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’toweyou 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,allin. 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.
