Chapter 4
Butterfly Man
Centered. Displayed. Perfect symmetry. I step back and let myself see it. My creation.
From this angle, I can see where fear sharpens her cheekbones, where defiance tightens her mouth.
The body tells truths the mouth never will.
Every direction accounted for. Every impulse answered before it’s born.
A body translated into intention. When she moves, the movement stops inside her, collapses inward, turns into breath and sound instead of action.
The light paints her exactly how I want her. Pins gleam at shoulder, hip, ankle. The table is an altar, the straps a frame. The pins are not cruelty; they are punctuation, the grammar of the language I speak. She is not restrained; she is preserved mid-becoming.
Stillness suits her. It burns away the noise. I’ve taken the chaos of Birdie Abel—her unapologetic sass, her running mind, her dangerous belief that she controls the narrative—and fixed her to a single, immaculate moment.
She is complete now.
I laugh to myself. Not yet. Not even close. Her panic is clawing for narrative. I feel it like pressure behind my eyes. Birdie can’t exist without story. Even strapped and emptied of motion, she is already writing her escape in her head.
“Take off the mask,” she says after the screaming thins. Her voice shakes, but the spine is still there. She’s always had a spine. “You want honesty? Then start giving it. You owe me that much.”
“Owe you? I don’t owe you anything, not after all I’ve done for you, not anymore. And if we’re talking about honesty, I’ve given you much more than you’ve ever given me. If anything, it’s you who owe me, Reagan.”
“But you lied to me. You said you’d never hurt me.”
“And I’ve kept my promise.”
Rage spikes in her gaze. “I’m screaming in tears, literally bleeding on a table like a fucking sacrifice. How is that not hurting me?”
“Hurt and pain are two different things, my sweet queen.” I walk to the butterfly cases and let my fingers trail over the glass.
There is a tremor in her breath. Good. She understands beauty made permanent.
Those colorful wings, perfect, eternal. No more running.
No more breaking themselves against the world.
“When butterflies struggle,” I say, not looking at her, “they tear the very thing that makes them rare. People think survival is movement. It isn’t. It’s surrender to the right hands.”
“You? You think you’re the right hands I should surrender to?”
“I kept you safe. I watched every door, every step, eliminated every threat. I learned you better than you learned yourself. And you still ran. Butterflies always think flight is freedom. But it’s just exposure.”
“Take off your mask, Butterfly Man. Take it off, Jacob.”
Jacob.
A muscle twitches deep in my stomach. Heat blooms behind my eyes, slow and poisonous. For a fraction of a second, my control flexes.
My hands curl at my sides as I turn toward her very carefully. She’s watching me now that she’s regained the ability to fully move her neck. Does she feel it? The way the air tightens when I say less instead of more?
Her mouth curves in defiance. “I knew it. You’re the detective. You’re Jacob Torrance or Reid Ashford or whatever the fuck your name is. Tristan was right not to trust you.”
Insult blooms into something darker than rage.
Jacob. Another badge. A man who mistakes authority for intimacy, who looks at her like a puzzle to solve instead of a miracle to protect. And Tristan. That careless confidence she mistook for safety. The man with the motorcycle is nothing but a shadow with a shiny toy to lure her in.
“Oh, Reagan.” A laugh scrapes out of my chest. It surprises her. It surprises me. “First Blake, and now Jacob.” I walk back into her line of sight. “I don’t understand how someone like you could be so far off from the truth.”
“I’m not. I know it’s you. You’re the detective.”
“I’m not him.”
“You’re lying. You always do.”
I reach out and touch the pin seated in her shoulder. Not pressing. Just acknowledging. Her breath stutters. Pain is a language we both speak fluently. “I am not the detective,” I tell her.
“Then prove me wrong. Show me that you’re not lying. Take off your mask and prove me wrong.”
“You think masks are lies.” I lean down until the mask hovers so close to her face the heat of her breath fogs mine.
