Chapter 16
Chapter
Sixteen
HALLOW
The darkness has always been cold, but now it starts to burn.
I’m still pinned to the slab, a butterfly with its wings torn off, staring at the void where the door should be.
The air in the room has changed—it’s thick, vibrating with a frequency that makes the marrow in my bones ache.
The scent of peppermint and copper is so heavy I can feel it coating the back of my throat.
Click.
The sound of the lock disengaging is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s the snap of a neck. The crack of a whip.
The door doesn’t just open; it yields.
A flood of toxic green light spills into the room, cutting through the blackness like a jagged blade. It’s blinding. I squint, my eyes searing after months of nothingness, and that’s when I see him.
He’s framed in the doorway, a silhouette carved out of nightmare and neon.
He’s tall, lean, and moves with a predatory grace that makes my heart stop and restart in a frantic, uneven rhythm.
For a second, I’m sure he’s just another hallucination, a final gift from the ECT to keep me company while I die.
He steps into the room, and the green fog swirls around his boots like a loyal dog.
He’s wearing a coat the colour of a fresh bruise, the velvet stained with dark, wet streaks that can only be Aris.
His hair is a wild, chaotic mess of ink-black strands, falling over eyes that burn with a terrifying, emerald heat.
His face is pale—deadly pale—except for the smeared, jagged red of his mouth. It’s not a smile. It’s a wound.
He’s beautiful. In the way a forest fire is beautiful. In the way the moment before a car crash is beautiful.
He doesn’t rush. He walks toward the slab with a slow, agonising deliberation, his boots clicking against the tiles. Step. Step. Step. Each sound is a hammer blow to my chest. He stops just inches from the edge of my bed, looming over me, his shadow swallowing my broken body.
I look up at him, my breath hitching in my throat.
Up close, he’s even more devastating. He has a jawline that could cut glass and a throat that moves as he swallows, his eyes raking over me with an intensity so fierce I feel like I’m being stripped naked.
He doesn’t look at me like a doctor looks at a patient.
He looks at me like a starving man looks at a feast.
“You’re not real,” I whisper, my voice a dry, papery rasp.
He leans down, his face descending toward mine until I can feel the heat radiating off his skin.
He smells of peppermint, gunpowder, and something dark and primal that makes the hair on my arms stand up.
His hand, gloved in purple leather, reaches out and traces the line of my jaw.
His touch is electric—a jolt of pure, unadulterated life that makes the leather restraints feel like they’re made of paper.
“Oh, I’m very real, Hallow,” he purrs. His voice is a low, gravelly cello, a sound that vibrates in the pit of my stomach. “And you… you’re even more magnificent in the flesh than you were in the files.”
His thumb brushes over my lower lip, his eyes darkening. There’s a smudge of blood on his cheek, a stray drop from the art gallery he left in the hall. He looks at me with a terrifying, obsessive hunger that makes my blood run hot and cold at the same time.
I should be screaming. I should be fighting. But as he looms over me, the master of this chaotic, bleeding world, I feel a spark of something I haven’t felt in two hundred and fifteen days.
Defiance.
I don’t look away. I stare back into those emerald eyes, watching the way the light catches the madness dancing within them. He’s the monster they warned me about. He’s the one who deals in cards and last breaths. And right now, he’s the only thing in the universe that matters.
“Who… are you?” I breathe.
He tilts his head, a lopsided, jagged grin spreading across his face. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a single card. The Joker. He slides it into the neckline of my tattered gown, the cold paper resting against my heart.
“I’m the guy who’s going to burn this world down just to see you dance in the ashes,” he whispers.
He reaches for the heavy leather strap across my chest, his fingers lingering on the buckle. He doesn’t pull it yet. He just looks at me, waiting, his presence so thick and dominating that the room feels like it’s shrinking.
The ghost is gone. The dancer is dead. But as the Dealer leans in to kiss the pulse point in my neck, I realise that whatever is waking up in me is far, far worse.
