Chapter 31
Chapter
Thirty-One
JEX
The grand foyer of the mansion smells like lilies and old money—a scent I’m about to drown in gasoline.
The heavy oak doors didn’t just open; we tore them off the hinges.
Now, the silence inside is the kind that happens right before a lightning strike.
Crystal chandeliers shiver overhead as the roar of the city’s destruction bleeds in through the shattered entryway.
The marble floor is a mirror, reflecting three shadows that Oakhaven thought it had buried in the salt.
I keep my hand on the small of Hallow’s back, feeling the frantic, jagged heat of her skin through the heavy coat. She’s vibrating. Not with fear—I know fear, and this isn’t it. This is the tension of a predator that finally has the scent of the kill.
“Upstairs,” I growl, my voice echoing off the vaulted ceiling. “The ballroom. I can hear the cowards breathing from here.”
“Wait,” Hallow whispers.
She stops at the base of the twin winding staircases.
Her eyes are fixed on the massive oil painting hanging above the first landing.
It’s the ‘Official Family Portrait’ from five years ago.
There’s Dad, looking like a saint in a charcoal suit.
There’s Ryker and me, the dutiful sons, masks of stoicism hiding the rot.
And there’s Hallow. She’s wearing a white lace dress that cost more than most people make in a decade—a dress that was meant to make her look pure even as she was being auctioned off.
Hallow walks toward it. She doesn’t hesitate. She raises the serrated blade and drags it across the canvas, right through our father’s throat, then down through her own white-lace heart. The sound of the fabric tearing is the loudest thing in the house.
“Better,” she murmurs, the jagged edge of the knife dripping with a bit of the Treasurer’s blood she hadn’t wiped off yet.
“Focus, Hallow,” Ryker says, his voice a cold, sharp snap. He’s already halfway up the stairs, his boots leaving soot-black prints on the cream-coloured carpet. “The guard will have locked the double doors. They’ll be armed.”
“Let them be armed,” I say, stepping up beside her and taking her hand. My knuckles are bruised, my pulse thrumming in my ears. “It’s more fun when they think they have a chance.”
We reach the top landing. The music is playing—some classical bullshit, Mozart or Vivaldi, meant to keep the panic at bay while the world burns outside. It’s coming from behind the massive gold-leaf doors of the ballroom.
I look at Ryker. He nods once. I look at Hallow. She licks her lips, her eyes dark, twin voids of vengeance.
I don’t use my shoulder. I don’t use a battering ram. I lift my boot and kick the centre of the gold-leaf doors with every ounce of the rage I’ve been hoarding since I was a boy. The locks snap. The doors fly inward, hitting the interior walls with a deafening boom that cuts the music dead.
The ballroom is a sea of silk and tuxedos. The “High Council” of Oakhaven—the men who signed the checks and the women who wore the diamonds bought with our blood—are huddled in the centre of the room. Their private security team, maybe six of them, scramble to raise their weapons.
I don’t give them the second.
I slide my sidearm from its holster and fire. Two shots. The lead guard’s head snaps back, his blood spraying across a woman’s pale blue evening gown. She screams—a high, piercing sound that harmonises perfectly with the chaos outside.
“Nobody moves!” I roar, the sound tearing from my throat.
Ryker steps into the light, his face uncovered, his expression as frozen and lethal as a winter morning. Hallow walks between us, the black coat falling open to reveal the blood-stained girl underneath.
The Council members shrink back, their faces pale masks of horror. They recognise us. They recognise the ghosts they created.
“The party’s over,” Hallow says, stepping over the twitching body of the guard. She raises her blade, pointing it at the woman in the blue dress—the wife of the man who ran the ‘procurement’ wing of the clinic. “But don’t worry. We brought our own music.”
The ballroom is a cathedral of glass and terror, the air suddenly thick with the smell of expensive perfume and fresh, copper-scented spray.
The woman in the blue gown is hyperventilating, her hands clutching her throat as she stares at the guard’s brain matter sliding down the gold-flaked wallpaper.
