Chapter 17
Chapter
Seventeen
HALLOW
Freedom isn’t a graceful leap. It’s a pathetic, shaking crawl.
My legs aren’t mine. They’re two columns of dead marble that refuse to hold my weight. When I try to stand, the room spins in a nauseating tilt of green gas and black shadows. I hit the floor again, my knees barking against the tile, my breath coming in short, panicked bursts.
“Fuck,” I hiss, the word feeling like a jagged stone in my throat.
He doesn’t give me a hand. He doesn’t offer some poetic line about rising from the ashes.
He just stands there, watching me struggle with a clinical, detached hunger.
His mask of eloquence has slipped; he’s breathing hard, his chest heaving under the purple velvet, his eyes fixed on the way my muscles cord and strain.
“Get… up,” he rasps. The smooth, cello-voice is gone, replaced by something raw and ugly. “He’s waiting. And he’s leaking.”
I grab the edge of the metal slab, my fingers slick with the blood from my wrists, and haul myself up. My vision whites out for a second, then snaps back into focus on the serrated knife lying on the floor. I reach for it, my hand shaking so violently I almost drop it.
I don’t look at him. I don’t care who he is or why he’s here. All I care about is the sound of the wet, bubbling breath coming from the hallway.
I stagger toward the door, one hand on the wall for balance. Each step is a scream of agony from my wasted muscles, but the rage—the cold, black, female rage that’s been fermenting in my gut for two hundred and fifteen days—is a better fuel than adrenaline.
I step into the hall.
The green mist is thinner here, but the smell of copper is a wall. I see him.
Aris is pinned to the wall like a fucking butterfly.
He wasn’t lying; he’s an “installation.” His skin is peeled back in flaps, pinned into the drywall with long upholstery needles.
He looks like a raw anatomy chart come to life.
His eyes find me, bulging and bloodshot, fixed in a permanent state of animal terror.
“Hhh… hhh…” He tries to speak, but his jaw is hanging by a thread of muscle.
I don’t say a word. I don’t need a monologue.
I reach him and the smell of his fear is better than the peppermint gas. It’s sweet. It’s intoxicating. I lean my weight against him, my face inches from his. I want him to see me. Not the “subject.” Not the “project.” Me.
I take the serrated blade and I don’t go for his throat. That’s too fast.
I drive the knife into the soft meat of his inner thigh, right where the femoral artery sleeps. I don’t just stab; I twist. I feel the blade catch on the bone, the serrated teeth tearing through the heavy muscle like a saw through wet wood.
Aris’s body jerks against the pins, a muffled, high-pitched shriek dying in his throat as a fountain of hot, dark blood sprays across my face. It’s warm. It’s thick. It tastes like iron and justice.
“You… liked… to watch,” I growl, my voice a guttural snarl.
I pull the knife out and go for his stomach. I don’t slice; I dig. I want to see the “data” he was so proud of. I want to see what a monster looks like on the inside. I carve a jagged, horizontal line across his abdomen, pulling the blade upward until I hear the wet squelch of his organs shifting.
I drop the knife and reach into the wound.
My hands are deep in his warmth, my fingers wrapping around the slick, pulsing coils of his intestines.
I pull. I pull until I hear the snap of connective tissue, until Aris’s eyes roll back into his head, showing nothing but the whites.
He’s shaking, a rhythmic, dying tremor that vibrates through my arms.
“Look at me!” I scream into his face, my voice breaking. “LOOK AT ME!”
I grab a handful of the cards Jex tucked into his skin and I shove them into his open mouth, packing them in until he’s gagging on the Queen of Hearts. I want his last breath to be the taste of the game he lost.
He slumps. The light in his eyes doesn’t just go out; it curdles.
I stand back, my chest heaving, my gown soaked in his blood from the neck down. I am covered in him.
He is behind me. I can feel his heat, his gaze. He isn’t talking now. He’s just staring at the mess I made, his mouth slightly open, a dark, obsessive fascination written across his pale face.
He reaches out, his thumb catching a glob of Aris’s blood on my cheek. He smears it across my skin, his touch heavy and possessive.
“Beautiful,” he breathes. It isn’t eloquent. It’s a grunt. A confession.
