One second. His pen is in his right hand, useless as a weapon. Two seconds. The guard outside the door is talking to someone, his attention divided. Three seconds. Kennedy's Adam's apple bobs as he swallows, and I imagine how easy it would be to crush it.
Four seconds. Five.
He holds out the form.
I take it. Sign my name at the bottom without reading a word.
"Remarkably thorough," I say, handing it back.
Kennedy's hand trembles as he accepts the paper. He doesn't look at my signature. Doesn't check that I've completed any of the fields. Just slides the form into his folder and holds it against his chest.
"I think," he says, "we should end early today."
"Of course, whatever you think, Dr. Kennedy."
I stand. The movement is slow, controlled—nothing the cameras or the guard would read as threatening. Kennedy doesn't stand with me. Doesn't walk me to the door the way he usually does, pretending we're colleagues.
We both know we're not.
"Dr. Kennedy."
He looks up.
"She asked me how I slept. Day one, fifteen minutes into our first session. Nobody's ever wanted to know if I slept."
His brow furrows. "Who?"
"Hope. The monitor you've been trying to limit my contact with. The woman you mentioned in your last report to the board—concerns about unhealthy attachment patterns, I believe you wrote." I watch him. "She asked a simple question, and in fifteen minutes she learned more about me than you have in three years. You know why?"
He doesn't answer.
"Because she doesn't come at me sideways. She doesn't put on a show. She walked into my cell and looked at me like I was a person, and she asked a question because she wanted to know the answer." I pause at the door. "You've never once asked a question you wanted answered. You ask questions that support your thesis and your books on me."
"Jude." His voice is thin. "What you said about Harold Devins—"
"Was a hypothetical. Creative speculation about a cold case. Nothing you could ethically report without compromising patient confidentiality." I smile, and I watch the color drain from his face. "Have a good afternoon, Dr. Kennedy."
The guard escorts me back to Ward C. The corridor is the same as it always is—white walls, the smell of industrial cleaner that doesn't cover what's underneath.
I think about Kennedy sitting alone in his office, clutching his folder, trying to convince himself that what just happened was a therapeutic breakthrough rather than what it was.
A reminder.
He's built his career on studying predators from a safe distance. Written papers, given lectures, collected awards from institutions that believe understanding evil is the same as containing it. And the whole time, he's been sitting across from the real thing, protected by nothing except my decision to let him live.
Sixty percent—that's what he's gotten from me in three years. Sixty percent of a mask, designed to give him enough to feel successful while hiding everything that matters. The kills, the methods, the year of hunting that taught me what I was. Frederick at the head of his own table. My signature—always the head, always the seat of power, always the message written in the placement of the body.
You thought you were king and I proved you weren't.
Kennedy got sixty percent. The board, the system, everyone who thinks they're seeing me clearly—they got sixty percent.
Hope got more in fifteen minutes than Kennedy has in three years.She got the truth I didn't even know I was telling—that I'm tired, that the noise inside my head quiets when she's near, that her presence does something to me that three years of chemical restraints and institutional protocols never managed.
Kennedy will file his report. He'll mention his concerns about attachment patterns and recommend continued monitoring and suggest that my progress, while notable, requires ongoing supervision. The board will read it and nod and check boxes, and somewhere in the margins of their decision, Hope's name will appear as a footnote to my pathology.
They'll never understand what she really is to me.
The door to Ward C opens. Gage is at the security desk, eyes on me as I enter. He doesn't say anything, but he's sitting too straight, watching too hard. The questions are all over him.
