Chapter 119: Bring him back
SÉVERINE
My familiar brought Prim in at half past midnight.
She stood in the center of my room, vacant and pliant, as if her mind had slipped away to a quieter floor inside herself. Which it probably was. Her eyes stared through me, empty. Her hands dangled at her sides, waiting. She was a marionette paused between commands, her strings slack, her mind absent from the controls.
I looked at her for a moment.
"Let us begin," I said.
I turned to my familiar. He had taken his human form, which meant he wanted me to see his face while he said what he was about to say.
"Do not," I told him.
"Séverine—"
"Do not hold back." I kept my voice even. "This needs to be real. If it does not look real, none of it works."
He held my gaze for three full seconds.
Then he inclined his head in difficult agreement.
I walked to the bathroom and undressed as quickly as I could manage, folding my clothes on the counter, and taking a deep winded breath before I then slid into the tub, sat, stared up at the ceiling, and drew in more steady breaths.
The first impact came without warning.
Pressure, abrupt and absolute, crashed into my back, hurling me into the porcelain. I saw my face in the water for a second as pain splintered through my ribs, and I gasped, which happened to be my worst mistake because barely a minute later, the next blow shoved my face toward the water. My hands shot up just in time to keep me from going under, but barely, and the water that invaded my nose burned with the raw intimacy of something wholly unwelcome.
The unseen hands did not slow.
They hauled me upright and slammed me sideways into the tile wall, the impact ringing through my skull in a blinding wave. The tub’s edge caught my hip as I fell back into the water. A sharp, immediate pain bloomed in my side, the unmistakable signal of something strained or cracked.
Good. It needed to look like this.
I repeated that to myself for the next thirty seconds as the hands moved through me with relentless focus and the sick hunger to finish what they started. I let my breath stay ragged, let my body react on instinct, because I needed to learn fast for the oscar level performance I was going to give in front of the camera because only an unfiltered response would convince anyone watching.
Then the hands lifted me once more.
The shift was sudden: pressure lifted me beneath my arms, and for a heartbeat I hung above the tub, water pouring off me, the ceiling looming, the mirror crowding my vision. Then I was hurled sideways, not falling but flung, and the mirror shattered beneath me with a sound like the world breaking open.
Glass scattered everywhere. Some embedded in my palm, slicing along my shoulder, and one jagged shard even traced my cheek as I fell.
I hit the bathroom floor. Hard.
My familiar appeared above me, his hand reaching out before he could stop himself, and I saw the crack in his composure, the moment when professionalism gave way to something rawer.
"Don’t," I said. My voice came out wet. "Don’t you dare."
"You are bleeding from your face."
"I know." I pushed myself to one knee. "We are not finished. Do not hold back."
Something moved through his expression that I chose not to examine.
"Our next show is the cameras," I said. "Now."
I pulled myself up with the wall and left the bathroom. My familiar guided Prim behind me, her movements eerily smooth, the kind of obedience that belonged to someone stripped of choice. The corridor was empty. At the far end, the camera’s red light blinked its silent witness.
I walked to a position directly in its line of sight and stopped.
I then turned to face Prim.
"Why are you doing this?" I let my voice carry, careful not to tip into theatrics. Fear was sharpest in the details, not in how loud you made it. "What do you want from me?"
My familiar worked Prim’s mouth.
"You know what I am," he made her say, in a voice that was hers but emptied of her. "I did not want to do this but you left me no choice. I cannot let you expose me."
"I will not say anything to anyone." I took a step back, which put me in a better position in the camera’s frame. "I swear to you, I will never say a word. Please spare me."
"That bridge has been crossed," The poor girl said back, still under the influence. "I think I will just kill you and run for the hills. Let us see Alpha Theodore recover from this."
The unseen hands then surged forward.
They closed around my throat, and I stopped performing and simply endured it, because there was no performance that matched the real thing, and the camera needed the real thing. The pressure built past discomfort into something that narrowed my vision at the edges. My hands came up to claw at nothing and found nothing, which was its own particular horror even when you knew why.
My right hand was then latched on too tightly by one unseen hand and then bent at an unnatural angle. Before a scream could even tear out of my mouth, my left hand went next.
The snap was precise, and I screamed with it, a short sound that I cut off because sound carried, and my familiar had not yet cast the silence spell. I looked at him past the pressure at my throat.
He caught the look. The air around us changed register, and the spell settled over the corridor like a held breath, sealing everything inside it from traveling further.
I screamed properly then because it was safer and because it needed to be in my face and my body when anyone reviewed this footage.
The hands lifted me higher.
Three, maybe four feet off the ground, my feet searching for purchase while my throat bore the full force of the grip. Then I fell. The floor met me without mercy. My legs buckled, one collapsing, and I landed on my broken hand, dragging an unplanned sound from my throat.
Prim walked toward me.
Her foot struck the side of my head once, then again. The second blow flattened me, and I stayed down because every instinct agreed that it was safest. The third kick was distant, muffled, a sign of how far I was slipping from awareness.
Then she stood over me.
I watched through narrowing vision as she looked directly into the camera.
And smiled.
The smile twisted her face, too wide, too intentional. My familiar wore her features like a costume, and it was perfect for the footage: something unmistakable, something that would unravel under any attempt to explain it.
She then walked away.
My familiar’s hold slowly separated from her then, and Prim sagged slightly and continued walking under the residual momentum of the working, disappearing around the corridor bend.
He materialized beside me on the floor, low and quiet, his hand almost moving toward my broken body.
Like he had forgotten the camera.
"We are in front of the camera," I said. The words came out slower than I intended. My mouth was not cooperating fully. "Remember that."
He looked at the camera.
Then he looked at me.
Then he stood and walked forward, past me, in the direction Prim had gone, which read as pursuit and was the last piece the footage needed.
I stayed where I was.
The corridor floor chilled my cheek, and blood from the mirror cut crept with the slow patience of liquid seeking a home. My broken hands throbbed, their pulse rising to drown out every other sensation.
I smiled.
Not for the camera. There was no performance left to give.
Just the quiet satisfaction of someone who had tallied the price, paid it in full, and knew precisely what that payment had bought.
Étienne would see this footage. He would see what had happened to me while he was in his room with that bitch, while he was choosing her over and over in the small ways he had been choosing her since she arrived. He would feel the guilt of it, the specific weight of having been elsewhere when he should have been attentive, and that guilt would do what guilt did to people who still had a conscience left.
It would bring him back.
Whatever the bond was pulling him toward, guilt was a stronger current. I knew that about him. I had known it since before we were anything to each other. The boy who had survived what he had survived did not have a casual relationship with responsibility for other people’s pain.
I had given him pain tonight.
The kind with my blood in it.
The corridor blurred at the edges, and I let it.
I would survive. I had factored that in as well. The damage was real, significant, and would register as authentic because it was. I would heal with the swift certainty, and when I woke in a hospital bed with Étienne’s hand over mine, I would know every second on the cold floor had been worth it.
I closed my eyes.
The blood moved.
I let the dark take me, and the last coherent thought I had was that this was what certainty felt like. That this was what victory felt like.