Chapter Fifty-Seven
Rheda
I wake with my thighs locked tight and grief already sitting in my chest like something alive.
The truth reaches me before consciousness fully does.
He dies in five hours.
For a few seconds, I stay completely still beneath the sheets, staring up at the ceiling as though refusing to move might stop time from moving with me. Morning light bleeds weakly through the curtains, colourless and thin, washing the room into something pale and already dead.
My throat aches.
There’s a taste in my mouth I can’t swallow away. Metal. Salt. Like I’ve been crying in my sleep hard enough for it to reach my tongue.
Five hours.
The number keeps landing wrong.
Too small.
Too close.
My chest tightens so violently around it that I have to drag in air carefully through my nose. The sound of the city outside continues anyway. Cars somewhere distant. A door slamming. Someone laughing far below my window.
The world is still moving. That feels unbearable.
Because somewhere beneath concrete and steel and fluorescent lights, he is still alive right now. Breathing. Thinking. Existing. And by tonight—
My stomach twists so hard I press a hand against it instinctively.
No.
I squeeze my eyes shut.
No no no.
The grief arrives in ugly waves after that. It feels animalistic and wrong. A panic so deep my body doesn’t know where to put it. Every thought of him drags something raw open inside me all over again.
I see his face behind my eyelids immediately. The shadows beneath his eyes. The shape of his mouth when he almost smiles. The terrifying stillness of him when he looks at me like I am the only thing in the room worth ruining.
It will all be gone.
I roll onto my side too quickly, curling inward around the pain. The sheets twist around my legs. My ribs hurt. Everything throbs.
I don’t realise tears are sliding into my hair until one reaches my ear.
Five hours.
And I cannot survive the thought of the world continuing without him in it.
BY THE TIME I STEP inside the facility, my pulse is already too high. Security buzzes me through. Doors seal behind me with heavy mechanical clicks that land somewhere deep in my spine. And the feeling gets worse.
Peter’s already by the door, file in hand, eyes glued to his watch. When he sees me, his face tightens. I stumble toward him quickly.
“Peter,” I move so quickly my badge swings against my chest with a loud thud. “We can’t do this. This is illegal. It’s wrong—”
“Rheda,” Peter says quietly, stepping closer before the others can properly hear. “Don’t make this worse.”
My breathing is already uneven. “It’s too soon.”
“It’s done.” His voice stays maddeningly level. His eyes flick over me properly then.
I didn’t pin my hair back this morning. It hangs loose around my shoulders in dark, uneven waves, still damp at the ends where I gave up trying to dry it halfway through.
I’m dressed entirely in black. Black jumper.
Black trousers. Even my coat folded over my arm looks funeral-like beneath the fluorescent lights.
“You look guilty.” He says sharply.
My throat burns.
“I don’t care how I look.” The sentence comes out thin. “You cannot seriously stand there and tell me this is ethical.”
“Lower your voice.”
“No.” My eyes sting instantly. “No, you don’t get to tell me to calm down while Harris stands in there preparing to poison someone.”
At the mention of his name, Peter’s gaze flicks sharply past me. I turn instinctively. Harris is already watching us from across the room. Latex gloves. Vial tray. Clinical white sleeves rolled neatly to his wrists.
Peter steps slightly closer, blocking part of the view between us. “He’s already concerned about you. You’re not helping yourself.”
A horrible laugh almost leaves me.
“Good,” I whisper. “Maybe he should be. I’m the only one sane enough to question this fucking thing,”
Peter’s jaw tightens hard enough that I see the muscle jump.
“Listen to me.” His voice lowers further. “Whatever this is, you need to get control of it now.”
I look past him toward the interrogation room again automatically, helplessly, like my body no longer understands how to orient itself away from Deogal.
“He shouldn’t die like this.”
Peter exhales slowly through his nose. “That stopped being your decision the second you signed the recommendation.”
The words hit like blunt force trauma. I physically flinch.
“Pull yourself together.” He snaps. “Do not embarrass me in front Headquarters.”
I swallow hard but the liquid gets trapped there. My fingers move quickly to my throat, and I press it like I manually dislodge the ache.
