CHAPTER TWENTY
I don’t wait for permission.
I don’t dress.
I don’t even breathe.
I just run.
Back through the hallway barefoot and bare, cold air biting at my skin, shame trailing behind me like a ghost I can’t shake.
My body still hums from what I’d done, but my chest feels hollow, cracked wide open by one phrase. One nickname.
My rose.
I slam the door behind me and drop to the floor, my back sliding down the wood until I hit the cold marble tile. I fold in on myself, arms wrapped tight around my knees, my skin prickling with leftover heat and new confusion.
I will be punished for this.
I know that.
For leaving without permission.
For running.
For showing weakness.
The certainty of it sits heavy in my chest, familiar in a way that makes it almost easier to breathe.
Because consequences make sense.
Rules make sense.
Order makes sense.
Uncertainty doesn’t.
And right now, all I feel is the space between what I did… and what comes next.
Unlike this.
Why did he call me that?
The name still lingers like a sound I can’t shake, too soft to feel like a command and too familiar to feel like a mistake.
Starling Pierce—the girl who was kidnapped, broken, and remade—wasn’t supposed to exist anymore. I buried her beneath Daya Montgomery. I stripped her down and built someone else in her place. Stronger. Quieter. Controlled.
And yet that name doesn’t belong to either of them.
It belongs to something older. Something half-forgotten. Something I can’t quite reach no matter how hard I try to place it in time.
But he said it.
Not by accident. Not a slip.
He knew.
My skin crawls.
I press my forehead against my knees and try to breathe, but the air in this room feels too sharp and too thin at the same time—like it is slicing through me instead of filling my lungs.
He said that name like a man I craved for said my name.
I changed everything about myself after leaving the compound—my hair, posture, voice, even the way I walked. I gave up Starling and anything that came with it so I could survive as Daya.
I folded her into a past tense, locked her in a corner of my mind and told myself she was better off dead.
I lift my head slowly, my heart pounding like it is trying to break through my ribs. The room is dim, but the corners stretch with shadows that feel deeper than usual. The silence pulses around me, and every creak of the house settles like a whisper against my skin.
I should’ve stayed. Should’ve stood my ground and demanded to know why he said that—why he used that name in that voice. Low. Certain. Almost absolute.
But I ran. Like prey. Like a girl with something to hide.
And maybe that’s what I am.
I pause there—still naked, still shaking, still not fully steady—and move toward the bed instead of standing frozen in place. I wrap it around myself like armor, like fabric could protect me from the memory he dragged up with a single word.
I need to know who he is behind that mask. What else he knows. What he wants.
I can’t ask him—not yet. Not like this. If I let him see how deeply that name cuts me, he’d use it. Weaponize it. Twist it around my throat like a leash.
But maybe…maybe he’s already been doing that.
I turn to the corner of my room where I keep my journal from after the compound. The one that still has notes and names from before. The one that could get me killed if it got in the wrong hands.
I retrieve it, fingers trembling, and flip through pages. Memories and warnings bleed together in looping ink.
Shoomaker. Dinah PD. Raid date: May 12
Alias chosen: Daya Montgomery
Known threats: Silas Hirsh (deceased), Tomas Raines (escaped).
I pause.
There was one name I’d never found a file on. One man whose face I never once saw clearly—only traces of him that never resolved into anything real. A figure on a porch too far away to trust, a presence behind tinted glass, grainy footage where even movement felt uncertain.
And every time he appeared in my world, he was the same.
Always behind a porcelain mask.
Never unmasked. Never human in any way I could confirm. Just that presence—controlled, unreadable, reduced to shape and silence—like he existed only to stay just out of reach.
The Warden. Unknown name.
The one above the Benefactor. Above Hirsh. The one who funded it all.
The one who never got caught.
I sink onto the floor again, notebook in my lap, the blanket still clutched to my chest like it can hold me together against what my mind is trying to assemble from too many broken pieces.
Because it isn’t just the hierarchy that lands.
It’s the pattern.
The way everything I’ve survived keeps pointing back upward. Not outward. Not away.
Up.
And for the first time, I stop asking who he is…and start wondering how long he has been close enough to know me.