“Please,” a man stammers—the City Magistrate, a man who once patted me on the back while discussing ‘inventory’ over brandy. “We can negotiate. We didn’t know the clinic had gone this far—”
“You knew exactly how far it went,” Ryker interrupts, his voice a low, terrifying hum. He moves toward the magistrate with the grace of a scalpel. He doesn’t shoot him. He grabs the man by his silk tie and slams his head into the grand piano. The ivory keys let out a discordant, crashing jar.
Ryker grabs a heavy crystal decanter from a nearby table and smashes it over the man’s skull.
Shards of glass and aged whiskey spray everywhere, mixing with the blood pouring from the magistrate’s scalp.
Ryker doesn’t stop. He picks up a jagged piece of the crystal and begins to methodically carve a ‘C’ for Choir into the man’s cheek while he’s still conscious and screaming.
“Hallow,” I growl, feeling the heat in my gut rising. “The woman in blue. She’s all yours.”
Hallow walks toward her, the serrated blade dragging along the marble floor with a rhythmic, screeching hiss.
The woman falls to her knees, sobbing, her diamonds clicking against the floor.
Hallow reaches out, her fingers—still stained with our father’s life—grabbing the woman’s perfectly coiffed hair.
She yanks the woman’s head back and leans in close.
“You wore these diamonds to my ‘coming out’ party,” Hallow whispers, her voice a jagged caress. “Do you remember? I was bleeding under my dress while you toasted to my health.”
Hallow doesn’t slit her throat. She drives the serrated blade into the woman’s shoulder, twisting it until she hears the wet pop of the joint.
The woman’s scream is a raw, guttural thing that fills the ballroom.
Hallow pulls the knife out and starts to methodically slice the silk dress away, carving thin, shallow lines into the woman’s skin, painting her in her own blood until she looks as wrecked as Hallow felt on that gurney.
I turn my attention to the remaining guards.
They’re shaking, their training failing them as they realise they aren’t fighting men—they’re fighting the physical manifestation of the city’s sins.
I move like a blur, my combat knife finding the soft underbelly of the nearest guard.
I gut him upward, feeling the heat of his entrails spill over my hands. It’s slick, steaming, and beautiful.
I grab the next one by the throat, hoisting him up and slamming him onto the buffet table.
I shove his face into a silver platter of oysters, then grab a heavy carving fork and drive it through his hand, pinning him to the mahogany table.
He howls, his blood dripping into the expensive hors d’oeuvres.
“Look at them, Ryker!” I shout, my face splattered with red. “Look at the elite!”
Ryker is standing over the magistrate, who is now a whimpering, faceless mess on the floor. Ryker looks up, his eyes cold and dark. He walks over to the heavy velvet curtains and rips the gold-tasseled cord away.
He walks to the centre of the room where the chandelier’s winch is located.
“Jex,” Ryker says, his voice devoid of any humanity. “Help me hang the Magistrate from his own house. I want the people outside to see him swinging against the fire.”
I grab the half-dead man by his collar and drag him toward the centre of the room.
We loop the gold cord around his neck, the silk biting into his throat.
I kick the winch release. The magistrate is jerked upward, his feet kicking frantically against the air, his face turning a deep, bruised purple as he’s hoisted toward the crystal lights.
The remaining Council members are catatonic, some vomiting on their shoes, others praying to a god who left Oakhaven an hour ago.
Hallow stands in the middle of the carnage, her white skin almost entirely hidden by the red spray. she looks at the swinging body, then at the terrified survivors. She raises her blade, licking a streak of blood from the serrated edge, her eyes glowing with a sick, ecstatic light.
“Who’s next?” she asks, her voice a sweet, deadly sing-song. “The night is still young, and we have so many more sins to pay for.”
The Magistrate’s heels drum a frantic, dying rhythm against the mahogany belly of the grand piano as he swings.
Each kick sends a fresh spray of blood from his carved face, speckling the ivory keys like a sick piece of sheet music.
Above the wet, choking sounds of his execution, the room is a vacuum of horror.
“Stop… please…” a voice whimpers.
It’s the High Priestess of the Cathedral we just levelled—a woman whose hands have blessed every child in this city. She’s huddled under a table, her lace habit soaked in the bile of the man dying next to her.
Hallow stops. She doesn’t look at the woman.
She looks at her own hands, then at the Magistrate.