The building groans again. Somewhere, a structural beam snaps. The “The Punchline” gas is starting to spark against the failing electrical wires. The circus is about to burn.
He grabs my arm, his grip bruising. “Time to go, Hallow. The audience is getting restless.”
I don’t fight him this time. I lean into him, the knife still clutched in my blood-stained hand, as we head for the exit.
The asylum is screaming.
It’s not just the guards anymore; the building itself is wailing as the fire finds the gas. The green fog ignites in pockets of brilliant, toxic emerald flame, turning the hallway into a neon furnace.
My legs give out three steps away from Aris’s corpse. The adrenaline that fuelled the carving is draining out of me, leaving nothing but a hollow, shaking wreck. I start to tip forward, the bloody knife slipping from my fingers, but I don’t hit the floor.
A pair of arms, strong and smelling of expensive smoke, catches me.
“I’ve got you,” he grunts.
The “Dealer” persona is gone. He’s not performing anymore. He’s straining, his breath coming in hot, ragged hitches against my neck. He hooks one arm under my knees and the other behind my back, hoisting me up against his chest.
I’m dead weight. My head falls back against his shoulder, my vision swimming with the heat. I look up at his jawline, sharp and smeared with the red of the man I just gutted.
“Who… are you?” I choke out. The peppermint gas is burning my throat, making every word feel like I’m swallowing glass.
He doesn’t answer. He just kicks open a set of double doors, plunging us into a stairwell filled with thick, black smoke. He doesn’t take the stairs; he heads for the laundry chute, his boots skidding on the blood-slicked landing.
“Hold your breath, sweetheart,” he says, his voice stripped of its velvet.
He jumps.
It’s a terrifying, weightless second of plunging through the dark before we hit a pile of soiled, wet linens at the bottom. The impact jars my teeth, but he doesn’t let go. He rolls, keeping his body between me and the floor, then he’s back on his feet, sprinting through the basement.
We burst through a delivery exit. The cool night air hits me like a slap, shocking my lungs.
In the distance, the sirens are a chorus of banshees, but closer, there’s a new sound. A heavy, rhythmic thudding. A van—rusted and spray-painted with jagged, grinning teeth—skids around the corner of the loading dock.
The side door slides open with a screech of metal on metal.
Two figures loom in the opening. A giant of a man with a face made of scar tissue and a small, feral-looking girl with a crowbar. I don’t know them. I don’t know where I am. I just see the way they look at the man holding me—not with love, but with a terrifying, cult-like devotion.
“Boss! The perimeter is crawling with pigs!” the girl screams over the roar of the engine.
The man holding me doesn’t say a word. He heaves me into the back of the van, tossing me onto a pile of moth-eaten blankets, before climbing in after me. He slams the door shut, plunging us into a vibrating, gasoline-scented darkness.
The van roars, tires screaming as we peel away from the burning tooth of Hillside.
I’m slumped against the metal wall, my breath coming in shallow gasps, watching him. He’s sitting on a crate across from me, his purple coat ruined, his face a mask of sweat and gore. He’s staring at me with an intensity that makes the air feel heavy.
“You have a name?” I rasp, clutching a blanket to my blood-soaked chest.
He reaches into his inner pocket, his fingers lingering there for a second before he pulls out a card. He doesn’t give it to me. He just holds it up between two fingers, flicking it so it catches the faint red light of the van’s taillights.
The Joker.
“Names are for people who want to be found, Hallow,” he says, his voice returning to that low, cello-crawl. “I’m just the guy who dealt you a better hand.”
I look at the giant man driving. I look at the girl sharpening her crowbar. They are shadows. They are his ghosts. And I am sitting in the middle of their hive, covered in the blood of the only life I’ve known for six months.
“Where are you taking me?”
He leans forward, the “Joker” grin slowly returning to his face, jagged and beautiful and wrong.
“Home,” he whispers. “We’re going to a place where the world can’t hear you scream. Not because the walls are padded… but because everyone else is screaming louder.”
I close my eyes as the van hits a bump, the darkness of the road swallowing us whole. I don’t know his name. I don’t know these people. But as the asylum explodes in the distance, a dull thud that I feel in my teeth, I realise I don’t care.
The cage is gone. The circus has begun.