Harris looks straight at me, those black eyes never twinkling once. His lips stay thin. He doesn’t smile at me. And I don’t bother looking friendly in return.
“We’re ready.” He says, and now I finally see it...the flick of his lip. The bastard reeks of smugness.
And something inside me starts screaming long before my mouth does.
I hate it. I want to scream and kick and swear.
I want to drag Peter from the room and plead some sense into him, that Harris is evil and sentencing Deogal to death means we are no better than those who have already hurt him—but he’s already moving.
His fingers catch my jumper, curl sharply around my arm.
He yanks me with him, and I’m forced to follow behind.
We stumble through the doors into the interrogation room. The air is fucking devastating in here. Stale. Already chewed up and spat out. The heat is already too much, and I feel stifled beneath my jumper.
Peter drags me next to him like he doesn’t trust me to move by myself, and I stumble into place.
My eyes find Deogal immediately. I reach for him with the same shame as touching a bruise just to feel it hurt again. His eyes are locked on the floor; he doesn’t show us if he has noticed our presence.
The chains are tight across his body, drawn hard enough that they should dominate the image of him, should define him, should reduce him into something contained and manageable. But they don’t. He sits with the same impossible stillness. Nothing’s changed, and yet everything is about to.
I keep looking until my eyes ache. Until the muscles start throbbing.
And only then does he finally move. His head lifts slowly and the motion drags through me with horrible precision.
His gaze catches first on the floor beside my boots before climbing higher in no hurry whatsoever, over my legs, my stomach, my chest, until it finally settles into mine.
Heat tears through me in one brutal sweep, sharp enough to feel invasive.
My thighs lock instinctively beneath the table.
I feel my pulse everywhere at once. In my throat.
Between my ribs. Low in my stomach where something humiliating twists hard enough to ache.
He doesn’t look afraid. That’s the worst part.
There’s no panic, or bargaining. Nothing in him resembles a man about to die.
I hold his gaze anyway even though every second of it feels dangerous now.
Around us, the rest of the room continues in blurred fragments that no longer connect properly in my head.
Papers shifting. Fabric pulling tight as someone crosses their arms. The dull electrical hum from the monitors vibrating through the walls.
Harris speaking somewhere to my left in that flat administrative tone they train into people before they let them oversee death.
None of it feels fully real anymore.
It feels distant.
Like the room has started separating from me in thin invisible layers while I stay trapped at the centre of it with him.
My mouth has gone dry enough to hurt.
I can still feel his eyes on me.
Harris keeps talking. The words drag together into meaningless sound for several seconds before one sentence finally forces its way through the fog and lands hard enough to make my stomach turn. “...sentenced to death, effective immediately.”
The room doesn’t react.
But something inside me does.
Air catches halfway in, sharp enough to hurt, and suddenly I can’t swallow. It reacts like they have announced they are about to cut a limb from me.
He turns to Peter, who nods his approval.
My lips part to protest, but the sound is suddenly stolen from my lips. I blink hard but time seems to move faster.
Harris is now moving.
My stomach drops so violently I grip the table to stay upright. Peter’s grip around my wrist tightens. It stings viciously like he’s drawing blood, like he’s straining the bone, but the pain feels delayed like it’s already an old wound.
I’m watching Harris placing the tray on the table next to Deogal.
He selects a needle with brutal slowness like he’s dragging out the moment, before taking a vial in the palm of his hand.
He lets it roll side to side and the liquid sloshes, thick and pale, clinging to the sides of the glass before settling again.
My eyes lock onto it so completely it feels like my body has forgotten how to do anything else. I can’t blink. I can’t swallow. I just stare.
“Any last words?” Harris holds the needle in front of Deogal’s face like a taunt.
My body seizes up so sharply it feels like fury.
Deogal doesn’t react, and it’s worse than if he did. He remains perfectly still like he’s frozen in time. I can’t seem to force the same calmness through me.
Everything narrows. The room blurs slightly at the edges. The sound shifts with it, voices stretching slightly, distorting, as though they’re arriving just behind where they should.
Harris slides the needle through the seal in the vial. The sound lands somewhere deep inside me like a rupture. His hand strikes out to angle Deogal’s head properly.
