Chapter Fifty-Eight
Rheda
I come back to myself in pieces, not cleanly, not like waking, but something is shocking me in various limbs. I know something is wrong before I even open my eyes.
The pressure is the first thing. Around my wrists, across my chest, tight against my ankles, high at my throat where something cold keeps my chin lifted no matter how badly my body wants to curl away from the light.
For a few seconds, I don’t understand it.
My mind reaches stupidly for the bedroom, for tangled sheets and weak morning light and the damp heat of my own skin after him, but the thought collapses as soon as I try to move.
Metal answers.
Pain sparks cleanly around both wrists.
My eyes fly open and I wince as a stinging pain rocks through my eye socket. My vision throbs painfully.
The interrogation room sits around me in a hard white blur, too bright, too sterile, the ceiling lights flattening everything into the same awful colour.
I blink once, twice, trying to make the room correct itself, trying to find the angle that makes this make sense.
The table. The glass. The observation suite beyond it.
I find Peter’s shape behind the window. Mike beside him. Sean half-hidden by the monitors.
Everything is where it should be.
Except me.
The realisation lands slowly at first, then all at once, like a sickness turning over inside me.
I am not behind the glass.
I am in the chair.
Deogal’s chair.
My gaze drops.
Orange clings to my skin like shame, and for a few long seconds I can only stare at it, because my brain refuses to catch up, refuses to make sense of what my eyes are seeing.
These aren’t my clothes.
Wait—my badge is gone.
I reach for it anyway and something catches my attention.
There’s dried blood beneath one of my fingernails.
I stare at it stupidly.
A tiny dark crescent trapped against skin.
My chest tightens so violently I stop breathing for a second because I don’t know whose blood it is.
Harris.
My brain supplies the name immediately and my body reacts before thought catches up, pulse kicking violently, heat crawling under my skin so fast it feels like panic trying to become sickness.
I scrub my thumb against the stain instinctively, frantic, but the restraints jerk me short before I can reach it properly.
Behind the glass, Peter moves forward. I tear my gaze upward. I realise suddenly that I can see him behind the glass.
That the glass is transparent.
Not one-way.
What?
My stomach heaves.
“Rheda,” Peter says through the speaker. My name sounds wrong coming from above me.
“Peter, get me out of here,” I say, my voice coming out too thin, too hoarse. I pull at the restraints again like they might finally give way.
He doesn’t answer straight away and that silence does more damage than anything else could have. I watch him glance once toward Mike, then back to me, and something in my chest starts to fold in on itself.
“You need to stay calm,” he says.
“No.” My throat tightens instantly. “No, don’t do that. Don’t speak to me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m him.”
His jaw moves once.
The room hums loudly but my pulse goes harder. “Let me out. I’m not supposed to be here.”
Peter inhales slowly through his nose like he is steadying himself before approaching a wounded animal. “You suffered a psychiatric event during Harris’s procedure—”
“Stop.” My voice breaks sharply. “No, I—”
The restraints cut into my wrists.
“Let me go, Peter. Please.” My voice cracks badly on the last word. “Just let me out. I don’t know what’s going on.”
“I didn’t mean to kill Harris,” I say suddenly. The words spill out too quickly once they start. “It was an accident. I swear to God, Peter, I didn’t mean to hurt him. I just—I thought...” My throat closes hard around the memory of the injection. “I thought you were going to kill him.”
Peter stays silent.
“I know what it looks like.” Tears burn hot behind my eyes now. “But I didn’t want Harris dead. I didn’t. You know me.”
“I know,” he says quietly.
Relief nearly caves my chest in. For one pathetic second, I think he believes me. Think maybe this can still be fixed if I explain it properly enough, if I can just make him understand that I’m innocent.
He inhales slowly. “And the others?”
My breathing stops. The room stills around me.
“What?”
He leans forward over the monitors. “The others, Rheda.”
“What others?”
“The other people you killed.” He says it slowly like he can force the meaning through my mind.
“I didn’t kill anyone—” my chest seizes. “Peter, this is ridiculous. Let me out!”
He watches me carefully now, like he’s deciding how much truth I can survive. “The wounds matched in all of them.”
My stomach tightens.
“All four victims had penetration trauma directly through the sternum.” His eyes stay fixed on mine. “The pathologist said whoever did it knew exactly how much pressure it took to split cartilage without shattering bone.”
I gag.
Peter swallows once. “You violated their hearts, Rheda.”
My pulse stops.
“Why?”
“Peter, I didn’t—”
His voice turns low, raw. “Why would you kill a doctor?”