So close that if I removed it, there would be no going back, no separation between thought and action, no barrier between hunger and fulfillment.
“They’re not. They’re devotion. See, Reagan, I don’t just want inside of you or a piece of you.
Possession is one thing, but with you, what I want with you… ”
Goddamn that voice in my head. The images unspool against my will.
Breathing her in until there is no clean line between where she ends and I begin.
Grazing her skin with my fingertips until I draw blood.
Empty eyes. Cold flesh. Hallowed screams. Then I’m inside her, all in.
I feel her from the inside out. I wear her skin, cradled in her bones.
My thoughts threading through hers until we share one sentence, one breath.
They echo before she finishes them and become mine.
The holy violence of becoming. Fantasy and reality melt into one. Every single part of her, finally, literally, mine.
I’m so hard I can come in my pants. My breath betrays me, heavy, heavier, audible inside the mask. The sound of my restraint fraying thread by thread. I hate that she can hear it. I hate that she must feel it. It lingers in the room like a confession I didn’t mean to make.
I force an inhale through my nose. Then another.
“You don’t understand.” I straighten abruptly and take a step back.
“The mask is the distance necessary to keep me from wanting too much, too fast. Without it, I’d ruin you.
I’d ruin the goddess I worship. I’d tear your pretty wings beyond repair, crawl inside you and never come out. ”
Her pupils dilate. Fear, yes, but also recognition. She’s written men like me, so many of them they can’t all be fiction. She must have always known we do exist outside of her mind, too.
“You mistake honesty for exposure. Honesty is structure. Exposure is just mess,” I finish.
“Like the butterfly that shouldn’t risk exposure to seek freedom?”
“Surrender is the ultimate form of freedom.”
“Cut the crap, Jacob. I can’t believe how fucking stupid I’ve been.”
“I’M NOT JACOB!” Why can’t she fucking see me for who I really am, not who she wants me to be?
Is it the mask? Bullshit. She’s seen me countless times without it and still can’t recognize me.
Yes, I’ve been hiding in her shadows, behind camouflage, but part of me always wanted, hoped, she’d see me, recognize me on her own.
“You’re right about one thing, though.” I circle her.
Anticipation sharpens her fear. Fear sharpens her truth.
“You are being so fucking stupid. I mean, how could you think Blake would be your dark protector and kill for you to earn your love? Why would you think a piece of shit like Torrance would expose himself and then bring you here, when you were so irritatingly, willingly, going to spread your legs for him after taking you out dancing?” I mock at the end, but the distorter doesn’t convey it.
“I don’t know, because you’re a sick fuck with a piquerism paraphilia? You and Blake were buddies, partners. You played the Butterfly Man game together, and then you left me that photo to rub it in my face because you get off on that shit.”
“That’s just a story you like, Birdie, not the truth.”
“Everything is a story, including the truth, and the truth is no one knew about the dancing part except Jacob and me. How did you know that if you weren’t him?” she says again. Persistent. Brave. Stupid.
Except Birdie has never been stupid. She’s the most brilliant mind I’ve ever met. Is she playing dumb on purpose to provoke me into revealing myself too soon? Or is there a hidden play in motion even I can’t see? “Really, Birdie?”
“Yes, really, Jacob.”
I stop behind her head. The bulb casts my shadow over her face and breaks it into fragments. A hundred versions of me layered over her skin. “You already know the answer to that question.”
“I don’t. My phone wasn’t bugged. Neither was the house. Tristan made sure of it.”
“But he didn’t check the detective’s.”
Quiet takes over her for a few moments. “You want to convince me that you were tracking Jacob’s phone, saw his messages?”
“I don’t need to convince you. You know I would. When you hired that so-called bodyguard and took away my windows of heaven, I had to find another way to watch over you.”
“You mean to stalk me.”
“To protect you. Remember the lawyer? How else would I’ve gotten the incriminating book from her or found out your husband’s plan to blackmail you? Your assistant? The fucking detective? Through them, I saw you, darling.”
