Chapter 6
Chapter
Six
HALLOW
The office isn’t a sanctuary anymore. It’s an altar.
Miller didn’t just bring the heavy restraints; he brought the drills.
I lay flat on the floor, my back pressed against the cold Persian rug, while the high-pitched whine of the power tool chewed into the mahogany floorboards.
Four heavy iron bolts, sunk deep into the foundation.
My wrists and ankles are spread-eagle, locked into cuffs that are welded directly to the floor.
I am pinned like a butterfly in a display case, staring up at the dark wood of Aris’s ceiling.
Aris has changed his shirt again. This one is black, making his skin look like pale marble. He’s sitting in his chair, leaning over me, his throat still a jagged map of purple and red from my chains.
“The brain is an electrical storm, Hallow,” he says, his voice a low, gravelly rasp.
He’s holding two silver leads connected to a small, sleek box on his desk.
No bulky hospital machine. This is his private toy.
“And yours is stuck in a hurricane. You think you’re a warrior, but you’re just a series of misfiring synapses. We’re going to find the calm.”
He doesn’t use the padded headgear from the infirmary. He reaches down and presses the cold, wet electrodes directly to my temples. He uses a thick, clear gel that smells like ozone.
“You’re a sick… fucking… coward,” I hiss, my breath coming in short, panicked stabs. I pull at the floor bolts, the iron biting into my skin, but I don’t move an inch.
“I’m the only one who cares enough to see what’s under the noise,” he murmurs. He looks down at me, his eyes dark with a manic, focused hunger. He’s not even looking at the dials; he’s looking at my pupils. “Tell me, Hallow. Does the urban legend feel the lightning too?”
He flips the switch.
The world doesn’t go black. It goes white.
It’s not a blow to the head; it’s an invasion.
It’s like a thousand serrated knives are being driven through my eyes and out the back of my skull.
My muscles don’t just tense; they turn to stone.
My back arches so violently off the floor that I can hear my spine pop, the only thing keeping me from snapping in half are the iron cuffs at my wrists.
I try to scream, but my jaw is locked in a bone-shattering grind. I can smell it—the scent of my own hair singeing, the metallic tang of the fillings in my teeth, the ozone of the current cooking my thoughts.
“Deep breaths, Hallow,” Aris’s voice cuts through the static, sounding like it’s coming from miles away.
He kills the power.
I collapse back onto the rug, my lungs finally dragging in a ragged, sobbing breath. My vision is a fractured mess of purple spots. My tongue is bitten, blood pooling in the back of my throat.
“That was thirty milliamps,” he says, leaning over me.
He wipes a bead of sweat from my forehead with a silk handkerchief.
He looks fascinated, his hand trembling as he touches my damp skin.
“Your heart rate spiked to one-eighty. Your pupils didn’t even react to the light. You were completely, beautifully gone.”
“Kill… you,” I choke out, the words barely formed.
“You’re still fighting the current,” he sighs, looking disappointed. He reaches for the dial on the box. “That’s the psychosis talking. We need to go deeper. We need to find the girl who doesn’t want to be a ghost anymore.”
He leans down, his face inches from mine. He looks hot—sweat-slicked, disheveled, his chest heaving with a dark, secondary thrill. He’s not doing this to cure me. He’s doing this to see how much of me he can burn away before he hits the soul.
“Let’s see what happens at sixty,” he whispers.
He touches the switch, and the lightning returns.
This time, it feels like my blood is boiling.
My heart is a trapped bird slamming against my ribs, trying to escape the cage.
The floor beneath me seems to vanish, leaving me suspended in a void of pure, screaming electricity.
I can feel my bladder wanting to let go, my muscles tearing against the iron bolts.
Through the white-hot fog of the pain, I see him. Aris. He isn’t standing back. He’s leaning over me, his hand pressed firmly against my heaving stomach, feeling the way my body vibrates under the load. He looks like he’s watching a sunrise.
“Yes,” he hisses over the hum of the machine. “Give it to me, Hallow. Give me the scream.”
“Higher,” Aris breathes, his voice a jagged edge of lust and science.
He doesn’t just turn the dial; he cranks it.
The world ceases to exist. There is no floor, no mahogany, no Hallow Maddix.
There is only the current. It’s a white-hot spear driven through my prefrontal cortex, a rhythmic, violent thudding of raw power that turns my nervous system into a burning fuse.
My body isn’t mine anymore—it’s a conductor.
My heels slam against the floor in a rapid-fire staccato, a seizure of pure, unadulterated agony that smells like burning copper and wet hair.
“Ninety,” he rasps. I can hear the click of the dial over the roar in my ears.
My heart isn’t beating; it’s vibrating. It’s a flatline of muscle-spasm that makes the air turn to lead in my lungs. I can feel the capillaries in my eyes snapping, a wash of red blurring the white light. My jaw is clamped so hard I hear the distinct, sickening crack of a molar giving way.
And Aris? He’s right there in the storm with me.
He’s not behind the desk. He’s on the floor, straddling my pinned hips, his hands clenching the rug on either side of my head.
He’s watching my face contort, his own expression a mirror of my wreckage—eyes blown wide, his mouth agape as he drinks in the sight of my undoing.
He’s looking for the moment the “ghost” leaves, the moment I become nothing but meat and electricity.