My throat closes.
I can’t—
God.
He’s going to touch him.
“Wait,” I say.
But nobody hears me. Or they do, and it doesn’t matter.
“Wait, wait, wait—” My voice is too high now, stripped of anything professional.
This is madness. Career-ending, life-ending.
But my chest pulls tight.
His fingers find Deogal’s neck and he presses lightly like he’s checking for a pulse.
No.
No, give it to me.
The thought comes so violently I almost say it out loud.
Give it to me instead.
My fingers twitch against the table.
I press my palm down harder, like I can pin the impulse there, force it back into something rational.
Harris raises the needle high, and flicks it with a taunting movement. Droplets jump from the tip of the needle, landing flat on the Deogal’s thigh. The orange jumpsuit darkens immediately under the poison.
I choke.
Grief drags it’s nails down my heart.
Please.
Not him.
Not him
The needle is angled by his neck and—I don’t decide to move. My body breaks rank.
My hand meets Harris’ wrist before I know it’s happening. I tear it from him with a sound I don’t recognise as mine, our hands colliding in a clumsy, desperate struggle.
Everything fractures.
My fingers snatch around the injection and I snatch it fast. I move quickly.
The needle punches into him. Flesh gives with a wet little surrender that shoots straight through me.
I feel it in my wrist. In my teeth. In the sick, hot place under my ribs that realises too late I wanted to hurt something.
My hand tightens instinctively, pushing the plunger down in one uncontrolled movement, emptying it into him without a thought.
For a second, everything seems to stop with it, like the room itself has missed a heartbeat. I can still feel the resistance of the needle under my hand, the awful softness of skin giving way, the intimate wrongness of it.
He gasps. The sound rips through the room, his body jolting back violently as the syringe slips from my grip and hits the floor with a sharp shatter.
Relief tears through me so brutally my head spins. For one glorified fucking second, I can breathe again. My head feels a stone lighter. My ribs stop their violent seizing.
And then—hands hit me all at once. Fingers dig into my arms, my shoulders, my waist—grabbing, dragging, claiming. My body jerks backward so violently my shoes lose purchase against the floor, and then suddenly I am weightless.
Someone shouts my name.
Someone else swears.
Fabric pulls tight across my throat. My badge snaps against my chest. Nails scrape skin. A hand clamps around my wrist so hard my fingers go numb, and humiliation burns through the panic because my first instinct—the first filthy, traitorous instinct—is not fear.
It’s that none of them are him.
I twist against them anyway, frantic, desperate, every nerve in me screaming toward the one person I should be running from. My pulse is a living thing now, violent and wet, hammering between my ribs like it wants out. My lungs won’t fill properly. I drag air in and get almost nothing.
My head turns. I find him. He watches me like I have done something beautiful for him. And I breathe it all in.
Cold slides under my skin so fast it feels like my blood turns to needles. And then—metal. It slams into me all at once.
Chains bite hard enough to drag a sound out of me, and when I look down, my mind refuses the shape of them. They are not being placed on me. They are already there. Layered around my ribs, locked around my wrists, sunk into bruises that have yellowed at the edges. Old pain. Old metal.
I pull once, and the pain answers too quickly. I pull again, harder this time, desperate, and the pain flares properly, sharp enough to confirm it, sharp enough to ground it.
“No—”
The chain snaps taut.
“Hold her!”
“I said hold—”
“What the fuck!” The scream rips itself raw out of my throat. “Get them off me!”
My shoulder collides with stone hard enough to burst white across my vision, but it barely registers. I fight harder, wild now. Nails clawing at sleeves and skin and metal while somebody tries to pin my arms behind my back.
A hand fists into my hair. Pain tears across my scalp.
I twist on instinct and my teeth catch flesh. Then another force hits me.
A fist.
Blistering across my cheek and the crack rings through my skull.
For one strange second, everything pauses. The room tilts violently sideways. Fluorescent light smears gold across stone. My body loses itself somewhere beneath me.
I taste blood. Heat spills down my chin.
And then the floor rushes upward too fast for me to stop it.
Darkness folds over me whole.