“But not Tristan. The only one who was truly protecting me.”
“Don’t speak that name or any other man’s here.”
“You hate him. Because I chose him. Because I fucked him.”
My hand tightens on the edge of the table. The wood complains softly. Don’t fall for it. She wants anger because anger is movement, progress. She wants you unbalanced.
“I should have never left him. You’re not half the man he is. You’re—”
My fingers claw around her throat and squeeze. Her eyes protrude in terror. I lean down until my voice is inside her ear, distorted and intimate all at once. “He touched what he didn’t understand, what wasn’t his to touch, and you let him.”
She doesn’t thrash or dissolve. Her pulse jumps hard against my palm, but her eyes—
Her eyes flare with challenge as she looks at me. Not up at me. Through me.
“You…let…me.” The words slur out of her, broken around my fingers, but they land clean. Precise. A blade slid between ribs I didn’t know were exposed.
It rattles something old and ugly in my chest. My grip tightens instinctively to punish the audacity. The accusation wrapped in truth.
“You…watched…me,” she forces out as her pulse stutters. “You…didn’t…stop it.”
I did let her. I watched. I waited. I told myself it was strategy, that patience was power, that control meant allowing the illusion of choice. I told myself men like Tristan expose themselves eventually.
But hearing it from her, seeing her use it…
My fingers flex. Her vision must be tunneling now. I can feel it in the way her pulse fights, frantic but weakening. This is the moment I could take something irreversible. Still, she doesn’t look away. She denies me the satisfaction of collapse.
An electric darkness coils inside me at her insolence. She understands the game well enough to threaten its rules. I hate her for it. I admire her for it.
I yank myself away, creating distance again before I forget why it exists.
Air floods back into her lungs in ragged pulls, her body arching against the restraints, eyes blazing wet and furious.
“You’re enjoying this, punishing me,” she says, voice raw.
She wants to name it, tame it with language.
“It must have hurt you, seeing me with him, knowing that, at some point, I chose him. Is that why you’re hurting me back? Even when I’ve left him for you?”
She still thinks I’m the detective? “For fuck’s sake…
” The truth vibrates dangerously close to the surface.
I press it back down where it belongs. She doesn’t get that.
Truth is a privilege she hasn’t earned yet.
“How is it that you didn’t recognize your husband’s partner in the first place?
Why did you pretend you didn’t know who Reid Ashford was all this time? ”
“I didn’t. You and Blake were never partners as detectives.
Obviously, it was before I met Blake. That day, one officer responded to my 911 call.
It was Blake. Then at the hospital, someone from Domestic came to take my statement.
His name was David Batista. Later when Blake and I got together, he never introduced me to any partners of his when he was still an officer.
Not even, shortly after, when he was promoted and went to Homicide as a detective.
Besides, you went to a different department, Stalker something, when you became a detective. ”
“I was never Blake Abel’s partner, and I’ve never worked for the police. Your precious detective is still out there somewhere, but not for long.”
“Stop lying to me. It’s you. It’s always been you.”
I turn back to her and take her in again. “You really do need a face to blame, don’t you? Fine, I’ll give you a hint. You already know who I am, Birdie. You just don’t want to remember.”
“What does that mean?”
“I am the one you felt before you ever saw. The one who was there long before you started guessing names.”
“Stop being so cryptic and take off your mask like a man.”
“Only you can take it off.”
“How?”
“Go back to where it all started.”
“You mean the school?”
I snort. “No, Reagan, not the school. That’s not where we first met.”
Her eyes are furious again. “Then I don’t know where. You’ve got to do better than this if you really want the truth.”
“This room. This moment. I made it all for you so you’d remember.
No witnesses. No lies you can hide behind.
Just you, exactly as you are, held in place long enough for me to learn every truth your body has been screaming since the day we met, before you thought you could leave.
” I lean close, stopping just short of touching her skin.
“But sure, if you want to start with the school, go for it. The question is which one?”