The smell of him is what undoes me. It isn’t the sterile, sharp scent of the hospital; it’s the smell of a revolution. Rain-soaked pavement, expensive tobacco, and the warm, metallic stench of the man he just slaughtered outside my door.
He lingers over me, his presence a physical weight, his shadow pinning me to the slab more effectively than the leather ever could. He doesn’t look at my scars with pity. He looks at them like they’re brushstrokes on a masterpiece he finally gets to own.
“You’re shaking, Hallow,” he murmurs, his thumb tracing the jagged line of my collarbone.
His voice is a low, vibrating velvet that makes the raw skin beneath my restraints prickle.
“Is it the cold? Or are you just realising that the monsters in your head are nothing compared to the one standing in front of you?”
“I’m dreaming,” I rasp, my voice cracking like dry earth. I pull against the wrist straps, the leather groaning, the bolts in the floor rattling a frantic rhythm. “Aris… he finally fried my brain. You’re just the static.”
He lets out a soft, dark chuckle that vibrates in the air between our lips. He leans closer, his nose brushing against mine, his emerald eyes boring into my soul with a terrifying, predatory clarity.
“If I’m static, sweetheart, I’m the loudest goddamn thing you’ve ever heard.”
He reaches for the heavy strap across my chest, his fingers ghosting over the buckle, but he doesn’t release it.
He just watches me struggle, his gaze flicking down to the way my breasts heave against the restraint.
He likes it. He likes that I’m trapped. He likes the desperation bleeding out of my pores.
“Please,” I whisper. The word feels like a sin on my tongue. I hate myself for saying it, but the need to be out of this skin, out of this room, is a fire that’s consuming me. “Let me go.”
He tilts his head, a lopsided, wicked grin pulling at the corner of his mouth. “Is that any way to talk to a saviour? You have to do better than that. A girl like you? A girl who bit a guard’s ear off just to taste the freedom? You don’t ask for things, Hallow. You beg.”
I glare at him, the old fire—the blue and red fire—flickering in my eyes. “Go to hell.”
“I’ve been there,” he whispers, his hand sliding up to grip my throat, not to choke me, but to claim me. His palm is hot, his grip possessive. “The devil sent me back because I was making the other residents uncomfortable. Now… tell me what you want. Say the words.”
I swallow hard, my pulse thudding against his hand. I look at the door, at the green fog, at the bloody silhouette of the man who used to be my tormentor lying in pieces in the hall. This stranger just unmade my world. He’s chaos in a purple coat, and he’s the only hand reaching into the dark.
“Please,” I choke out, my eyes stinging with a rage so pure it feels like grief. “Unstrap me. I’ll do anything. I’ll be anything. Just get me off this fucking slab.”
He leans in so close I can feel the dampness of his breath on my ear. He’s a nightmare I never want to wake up from.
“Anything is a dangerous word to give a man like me, Hallow. I don’t want your gratitude.
I don’t want your soul.” He bites down softly on my earlobe, a sharp, electric sting of pain that makes my toes curl.
“I want your havoc. I want to see what happens when the girl they tried to break finally decides to break the world back.”
He reaches down and flicks the buckle.
The chest strap snaps open with a sound like a gunshot. The pressure on my lungs vanishes, and for the first time in two hundred and fifteen days, I can take a full breath. It tastes like peppermint and carnage.
“One down,” he purrs, his eyes locked on mine as he moves his hand toward my pinned right wrist. “Three to go. But remember, Hallow… once I take these off, you don’t belong to Aris anymore. You don’t belong to the state. You belong to the madness.”
I look at him, my lips pulling back into a jagged, lopsided mirror of his own grin. The little girl in the tutu is dead, and the dancer is buried. But the thing that’s left? She’s hungry.
“Then stop talking,” I snarl, my voice finding its edge. “And finish the job.”