“Peter—”
His gaze sharpens. “A librarian,”
My heart pounds violently. I pull against the restraints as the panic claws its way up my throat. “I didn’t—”
His eyebrows furrow together. “A priest? Why a priest? What do they have to do with the others?”
The accusation lands so hard my lungs stop expanding properly. For one sick flash, something wet and red flickers through my mind. A scream cut ragged from a man’s throat. Blood beneath fingernails. Strips of something pale hanging from trembling fingers.
I gag so hard my stomach cramps around it. Acid burns the back of my throat.
“No.” The word tears out of me wetly. “No, it wasn’t me. It was him. It was Deogal.”
Peter’s face changes. He’s about to say something, but gets interrupted.
“Stop.” Sean’s voice detonates through the speaker hard enough to make me flinch violently against the restraints. Static shrieks afterwards. “Just stop saying his fucking name.”
My pulse jumps so hard it hurts.
Sean shoves forward behind the glass so abruptly Mike catches at his arm on instinct. Papers scatter across the desk beside them. Coffee rocks dangerously close to the edge.
“We’ve heard enough about Deogal,” Sean spits. “Enough about your fucking obsession.”
I recoil instinctively. The restraint at my throat digs deeper.
“Sean,” Mike says sharply, reaching again, but Sean tears himself free with enough force to slam the chair backwards behind him.
“No.” His face is red now. Veins standing out hard beneath his skin. “No, I’m sick of this. I’m sick of all of us standing here pretending this is normal.”
His hand snatches the microphone off the desk so hard the wire jerks taut. Feedback screams through the room. I flinch again, breathing harder now, every sound suddenly too loud against my skull.
“You’ve been deteriorating for weeks, Rheda.” His voice shakes with something uglier than anger now. “Weeks. You stopped sleeping. You started talking to empty fucking rooms. You’d sit in observation for hours staring at that chair like somebody was sitting there.”
My stomach folds violently.
“No,” I whisper instantly. “No, that’s not true.”
Sean laughs once, sharp and disbelieving. It makes my skin crawl. “You really believe it, don’t you?”
His gaze snaps back to the others. “This is why this must end.”
“I’m not lying,” I choke out. “You saw him. All of you saw him.”
My heart pounds so loudly the room spins. Because suddenly I can hear myself. Hear the way I sound. Breathless. Desperate. Half-hysterical.
Insane.
“He was here!” I rush. “He is real!”
Sean slams his palm flat against the desk so hard the sound cracks through the speaker. “There was nobody there!”
The scream punches straight through my chest.
My body jerks violently against the restraints before I can stop it. Metal bites deep into my wrists. Pain sparks hot up both arms but panic is already flooding me too fast to care.
“No.”
I’m shaking now. Actually shaking. My teeth knock together hard enough to hurt. “No, no, no, Sean, stop—”
“Enough.” Mike’s voice breaks badly. “Enough, man.”
But Sean’s eyes stay locked on me like he’s looking at something rotten. “You butchered four people.”
I scream. The sound rips itself out of me raw enough to burn my throat open. My whole body convulses against the chair. The restraints shriek under the force of it.
“She needs to know the truth!” Sean spits.
“But Peter said—” Mike starts weakly.
“I don’t give a fuck what Peter said!” Sean roars. Spit flashes from his mouth. “This has gone too far. She’s gone too far.”
“Enough!” Peter’s voice explodes through the speaker system hard enough to rattle the glass. The feedback screams afterwards in long violent bursts that stab straight through my skull.
Silence crashes down after it.
Peter braces both hands against the desk. His head lowers for a second like the weight of it all is physically crushing him. When he finally looks up again, his eyes find mine immediately.
I stop breathing. Because I know that look. I’ve seen it before. Doctors give it to terminal patients before they tell them there’s nothing left to save.
“Sean’s right,” Peter says quietly. The sentence slides into me so slowly I feel every piece of it cutting on the way down.
My mouth parts soundlessly.
“No,” I whisper.
“This has gone on too long.” His voice roughens slightly. “Far too long.”
“Peter?” My voice breaks apart around his name.
He drags a hand slowly down his face. His wedding ring catches the light briefly before disappearing again. When his hand drops, something in him looks colder.
“You built this case around the murders.” The words hit like blunt force trauma.
“We went along with it at first because we thought if we contained the delusion, eventually you’d break or confess.” He swallows hard. “You made him silent in the beginning. That made it easier.”
I stare at him.
My pulse is so violent now I can barely hear properly around it.
“You wrote him into the system, Rheda.”
My breathing turns shallow instantly.
“No.”