Page 43 of Sting of Sin

Warden looked at me. One question in it, no words.

I peeled off the wall and set myself square in front of that door with everything I am, every pound of me, every year of standing in front of people, the whole hard useless wall of me finally aimed at the one door it was ever built to come through.

I looked at Throttle. Every hard mile of it walked together. And here was the last door, and his sister on the far side.

He nodded once. His eyes were wet and his jaw was iron.

I set my weight, and I said her name in my head, closest thing to praying I've got left, I'm here, Bee. I'm here. Hold on. And I got ready to bring the whole world down on the other side of that door.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

I SAT UP.

Not the slow careful surfacing he'd been watching all afternoon, I sat up all the way, fast, my whole body answering me at last, and the rail of the bed was cold and solid under my hand, and on the little steel tray beside it, laid out neat the way a careful man lays out his tools, were three syringes already filled.

He heard the bed shift and he turned from Holly's body, and for the first time in four years I saw Dr. Reed surprised.

"Beatrice," he said, and there was a question in it. "You should be—"

"I know your voice."

It came out of me whole. Not cracked, not rusted, not two words dragged up from the bottom of a well—whole, my voice, the one I'd been hiding in the dark of myself for four years, and it filled that clean terrible room to the corners. He went absolutely still.

"I know your voice," I said again, and I was standing now, off the bed, on my own two feet, swaying but up. "I've always known your voice. You said it yourself, my body never stopped knowing. Every week you sat across from me in those soft little rooms and said your gentle things, and the alarm in me screamed and screamed and couldn't find the door, and you loved that, you sat there and fed on it.”

"Be still," he said, and he reached for the soothing register, the one that had ruled me for years. "Beatrice. Be still now. There's nothing in the—"

"No!"

And there it was, the loudest sound I had made since that night, a single word that came up out of the whole length of me and broke against the walls, years of swallowed screams spending themselves at once, and it was not a word he had ever planned for, because his entire life was built on the silence of the people he selected, and I watched it hit him like a hand. I watched the certainty crack down the middle of that tired ordinary face.

"You're a monster, Marcus Reed," I said, and I made each piece of it land, because naming a thing is how you take its power, and this was a man who had spent his whole life making sure he could never be named. "You're my doctor. You're the voice in the woods. You're the one who wrote my cage and sat by my bed for four years to keep me broken and played on a woman’s insecurities to drag me here. You're not a ghost. You're not a name on a wall. You're not the man who's never in the room." My voice didn’t shake. "You're in the room. I see you. I see you, and you are nothing, you are a small, sick, ordinary man, and I am going to walk out of here, and everyone is going to know exactly who you are."

He stopped reaching for gentleness.

What came up under it instead was the real thing, the thing that had stood forty feet back in the dark of those trees, and it wasn’t smooth or patient at all, it was fury, white and total, the rage of a man whose one possession had just fought back, and he came at me across that little room fast, hands out, four years of interrupted in his face.

But I’d learned, this long terrible day, what my body could do when I finally let it. And he had made one mistake: he'd never once thought of me as a person who might fight back.

My hand was already on the tray.

I had a syringe in my fist before he reached me, his syringe, his careful tool, the thing he used to make people soft and walk them quiet to their ruin, and when his hands closed on my shoulders I drove it into the side of his neck and pushed the plunger down with my thumb, all of it, every drop of whatever he'd meant for me.

He reared back with a sound I'd never heard him make. His hand flew to his throat. And I stood there in front of the man who'd taken everything, swaying on my own two feet, and I watched his own poison start to climb up behind his eyes, watched the fog I knew so well come down over him for once, his legs going loose, his careful face going slack and stupid and afraid.

"There it is," I told him, soft, the way he'd said it to me. "Better already. You just rest now."

He went down against the wall, sliding, his mouth working and nothing coming out, and the last thing I gave him before the door came off its hinges was the thing he'd wanted from me for four years and never gotten and never, ever would: I turned my back on him.

The door didn't open. It exploded.

Wood and noise and the whole world pouring in at once, and they came through it like the wrath of God, Eli first, always first, his face a thing I'll never have the words for, and Caleb a half-step behind him, and The Devil's House behind them filling that quiet little house with thunder. Eli's eyes swept the room in a single terrible arc, Holly on the floor, Reed sliding sideways and senseless against the wall, the syringe still rolling where I'd dropped it, and then they found me, standing.

Standing. On my own two feet. In the middle of it.

I watched him understand it. I watched it go into him that he had not come to carry a broken thing out of a nightmare, that he'd come crashing through a door to save a woman who had already, with her own voice and her own two hands, saved herself.

"Bee," he breathed. Just that.