Chapter 24
Chapter
Twenty-Four
HALLOW
The night air is a cold blade against my face, but the fire inside my chest is hotter than the funhouse.
I’m riding one-handed, my fingers trembling as I reach for the external PA mic clipped to my collar.
My visor is up, and the salt-spray from the harbour is mixing with the hot, stinging tears that are finally, finally breaking through the ice of my skin.
I look at the white metal side of the ambulance. He’s in there. The man who taught me that love was a currency and pain was the only language that didn’t lie.
“City of Saints,” I whisper, my voice cracking, projected through the massive external speakers of the ambulance. It echoes off the concrete barriers, a ghostly, amplified wail that drowns out the wind. “Can you hear the heartbeat of your saviour?”
I let out a broken, jagged sob, my body heaving against the Ducati’s tank. I’m not just crying; I’m leaking the last ten years of my life onto the asphalt.
“Do you know what he smells like?” I scream into the mic, the sound distorting, raw and ugly. “He smells like expensive cologne and the copper tang of my own blood. He smells like the bleach they used to scrub the floors of the rooms where he sold me. He sold me!”
I swerve, the bike tilting dangerously as I lose my grip for a second, my vision blurred by the flood of grief.
I can see Jex in the driver’s seat through the shattered window.
He’s watching me in the side mirror, his eyes dark, blown out with a sick, kinetic hunger.
I can feel his gaze crawling over me, feeding on my collapse, turning my agony into his fuel.
“He told me I was special,” I choke out, the words tasting like ash.
“He told me the needles were to keep the world away. But the world wasn’t the monster, Dad.
You were the one who opened the door. You held my hand while they strapped me down.
You kissed my forehead while Aris picked out the scalpels. ”
I’m wailing now, a sound so primal and hollow it feels like my ribs are cracking open. I’m broadcasting the blueprints of my ruin to every midnight commuter, every homeless soul under the bridge, every ghost in the city.
“I was six! I was six years old when you realised my pain was worth more than my smile! You traded my childhood for a seat in the Mayor’s office! You traded my body for a fucking campaign budget!”
Through the partition, I hear his muffled, pathetic groans. He’s begging, but I don’t stop. I want the city to choke on the truth.
“Listen to him!” I shriek, my voice breaking into a thousand jagged pieces.
“Listen to the Great Reformer! He’s crying because his daughter is finally loud enough to drown out his lies!
He’s crying because the ‘sanctity of family’ is hanging from a hook in a funhouse, vibrating until she can’t remember her own name! ”
I look at Jex. He’s leaning out the window now, his hand reaching out toward me in the wind, his face a mask of terrifying, dark arousal.
Seeing me break, hearing the absolute, shivering insanity in my voice—it’s doing something to him.
It’s making him harder than the steel of the bike.
He’s savouring the kill, the slow-motion car crash of my soul.
“I’m a ghost, Dad!” I sob, the tears blinding me as I gun the engine, the roar of the Ducati punctuated by my own shattered gasps. “And you’re the one who murdered me. You didn’t just break my body—you turned my brother into a monster just so he could be the only one who could find me in the dark!”
I’m shaking so hard the bike is fishtailing, a black streak of pure, unadulterated trauma tearing through the night.
“Everyone… look at the white box,” I whisper, my voice dropping into a terrifying, wet hiss that carries for miles. “Inside is a man who thinks he’s going to heaven. But he doesn’t know… we’ve already brought hell to meet him halfway.”
The ambulance lurches to a halt in the middle of the bridge, its tires shrieking as Jex slams it into park. The silence that follows is deafening, broken only by the ticking of cooling metal and the ragged, wet heaving of my own chest.
I kick the kickstand down and slide off the Ducati, my legs nearly giving out. I’m not Hallow the socialite anymore. I’m not the girl in the funhouse. I’m a raw, exposed nerve, vibrating with a decade of suppressed screams.
“You want to hear more?” I shriek, the PA mic still gripped in my shaking hand, my voice echoing off the stagnant water below.
I pull the heavy glass-breaker from my belt and swing.
CRACK. I shatter the side window of a stopped sedan, the driver staring at me with wide, tear-filled eyes.
I don’t care. I don’t see them. I see the sterile white walls of the clinic.
I see the way the dust motes danced in the light while the doctor’s hands went where they weren’t supposed to.
