? Or do we save the gratitude for dessert?”
Aris doesn’t flinch. He just spreads a thin layer of marmalade over his toast. “You’re being dramatic, Hallow. It’s a side effect of the psychosis. You’ve confused clinical observation with something… more.”
“Clinical observation?” I let out a low, wet laugh that hurts my ribs. “You didn’t look very clinical when you were shaking against my thighs, Doc. You looked like a man who finally realised his degree couldn’t stop him from being a fucking monster.”
He pauses, the knife hovering over the bread. The silence in the room is deafening. The other inmates are hunched over their trays in the distance, grey ghosts eating grey food, but here, in the centre of the light, the air is thick with the scent of our shared rot.
“You have a very dangerous tongue,” Aris whispers, leaning forward. “It’s a shame, really. I’d hate to have to remove it to keep the rest of you quiet.”
“Do it,” I challenge, leaning in until the scent of his expensive cologne makes me want to gag. “Cut it out. Put it in a jar. Label it ‘Defiance’ and keep it on your desk so you can remind yourself every day that you couldn’t break me with your cock, so you had to use a scalpel instead.”
His eyes darken, that same predatory hunger from last night flickering behind the glass of his gaze. He reaches across the table, his fingers tracing the line of my jaw, his thumb pressing hard into the split in my lip.
“You think you’re winning because you can still scream,” he murmurs. “But a scream is just air, Hallow. It’s the sound of a lung collapsing. You’re not a revolutionary. You’re a girl in a cage who has mistaken her own bleeding for a crown.”
I pull back, my head spinning as the sedative tries to pull me under. “A crown is a crown, Aris. Even if it’s made of thorns. Even if it’s heavy enough to snap my neck. At least I’m not the one hiding behind a white coat because I’m too afraid to admit I like the taste of blood.”
He smiles—a thin, cruel line that doesn’t reach his eyes. “Eat your breakfast, Hallow. Today we begin the deep-tissue mapping. I want to see how far that ‘crown’ of yours actually goes.”
I look down at the oatmeal. I pick up the spoon, my hand shaking so hard the metal clatters against the bowl. I take a bite. It tastes like ash. It tastes like the end of the world.
And as I swallow the grey sludge, I realise the worst part.
I’m still alive. And he’s still watching.
I stare at the grey sludge in the bowl. It’s thick, pasty, and smells like wet cardboard—the perfect fuel for a ghost.
Aris is watching me with that suffocating, proprietary stare. He isn’t eating anymore. He’s just observing the way the light hits the bruises on my neck, his eyes tracking the pulse in my throat like he’s counting down the seconds until he can get me back under the heat of his tools.
“Eat, Hallow,” he repeats. It’s a command disguised as a suggestion.
I pick up the spoon. My fingers are still trembling, the chemical stabiliser making my motor skills feel like they’re being filtered through molasses. I dip the metal into the bowl, pulling up a glob of the grey paste. It hangs there, heavy and pathetic.
I don’t put it in my mouth.
Instead, I let it slide off the spoon, watching it hit the table with a wet, sickening thwack.
“You know, Doc,” I whisper, my voice catching on the raw edges of my throat. “This looks a lot like what came out of you last night. A bit more grey, maybe. A little less… frantic.”
Aris’s jaw tightens. The sound of his silver spoon clinking against his porcelain saucer is the only noise in our small circle of hell. “Don’t be vulgar. It doesn’t suit the image you’ve built for yourself.”
“The image?” I giggle, a sharp, broken sound.
I dip my fingers into the bowl. The oatmeal is lukewarm and slimy.
I start to smear it across the laminate tabletop, tracing jagged, nonsensical lines.
“I don’t have an image anymore, Aris. You and Miller peeled that off me piece by piece. Now I’m just… art.”
I draw a circle in the sludge. Then I draw a cross through it. I’m playing with it like a child, my movements erratic and messy, getting the grey paste under my fingernails and all over my wrists. I look like a lunatic. Maybe I am.
“Is this what you want?” I ask, my eyes snapping to his, wide and bloodshot.
I take a handful of the oatmeal and squeeze it, letting the mush ooze between my fingers.
I start to paint my own arm with it, covering the injection bruises with the grey filth.
“Does this make the mapping easier? Or do you prefer it when I’m screaming? ”
“You’re making a scene,” he says, his voice dropping an octave. He looks around the room—at the orderlies standing by the walls, at the other broken girls staring into their laps. He’s embarrassed. The refined doctor doesn’t like it when his favourite toy malfunctions in public.
“A scene?” I laugh louder, the sound echoing off the high ceiling.
I pick up the bruised apple and dig my thumb into the soft, brown spot, peeling back the skin until the mealy flesh is exposed.
I start to shred it, dropping the pieces into the oatmeal mess on the table.
“I’m just decorating, Doc. Creating a menu for the funeral. ”
I lean forward, my face inches from his, the scent of the oatmeal and my own unwashed skin clashing with his expensive cologne. I take a glob of the paste on my index finger and reach across the table.
Before he can pull back, I smear a streak of the grey sludge right across the lapel of his charcoal suit.
“There,” I purr, watching the way his eyes turn into black glass. “Now you look like you belong here. Now you look like you’ve been touched by the things you keep in cages.”
Aris doesn’t move. He doesn’t wipe it off. He just looks at the stain, then back at me. The air between us is vibrating, a dark, heavy tension that feels like a physical weight.
“Miller,” Aris says, his voice terrifyingly calm.
The orderly is there in a second, his shadow looming over the table.
“Take her back to the Ward,” Aris whispers, never taking his eyes off mine. “She’s finished with her meal. And prepare the restraints in the exam room. The metal ones. I think Hallow needs a reminder of what happens when she tries to play outside her cage.”
Miller grabs my upper arms, his grip bruisingly tight, and yanks me out of the chair. I don’t fight him. I just look at Aris, my face smeared with oatmeal and dried blood, and I give him one last, jagged grin.
“See you in the dark, Doc,” I whisper. “Don’t forget to wash your suit. You wouldn’t want the other monsters to think you’ve gone soft.”
The hallway smells like bleach and desperation, a long, white throat designed to swallow screams. Miller is dragging me, his fingers biting into my biceps, his breath hot and ragged against the back of my neck.
He’s pissed. I can feel the tremors of his rage through his grip; he’s still wearing the shame of Aris’s dismissal like a lead vest.
“Keep walking, you crazy bitch,” he mutters, shoving me forward.
We pass the line of “Low-Risk” inmates heading toward the laundry—a queue of grey, shuffling ghosts with hollow eyes. But at the end of the line stands Thorne.
Thorne isn’t a ghost. She’s a goddamn mountain of scarred meat and bad intentions. She’s been in the Ward for six years, and they say she once killed a nurse with nothing but a plastic spoon and a grudge. She stops as we approach, her massive frame blocking the narrow corridor.
“Look at the little pet,” Thorne sneers, her voice like gravel in a blender. “Smells like the doctor’s office. Smells like a fucking whore.”
Miller tries to shove past her. “Move it, Thorne. She’s going to the exam room.”