“Tell me!” he screams over the whine of the machine. “Tell me you can feel me now! Fuck the legend! Fuck the dark! It’s just us, Hallow! Just the wire!”
The machine lets out a high-pitched, dying squeal. A spark jumps from the electrode on my left temple, scorching a black pit into the rug. My chest hitches once, a violent, final jolt that feels like a physical punch to my soul, and then…
The silence is deafening.
The power cuts. The hum dies. I collapse back into the floor, a wet, limp pile of scorched skin and frayed nerves.
My heart is a stuttering engine, missing every third beat, fluttering like a dying moth.
I can’t feel my hands. I can’t feel my legs.
I can only feel the cold, heavy weight of Aris on top of me.
He stays there for a moment, his chest heaving against mine, his forehead pressed to the floor next to my ear. He’s shaking. The man who thinks he’s a god is trembling like a leaf.
He lifts his head, and I see it. He looks like a man who just touched the sun and survived. There’s a smudge of my blood on his cheek, and his black shirt is soaked through with sweat.
“Hallow?” he whispers. It’s not a command. It’s a plea.
He reaches for my throat, his fingers pressing into my carotid artery. He waits. The silence stretches, thick and suffocating, until a tiny, pathetic thump echoes under his skin.
He lets out a breath that sounds like a sob, his head dropping onto my shoulder. “Still there. You’re still there.”
He pulls back, his hands moving over my body with a frantic, possessive urgency, checking the bolts, checking the burns at my temples. He’s manic, his eyes darting across my face, looking for a sign of the girl who tried to strangle him.
“Speak to me,” he commands, his voice regaining its sharp, clinical edge, though it’s still frayed at the borders. “Hallow Maddix. Identify yourself.”
I pull my eyes to his. They’re clouded, the red smears from the burst vessels making him look like he’s standing in a sunset. I try to move my tongue, but it’s a heavy, leaden weight. I swallow the taste of copper and burnt enamel.
“Go… to… hell,” I croak. The words are barely a vibration, but they’re mine.
Aris stares at me for a heartbeat, and then he does something truly terrifying. He smiles. It’s a wide, genuine, and utterly psychotic expression of joy. He leans down and presses a hard, bruising kiss to the burn on my forehead, his lips lingering on the scorched skin.
“I’m already there, Hallow,” he whispers against my skin. “And I’m never letting you leave.”
I don’t answer him.
The spark that usually lights up my throat, the one that feeds the venom in my words, is gone.
It didn’t just flicker out; it was burned to ash by ninety milliamps of his “care.” I lie there, pinned to the mahogany floorboards by iron bolts, staring at the ceiling with eyes that feel like they’ve been replaced by glass marbles.
My mouth hangs open just a fraction, the air whistling over my parched, bitten tongue. I can feel the weight of him on me, the heat of his body pressing into my cold, scorched skin, but I don’t flinch. I don’t fight. I am a hollowed-out shell, a cathedral that’s been gutted by fire.
A single tear breaks free from the corner of my eye. It’s hot—the only warm thing left in my world. It crawls a slow, jagged path through the drying gel on my temple, carving a line through the soot and the salt.
Aris pulls back just enough to see it. He freezes, his hand hovering over my chest.
He watches the tear. He watches it roll down my cheek and disappear into the dark hair at my temple. Then another one follows, silent and heavy, a steady leak from a heart that has finally, mercifully, shattered.
“Hallow?” he whispers.
I don’t blink. I don’t even look at him. I look through him, through the ceiling, through the sky, into the black void where the “Man with the Cards” used to live. The ghost is gone. The girl is gone. There is only the static.
“Look at that,” he breathes, his voice thick with a terrifying, reverent delight. He reaches out, his thumb catching the next tear, smeared across his skin like a trophy. “The defiance is gone. The noise has stopped. You’re finally… quiet.”
He leans over me, his face a mask of ecstatic, religious fervour. He isn’t looking for the patient anymore; he’s looking at his masterpiece. He runs a hand down my arm, his fingers trembling as they pass over the iron cuff, feeling the stillness of my muscle.
“You’re beautiful like this,” he murmurs, his lips brushing against my ear. “No more screaming. No more biting. Just the ghost. Just my silent, perfect Hallow.”
He begins to laugh—a soft, breathless sound that makes the hair on my neck stand up, though I don’t have the strength to shiver.
He’s delighted. He’s fucking charmed by the ruin of me.
He leans down and licks the salt of my tears off his thumb, his eyes never leaving mine, his pupils so wide they’ve swallowed the iris whole.
“Miller was wrong,” Aris says, his voice a caress of pure silk. “He wanted to kill the animal. But I knew… I knew if I just burned away the armour, I’d find the saint underneath.”
He rests his head on my chest, right over my stuttering heart, closing his eyes as if he’s listening to a symphony. I just stare at the flickering green light of the machine on the desk. The tears keep coming, a silent, rhythmic weeping of a body that’s been abandoned by its soul.
I am the ghost he wanted. I am the silence in the white room.
And as he clings to me, whispering my name like a prayer into my skin, I realise the most terrifying thing of all: he doesn’t want me to come back. He wants to keep me right here, bolted to the floor, weeping and broken, until the end of the world.