“Do it,” Jex growls, his hands snapping to my throat, his thumbs pressing into my windpipe just enough to make the world go grey at the edges. “Show him how much you love the monster.”
I shatter. My body goes rigid in the straps, my internal muscles pulsing in a violent, rhythmic riot around him. I’m wailing, a long, harrowing sound of release that fills the small space, while Jex lets out a guttural roar, his own climax hitting him like a freight train as he spills into me, his heat a brand that burns through the last of my history.
We hang there, tangled and panting in the white light, while our father stares upward into the silence of his own undoing.
Chapter
Twenty-Five
JEX
The ambulance is a tomb of white light and the copper scent of old blood and new sin.
I’m still buried deep inside her, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird, feeling the rhythmic, dying tremors of her climax milking the last of me. Hallow is hanging from the straps above me, her head lolled back, her skin flushed a violent, beautiful pink. She looks like a saint carved from ice that finally met the sun.
Below us, dad is quiet.
The whistling breath has turned into a shallow, rattling hitch. He’s staring up at the bottom of the gurney, his eyes pinned open by the steel retractors, glazed over with a shock so profound I think his heart might have finally folded under the weight of the shame.
I slowly pull out of her. The sound is wet and heavy in the silence—the only applause for the performance wejust gave him. I don’t reach for my jeans. I don’t cover up. I want him to see the mess we made. I want him to see Hallow’s slick heat dripping off me and onto his pristine, medical-grade sheets.
“You okay, sweetheart?” I rasp, my voice sounding like it was dragged over gravel.
Hallow doesn’t answer. She just lets out a long, shuddering exhale, her eyes slowly fluttering open. They’re dark, hollowed out, but the frantic, jagged insanity I saw on the bridge has been replaced by something much more dangerous.
Clarity.
“Untie me,” she whispers.
I reach up and hit the ratchets. The nylon straps hiss as they release, and Hallow collapses into my arms. I catch her, her skin hot and damp against mine, and I set her down on the edge of the gurney, right next to our father’s head.
She doesn’t look away from him. She leans over, her hair falling like a curtain of silk and soot, and she stares directly into his pinned-open eyes. She reaches out a hand—slow, steady, her fingers no longer shaking—and she begins to trace the line of the stitches on his cheek.
“Does it hurt, Dad?” she asks, her voice terrifyingly soft. It’s the voice of a girl telling a bedtime story to a doll. “The fire? The glass? The way Jex looked inside me?”
He makes a small, gargled sound. A single tear rolls from the corner of his pinned eye, disappearing into the foam block.
“I remember thinking you were a god,” she continues, her thumb pressing into a fresh bruise on his neck. “Ithought if I did everything right, you’d let me stay in the light. But you didn’t want a daughter. You wanted a ghost. You wanted something you could sell without it screaming.”
She looks at me, and for a second, the coldness in her gaze makes even my blood run cold.
“Jex,” she says, her voice as sharp as a scalpel. “Hand me the med-kit. I want to see if the Mayor’s heart is as black as the one he gave me.”
I don’t hesitate. I reach for the tray and slide it towards her. There’s a tray of surgical steel—scalpels, forceps, sutures. The tools of the trade he used to keep us in line.
“What are we doing, Hallow?” I ask, my hand resting on the small of her back, my thumb tracing the curve of her spine.
She picks up a small, shimmering blade, turning it over in the light. She looks at her reflection in the steel, then at the man trapped beneath her.
“We’re going to give the city one last broadcast,” she whispers. “We’re going to show them what’s under the suit. No more lies. No more silence.”
She leans down, the tip of the blade resting just above his collarbone.
“Don’t blink, Father,” she hisses, a slow, dark smile spreading across her face. “This is the part where the ghost starts to scream back.”
I watch her, and for the first time in my life, I feel a flicker of something that isn’t just rage. It’s awe.
Hallow is holding that scalpel like it’s a part of her own anatomy, the clinical white light of the ambulance reflecting off the steel and into the dark, dilated void ofher pupils. She’s naked, smeared with the salt of the harbour and the slick evidence of my come, but she looks like she’s wearing a suit of armour made of spite.
