Page 46 of Psycho Obsession
I turn the page. Taped to the back is a photo. It’s old, the edges curled and yellowed. It shows two children standing in front of a fountain. A girl with platinum blonde hair and a boy with a wide, gap-toothed grin. He’s wearing a tattered purple shirt.
I look at the boy’s eyes. They’re emerald green. Even through the grain of the old film, they burn with a manic, obsessive light.
I look back at the man standing in the doorway. He’s leaning against the frame, his arms crossed, watching me with a look of agonising, twisted satisfaction.
“You said you didn’t know who you were,” he says, his voice dropping into a soft, terrifying lullaby. “But I never forgot. I spent ten years in the dark of this city looking for the girl Aris stole from me.”
I look at the photo, then back at him. My vision swims. The room feels like it’s spinning, the walls closing in.
“Jex?” I breathe, the name finally surfacing from the black sludge of my memory like a corpse in a river.
He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t move. He just tilts his head, the red light from the funhouse casting a long, jagged shadow across his face.
“Not exactly, sister,” he whispers. “Jex was the one who tried to save you. He’s the one who went to the cops. He’s the one they broke.”
He steps into the light, and I see the scars on his temples—the deep, puckered divots where the electrodes sat for weeks. The same scars I have.
“Jex died in that chair,” he says, his eyes wide and shimmering with a beautiful, catastrophic madness. “I’m just the part of him that was left over after they finished the edit.”
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a final card. It’s not a Joker. It’s the King of Hearts. He drops it on the desk, right over the photo of thetwo children.
“Welcome home, Hallow. Now… do you want to know who really sold us to the Doctor?”
I can’t breathe. I can’t move. The world isn’t just a joke anymore. It’s a goddamn massacre.
“It wasn’t Aris,” he says, his voice a cold, sharp blade. “It was our father. And he’s the one running for Mayor on Tuesday.”
Part Three
They didn’t save me.
They hollowed me out, fucked my mind raw, and sold the pieces.
Now I remember every hand.
Every lie.
Every man who watched and signed and smiled.
My brother didn’t come to rescue me.
He came to finish what they started.
This city isn’t getting justice.
It’s getting fucking buried.
—Hallow
Chapter
Nineteen
JEX
I’m leaning against the doorframe, a cigarette burning a hole in the air, and all I can think about is how much I want to shove her head through that goddamn mirror.
Hallow is sitting there, hunched over a vanity that’s more splinters than wood, and she’s losing her fucking mind.