“He told me it was a game!” I wail into the mic, the sound distorting into a hellish, glitching sob.
“He told me if I stayed quiet, he’d buy me the porcelain doll with the blue dress.
I sat there, clutching that doll until my knuckles turned white, while he signed the checks in the next room!
He sold the minutes of my life by the hour! ”
I turn to the ambulance and scream, a sound so primal it feels like my vocal cords are tearing. I swing the breaker again and again, denting the reinforced white metal, chipping the paint, trying to get to the monster inside.
“I remember the smell of your cigars, Dad!” I choke out, the tears blurring the world into a smear of orange fire and black shadow.
“I remember the way you’d tuck me in afterward and tell me I was a ‘good girl’ for helping the family.
You didn’t just break my body—you poisoned my mind!
You made me think the pain was my only value! ”
All around us, the bridge has turned into a graveyard of idling cars.
People are stepping out, their faces illuminated by the pale moonlight and the flickering hazard lights.
They aren’t filming. They aren’t shouting.
They are standing in a heavy, horrified silence, some with their hands over their mouths, others openly weeping as my shattered history bleeds out over the speakers.
I collapse against the side of the ambulance, sliding down the cold metal until I’m on my knees in the glass shards. “I just wanted to be a little girl,” I whisper, the mic catching the wet, hollowing sound of my soul breaking. “I just wanted my dad to love me more than his poll numbers.”
The driver’s side door of the ambulance creaks open.
Jex steps out. He doesn’t look at the crowd. He doesn’t look at the city. He looks at me.
The air around him feels thick, charged with a dark, predatory electricity.
He’s walking toward me, his boots crunching on the glass, his eyes fixed on my shaking form with a hunger that is almost holy.
Seeing me like this—broken, screaming, insane with grief—it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.
He stops a foot away. He doesn’t reach down to comfort me. He doesn’t offer a hand. He just stands there, looming over me, his shadow swallowing my small, broken body.
“Look at them, Hallow,” he rasps, his voice a low, vibrating growl that cuts through my sobbing. “Look at the world you just destroyed. You didn’t just kill him. You killed the lie.”
He reaches out, his gloved fingers tangling in my wet, matted hair, forcing my head back so I have to look up into his dark, blown-out eyes. He’s hard, his pulse visible in the vein of his neck, his entire body thrumming with the high-voltage thrill of my collapse.
“You’re finally empty,” he whispers, leaning down until his lips are brushing against my forehead. “And now, I get to fill the space where he used to be.”
I’m on my knees, the broken glass of the bridge biting into my skin, but I can’t feel it.
All I feel is the hollowed-out cavern where my heart used to be.
The PA mic is still in my hand, heavy as a lead weight, broadcasting the wet, jagged hitch of my breath to the hundreds of strangers watching us from their cars.
I look up at Jex. He’s a dark monolith against the moon, his shadow stretching over me like a shroud.
“He told me…” I whisper, the words catching in a throat raw from screaming.
A single, fat tear tracks through the soot and salt on my cheek, dripping onto the cold asphalt.
“He told me that if I was a good girl and stayed quiet, he’d love me forever.
I stayed quiet for ten years, Jex. I stayed so quiet I forgot what my own voice sounded like. ”
I let out a broken, hollowing sob that vibrates through the speakers, making the people in the front row of cars flinch.
“And he still didn’t love me. He just liked the silence.”
The world stops. The wind dies down. Even the sirens in the distance seem to fade into a dull hum.
Jex doesn’t move. He just stares down at me, his eyes two dark voids reflecting the flickering hazard lights.
For a second, I think he’s going to let me drown in it.
I think he’s going to leave me here in the shards of my own history.
His chest is heaving, his jaw set so tight I can hear the bone grind.
He’s vibrating with a dark, kinetic energy, his entire body thrumming with the high-voltage thrill of my absolute, agonising collapse.
Then, he moves.
It’s not a comfort. It’s an acquisition.
He lunges forward, his gloved hand snapping out to catch me by the throat.
He doesn’t squeeze to kill, but he grips me with a terrifying, possessive force that shocks the air right out of my lungs.
He hauls me up off my knees until I’m flush against the cold metal of the ambulance, my toes barely touching the ground.
And then he destroys me with a kiss.