Page 45 of Psycho Obsession
“Is that it?” he asks, his voice a low, dangerous rumble. “Are you done breaking the reflections? Or do you want to start on the walls?”
“You brought me here,” I choke out, my voice trembling with a terrifying, wild energy. “You took me out of one cage and put me in another. You’re just like him. You just want to watch the show.”
I lunge at him, the glass shard raised, my visionblurred by tears and madness. I want to hurt him. I want to see if he bleeds the same way the doctor did.
He moves with a fluid, terrifying speed, catching my wrist in a grip that feels like a vice. He yanks me forward, slamming my back against the one mirror I haven’t broken yet. My breath leaves me in a sharp unh.
He pins me there, his body a wall of heat and muscle, his face inches from mine. I can see the sweat on his brow, the stubble on his jaw, the raw, unpolished hunger in his eyes.
“Look at yourself,” he snarls, his voice dropping into a register that makes my skin crawl.
“No!”
“LOOK!”
He grabs my hair, forcing my head toward the glass. I see myself. I’m covered in dust and sweat, my gown torn, my eyes wide and bloodshot. But I also see the blood on my hands—the fresh blood from the glass. I see the fire. I see the monster.
“You’re not a victim anymore, Hallow,” he whispers, his breath hot against my ear. “You’re a riot. You’re the beautiful, bloody mess the world tried to hide. You can break every mirror in this house, but you can’t break what you’ve become.”
I stop fighting. I sag against him, the glass shard falling from my numb fingers and clattering to the floor. The rage is still there, but it’s changing, turning into a heavy, suffocating weight.
“I don’t even know who I am,” I whisper into his chest.
He reaches down, his hand cupping my jaw, forcingme to look up at him. His expression is a terrifying mixture of obsession and something that might be tenderness, if tenderness were a weapon.
“You’re the punchline, sweetheart,” he says, his thumb tracing the curve of my lip. “And I’m the only one who knows how to tell the joke.”
He doesn’t kiss me. He just holds me there in the middle of the wreckage, two broken things in a house of mirrors, while the distant sound of the tide slams against the pier like a heartbeat.
I pull away from him, my chest heaving, the jagged air of the funhouse tasting like salt and stale popcorn. The adrenaline is curdling into something darker, something heavier. I look at him—really look at him—standing there in the wreckage of my reflection.
“You keep talking about the joke,” I rasp, wiping a streak of dust and sweat across my forehead. “But I don’t see anyone laughing. I see a girl who’s lost her mind and a man who thinks he’s a god because he has a bag of cards and a crate of gas.”
His jaw tightens, a small muscle jumping in his cheek. The “Dealer” mask flickers, and for a second, the green light in his eyes dims into something human. Something tired.
“You want to see the punchline, Hallow? You want to know why I pulled you out of that hole?”
He grabs my hand—his grip isn’t a caress, it’s a tether—and drags me out of the mirror-lined room. We stumble through the dark, past the skeletal remains of a merry-go-round and the gaping, hollow eyes of wooden horses. The funhouse isn’t just a home; it’s a monument to everything the world forgot.
We reach the back of the pier, where the warped wood gives way to a heavy, rusted steel door. He pulls a ring of keys from his belt, the metal chiming like a funeral bell, and throws the bolt.
“Go on,” he says, his voice flat. “Look.”
I step into the room. It’s cold. Colder than the asylum. It’s filled with rows of filing cabinets, their drawers hanging open like tongues. On the walls, there are photos. Dozens of them. Hundreds.
Girls. All of them young. All of them pale. All of them with the same look of vacant, lobotomised terror in their eyes.
I walk toward the centre of the room, where a single, oversized map of the city is pinned to the wall. It’s covered in red string, all of it leading back to one location: Hillside. But that’s not what makes my heart stop.
There’s a desk in the corner. On it sits a single, leather-bound journal. It’s open to the middle. I recognise the handwriting. It’s Aris’s precise, clinical script.
I lean down, my breath hitching as I read the entry dated six months ago.
Subject: Hallow. The integration was successful. The trauma-induced amnesia is holding. She truly believes she was a dancer. She has no memory of the Bureau, no memory of the Project, and most importantly, no memory of her brother.
I freeze. My blood turns to slush in my veins.
“Brother?” I whisper.
