KEIRA
The car slides through darkness, headlights carving a path forward on empty roads. I’m cocooned in Cyrus’s leather jacket, its collar pulled high around my face. His scent—sandalwood and something metallic—fills each breath. The seats are plush, expensive. Everything the twins own is expensive. I should feel safe, protected.
Instead, I stare at my hands.
Ace cleaned them thoroughly at Henderson’s house. No visible traces remain of what I did in that basement. My skin is clean, but I can still feel it.
The warm stickiness as Henderson’s blood spilled over my fingers. The resistance of flesh as I carved into him. The power that surged through me with each scream I pulled from his throat.
I flex my fingers, expecting to see crimson in the creases of my knuckles, under my nails. Nothing. Just clean skin. But the phantom sensation persists like a ghostly film coating my hands that no amount of scrubbing will remove.
“You okay back there?” Cyrus asks, his eyes finding mine in the rearview mirror.
I nod, not trusting my voice. What would I even say? That I enjoyed watching the light drain from Henderson’s eyes? That the most terrifying part isn’t what I did to him, but how alive it made me feel?
Ace turns in the passenger seat, studying me with an assessing gaze that misses nothing.
“Your hands are clean, Keira,” he says quietly.
I swallow hard. “I know.”
But knowing and feeling are different things. The weight of Henderson’s death presses against my chest. Not with guilt. That’s the part that should frighten me, but doesn’t. There’s no guilt. Only the understanding that I’ve crossed a line I can never uncross.
I’ve become a new version of myself tonight. Or perhaps I’ve simply revealed who I’ve always been beneath all the trauma, behind the protective walls I built around myself after Henderson, after Patterson, after all of them.
The twins made me their prey during the Hunt, but tonight, I was the predator. And God help me, I liked it. A weight I’ve carried since I was thirteen has lifted from my shoulders.
I expected to feel guilt crushing me. Shame burning through my veins. Horror at what I’ve become, what I’ve done. Those feelings should be there, shouldn’t they? Normal people don’t torture and kill their abusers and feel... nothing but relief.
But that’s not quite right. I don’t feel nothing.
I feellight.
As if chains I didn’t even know were binding me had suddenly shattered. As if the frightened, shaking girl locked in Henderson’s basement has finally stopped screaming in the back of my mind.
“I thought I would feel guilty,” I whisper, more to myself than to the twins. “I thought I would hate myself for becoming the monster.”
Ace watches me, waiting for me to continue.
“But I don’t,” I continue. “That little girl—the one he hurt, the one he broke—she needed this. She needed to see him afraid. To watch him die.”
I lift my head, meeting Cyrus’s gaze in the mirror. His eyes, usually wild, hold a quiet understanding that matches his brother’s.
“Thirteen-year-old Keira couldn’t fight back. She couldn’t scream or run or hurt him the way he hurt her.” A small smile touches my lips, feeling foreign yet perfectly right. “But we could. We did.”
The car hums beneath us, eating up miles, carrying us away from the broken body we left at the abandoned mine shaft.
“I feel...” I search for the right word. “Free.”
The silence in the car feels different now. Like the aftermath of a storm, when everything is washed clean.
I shift in my seat, pulling Cyrus’s jacket tighter around my shoulders. “It’s strange,” I continue. “I always thought if I ever faced Henderson again, I’d fall apart. That I’d be that terrified little girl all over again.”
Ace glances at me in the rearview mirror. “But you weren’t.”
“No,” I agree. “When I saw him recognize me, when I watched him understand what was about to happen...” I pause, searching for words. “It was like all these pieces of myself that have been scattered for years suddenly clicked back into place.”
The headlights illuminate an empty stretch of road ahead. We could be the only people awake in the world.