She walks over to the piano, sitting on the bench directly beneath his dangling, twitching feet.
A drop of his blood falls, landing right on her forehead, sliding down the bridge of her nose like a crimson tear.
She begins to play.
It’s a simple, haunting lullaby—the one our mother used to hum before the “Clinic” took her, too. The notes are clashing and broken because the Magistrate’s feet keep hitting the high strings, creating a discordant, jarring thud-thud-thud against the melody.
“Do you remember this one, Father Peter?” Hallow asks, her voice devoid of its rage, replaced by a hollow, terrifying sweetness. “You sang it to me while they prepped the lasers for my skin. You told me it was the sound of angels.”
She hits a sharp, violent chord.
“I didn’t see any angels,” she whispers. “I just saw you holding the tray of scalpels.”
I move toward the huddle of survivors. I don’t want to shoot them.
I want them to feel the weight of what they’ve done.
I grab a young man—maybe twenty, a Council legacy—by the back of his neck and drag him toward the centre of the room.
He’s sobbing so hard he can’t breathe, his expensive loafers sliding through the slick gore on the floor.
“Look at her!” I roar, shoving his face toward Hallow as she plays her death-song. “Look at what you paid for! You wanted a pure city? You wanted a perfect bloodline? This is the cost!”
I shove him down onto his knees and force his hands into the pool of blood spreading from the guard I gutted. I want him to feel the cooling heat of it. I want it under his fingernails.
“Rub it in,” I hiss, leaning over him, my breath hot against his ear. “It’s your inheritance. Don’t let a drop go to waste.”
Ryker, meanwhile, has found the ‘Record of Sales’—the heavy, leather-bound ledger kept in the wall safe. He walks to the centre of the ballroom, the book open in his hands. He begins to read the names aloud, his voice a steady, rhythmic tolling of a funeral bell.
“Entry 402: Hallow. Sold to the Magistrate for ‘experimental refinement.’ Price: Two million. Witnessed by the High Priestess.”
Every time he reads a name, he walks to the corresponding person in the room and draws a shallow, horizontal line across their throat with a scalpel—not deep enough to kill, just enough to let them feel the bite of the steel.
“You aren’t people anymore,” Ryker says, his eyes landing on the Priestess. “You’re ledger entries. And the debt is being settled in cash.”
He reaches into the ledger, pulls out a stack of high-denomination bills, and stuffs them into the Priestess’s mouth until she’s gagging on the paper.
“Eat it,” he commands, his voice a cold, dead vacuum. “It’s what you traded her for. Choke on the profit.”
Hallow’s playing becomes faster, more frantic. The Magistrate’s kicks are slowing down now, the rhythmic thud against the piano becoming a faint, wet tap. She leans forward, her forehead touching the blood-slicked wood of the piano, her shoulders shaking.
“I can still feel the cold of the table,” she sobs, the music finally breaking into a mess of smashed keys. “Every time any of you touched me, I died. I’ve died a thousand times in this room.”
She stands up, the serrated blade trembling in her hand.
She walks to the Priestess, who is trying to spit out the blood-soaked money.
Hallow doesn’t use the knife. She leans down and wraps her arms around the woman in a mock-embrace, a terrifyingly human gesture that makes the Priestess freeze in hope.
“I forgive you,” Hallow whispers into her ear.
Then, with a sickening, wet crunch, Hallow drives the blade through the woman’s back, the serrated edge catching on the spine. She holds the woman tight, feeling the final, frantic heartbeat against her own chest, swaying slowly to the silence of the room.
“I forgive you,” Hallow repeats, her voice breaking. “But the Choir doesn’t.”
She lets the body go. It falls like a sack of wet laundry. Hallow stands over her, the grey ash from the window settling on the red mess of her hair. She looks at us—at Ryker and me—and for the first time, the fire in her eyes is gone, replaced by a devastating, soul-crushing exhaustion.
“Is it enough?” she asks, her voice a tiny, wounded thing. “Does the world feel better now?”
I look at the bodies, the hanging Magistrate, the blood-soaked money, and the burning city outside.
“No,” I say, stepping over a corpse to take her hand. “But it’s finally honest.”