Page 79 of Psycho Obsession
It isn’t a battle. It’s a harvest.
I reach the first line, my blade shearing through the throat of a guard before he can even raise his sidearm. I feel the hot spray of his life across my face, and I laugh—a raw, broken sound that matches the chaos.
Beside me, Hallow is a dervish of jagged metal. She moves with a sickening, fluid grace, her blade finding the gaps in their armour, the soft parts of their necks, the palms of the hands they raise to beg for mercy. She’s silent, a ghost in the blood-mist, her eyes fixed on thecentre of the bridge where the last of the Council’s high-ranking officers are trying to flee.
Jex joins us, his boots heavy on the pavement, his rifle discarded for a combat knife. He grabs a guard by the hair, forcing him to his knees right in front of Hallow.
“This one was on the board,” Jex growls, his voice thick with adrenaline. “He signed the ‘maintenance’ fees for the clinic.”
Hallow stops. She looks down at the man—a man I recognise. He’s the Treasurer. He used to buy me sweets when I was six years old, right before he’d hand my father the envelopes of cash that paid for my first “session” with the surgeons.
He’s weeping, his hands trembling as he looks up at her. “Hallow… please… I have a family…”
Hallow leans down, her face inches from his, the ash settling on her eyelashes like grey snow.
“So did I,” she whispers.
She doesn’t make it quick. She drives the serrated blade into his shoulder, twisting it slowly as he shrieks, before she leans in to whisper one last thing in his ear.
“Tell the devil the Choir is coming for the rest of his kingdom.”
She yanks the blade free, and the man collapses into the soot. We stand at the peak of the bridge, the city laid out before us like a map of burning veins. The barricade is broken. The way is open.
Oakhaven is ours.
The air at the crest of the bridge is thin, choked with the incinerated remains of Oakhaven’s history. Below us, the harbour churns, the black water swallowing the sub where our father sits in his silver-lined tomb. The city ahead of us is a sprawling ribcage of fire, and we are the marrow.
Jex steps up beside Hallow, his chest heaving, his knuckles split and weeping red. He looks at the Treasurer’s body, then up at the burning skyline. He reaches out and wipes a streak of fresh blood from Hallow’s cheek, his thumb lingering on her skin with a possessive, heavy pressure.
“The Governor’s mansion is the last light on the hill,” Jex rasps, his eyes reflecting the orange carnage. “The rest of the Council is barricaded in the ballroom. They think the walls are thick enough to keep the ghosts out.”
I step toward them, my boots crunching on the glass of a shattered headlight. I look at my siblings—my co-conspirators, my only truth in a world of manufactured lies. We are a trinity of wreckage, standing on the threshold of the life we were promised and the life we took for ourselves.
“Let them stay in the ballroom,” I say, my voice a low, jagged thrum. “I want them to hear us coming. I want the sound of our boots on the marble to be the last thing they ever understand.”
Hallow turns to me, her eyes dark and bottomless. The heavy tactical coat is slipping off one of her shoulders, revealing the map of bruises and blood we left on her in the dark. She looks like a queen of the apocalypse, a girl who died a thousand times in a clinic and finally decided to haunt the living.
“I want to dance in that ballroom, Ryker,” she breathes, a ghost of a smile touching her blood-stained lips. “I want to see their faces when they realise the girl they paid to break is the one who’s going to close their eyes.”
Jex growls, a low, territorial sound, and pulls her closer to his side. “Then we don’t wait for the fire to die down. We go through it.”
He whistles—a sharp, piercing note that cuts through the roar of the flames. From the shadows of the bridge, three black SUVs, their windshields reinforced with steel mesh, roar forward. The Choir—our army of the broken and the discarded—pours out of the shadows, their silver masks flickering like stars in the smog.
We pile into the lead vehicle. The interior smells of leather and gun oil, a sanctuary of cold steel in the middle of the inferno. Jex sits in the middle, Hallow between us, her hand resting on Jex’s thigh while I take her other hand, my fingers interlacing with hers.
The driver guns the engine, and we tear across the bridge, racing toward the hill where the elite of Oakhaven are waiting for a saviour who isn’t coming.
As we climb the winding roads, the houses of the wealthy pass us by like burning lanterns. I look out the window and see the chaos—the people whoignored the screams from the docks now screaming in their own gardens. It’s a beautiful, symmetrical justice.
“Nearly there,” Jex murmurs, his hand sliding up to the back of Hallow’s neck, his thumb massaging the base of her skull.
The gates of the mansion loom ahead, wrought iron and gold leaf, a monument to the blood money that built this city. The SUV doesn’t slow down. We hit the gates at sixty miles an hour, the metal shrieking and buckling as we burst through into the pristine, manicured gardens.
The tires scream on the gravel as we slide to a halt in front of the grand entrance. The marble columns are lit by the flickering glow of the city burning below.
I open the door and step out into the heat. I look up at the towering oak doors, my heart beating a rhythmic, violent war drum in my chest.
“Welcome to the end, brothers,” Hallow says, stepping out beside me, the serrated blade glinting in the firelight.