He doesn’t move for the next buckle. He just watches the way my chest heaves, the way my skin flushes under the sudden rush of oxygen. He’s savouring the sight of me unravelling, a dark connoisseur of my desperation.
“You’re in such a rush, sweetheart,” he murmurs, his fingers tracing the silver-white scars on my inner arm, lingering right where the needles used to go. “But we haven’t even been properly introduced. I’ve spent months reading the poetry of your pain, and you haven’t even given me a thank you.”
“I don’t owe you shit,” I spit, my voice trembling with the effort of not collapsing. “You killed the man who kept me in a cage. That just makes you the new locksmith.”
His eyes flash—a sudden, violent emerald spark that makes my blood turn to liquid fire. He leans over me, his weight pressing into the slab, trapping me between the vinyl and his heat. He’s so close now that the world is nothing but his pale skin and the jagged red of his mouth.
“I’m not a locksmith, Hallow. I’m the fire that melts the key.” He reaches down, his hand sliding behind my neck, his leather glove cold against my burning skin. “You want the rest of these straps off? You want to walk out of this tomb on your own two feet? Then pay the toll.”
He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t wait. He just hovers there, his breath ghosting over my lips, waiting for me to bridge the gap.
“Kiss me,” he whispers. It’s a command disguised as an invitation. “Show me there’s still a heartbeat under all that trauma. Show me the girl who bit the world back.”
I stare at him, my breath coming in short, jagged hitches. I hate him. I hate the way he looks at me like I’m a prize. I hate that he’s the only thing standing between me and the dark. I lunge forward, not to kiss him, but to sink my teeth into his lower lip.
I want to taste his blood. I want to remind him that I’m not a doll.
But he’s faster. He catches my chin in a grip of iron, his thumb pressing into the hinge of my jaw until my mouth drops open. He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t pull back. He just laughs—that low, terrifying sound that vibrates in my own chest—and slams his mouth against mine.
It isn’t a kiss. It’s a collision.
It tastes like copper, peppermint, and madness. I fight him, my head thrashing against the slab, my pinned wrists straining until I feel the skin tear again. I want to scream, to curse him, to tear the velvet off his back.
But then, the green gas in my lungs begins to hum.
The spark he ignited when he walked in turns into a goddamn inferno.
My body, starved of touch for two hundred days, betrays me.
The anger turns into an obsessive, sickening heat.
I stop fighting and start biting back, my tongue meeting his in a frantic, desperate war.
I’m clawing at the air with my bound hands, trying to reach him, trying to pull him down into the black hole of my existence.
He groans into my mouth, a jagged, primal sound of victory. He tastes like the end of the world, and God help me, I want to swallow every drop of it.
He pulls back just an inch, his lips wet, his eyes wide and shimmering with a terrifying, beautiful insanity. He looks at me, and for the first time, I see myself reflected in his pupils—not as a victim, but as a mirror.
“There she is,” he rasps, his voice thick with a hunger that makes my knees weak. “There’s the Queen of the Gutter.”
He reaches down, his movements fluid and fast, and flicks the remaining three buckles. Snap. Snap. Snap.
The weight is gone. The leather falls away.
I don’t fall into his arms. I scramble off the slab, my legs buckling as they hit the cold tile for the first time in months. I collapse, my hands skidding in the green-tinted shadows, my breath coming in sobbing gasps. I’m free. I’m freezing. I’m covered in my own blood and his peppermint scent.
He stands over me, silhouetted against the blood in the hallway, looking down at me like I’m the sun rising over a graveyard. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his serrated blade, tossing it onto the floor in front of me. The steel rings against the tile.
“Aris is still breathing out there, Hallow,” he says, his voice flat and cold. “He’s an artist now. He’s pinned to the wall like one of his ‘projects.’ Why don’t you go out there and tell him what you think of his latest work?”
I look at the knife. I look at the man in the purple coat. Then I look at the door.
The dancer is gone. The ghost is dead.
I pick up the knife.