Page 27 of Psycho Obsession
I want to be the thing that keeps them awake at night. I want to be the cold wind that makes them check the locks on their doors. I want to be the realisation, rightbefore the lights go out, that the girl they broke didn’t disappear. She just turned into the shadow they can’t run from.
I’m not a dancer anymore. I’m the floorboards that groan under your feet. I’m the silence that’s too loud. I’m the ghost that doesn’t just haunt—I’m the ghost that remembers exactly where you keep the knives.
I’m crying again. It’s pathetic. It’s the last bit of the “little girl” leaking out of my eyes. But it’s okay. Let her go. She doesn’t belong here. She was never going to survive this world anyway.
The room is cold, but I’m burning. I’m a house fire in a padded cell.
“I just wanted to be loved,” I whisper into the blackness. My voice is a ghost of a ghost, a jagged sliver of sound that cuts my own throat on the way out. “But I guess I’ll settle for being the end of you.”
Part Two
They turned her into a ghost.
I turned that into a promise.
Men like Aris hide behind white walls and clean hands.
They think silence means ownership.
They think breaking her made them gods.
It didn’t.
It marked them.
I’m not coming to save her.
I’m coming to finish what they started — only slower, louder, and with an audience.
I don’t use scalpels.
I don’t do mercy.
I deal in cards, teeth, and last breaths.
Smile, Doctor.
The joke’s on you now.
—Jex
Chapter
Nine
JEX
The city doesn’t breathe; it wheezes. It’s a sick lung filled with neon smog and the smell of roasting trash. I’m sitting on the edge of a rooftop that feels like it’s crumbling under the weight of my own boredom, swinging my boots over a three-hundred-foot drop.
Below me, the streets are a grid of ants scurrying to jobs they hate and lives that don’t matter. They think they’re safe because they locked the “monsters” away behind the white walls of the Hillside Sanitarium. They think if they don’t look at the dark, the dark won’t look at them.
Idiots. The dark has twenty-twenty vision.
I flip a card between my knuckles—the Queen of Hearts. She’s seen better days. The edges are frayed, and there’s a dried brown smudge across her face that might be blood or might be chocolate. I haven’t decided yet.
“You see that, boys?” I chirp, not looking back at the three husks of men tied to the industrial vent behind me. Their mouths are taped shut with neon-pink duct tape I found in a dumpster. It clashes beautifully with the deep, bruised purple of their faces. “The Queen is grumpy. She says the air tastes like… clinical trials and unwashed lab coats.”
One of the men—a mid-level enforcer who thought he was a big deal until I introduced his kneecap to a ball-peen hammer—makes a muffled, frantic sound.
