Page 82 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

It’s a sash window. Well, it was one once. The frame is dark with age, and something has snapped rather than decayed, both sash cords broken in the specific way they break when someone tried to open a window very quietly and the ancient rope gave way and the whole thing came down.

I know that window.

I know it the way I know my own handwriting, the way I know the specific sound of a case going wrong. I stood in a corridor near that window on a dark night and heard the crack of it falling, and I turned a corner and walked into someone in the dark and my torch caught a face I never forgot, and I turned my torch off in an alley months later for that same face.

The derelict hospital.

He’s at the derelict hospital.

The stalker sent me that video to gloat. He doesn’t know what he’s given me. He has no idea that I’ve been in that building, that I know that window, that this particular piece of cruelty has just handed me the one thing I needed.

I’m already running.

Chapter thirty-eight

Micah

The rope has stopped hurting.

That’s the part that scares me more than anything else has tonight, more than the fever or the dark or the shape of the man moving somewhere behind me. My wrists went past pain about an hour ago, out the other side into a kind of numbness that feels less like relief and more like a warning. My body giving up on telling me something is wrong because it’s decided I already know.

I flex my fingers anyway. Slow, small movements, the kind I hope don’t show. I’ve been doing it since he tied me here, working the give in the knot without looking like I’m working anything at all, because the one thing I learned a long time ago and never managed to forget is that the moment you let someone see you trying, they take the trying away from you.

I know this building. Even the bones of it, the particular cold that comes off old brick that’s been rained on for longer than it’s been dry. I’ve climbed through a dozen places just like it with a camera in my hand and a grin on my face, and it is a special kind of cruel that the thing I turned into a career, the thing that felt like freedom, is the same thing that’s ending up killing me.

Footsteps. Unhurried. He’s never in a hurry, that’s the worst part, he moves through this the way a man moves through his own kitchen.

“You’re awake.”

I don’t answer. I’ve learned that too, a long time ago, in rooms much smaller than this one.

He crouches in front of me, and the little bit of light from his torch on the floor catches him from underneath in a way that makes him look almost gentle, and that’s the thing I can’t get past, even now, even here. He is so ordinary. Thinning hair. A soft, forgettable face, the kind you’d walk past on any street in London and never once look back at. A gray fleece, the unofficial uniform that used to mean a car waiting outside a building I didn’t want to be in, a hand on my shoulder steering me toward it. Dave. Just Dave. Never anyone’s first thought when they pictured a monster, and that was always the point of him, that was always what made him useful to the people above him. Nobody watches the driver.

“I used to bring you your tea,” he says, like we’re catching up. “Remember that? Two sugars. You always said thank you so nicely.” His head tilts. “None of the other boys said thank you.”

My stomach turns over slow and complete, the particular nausea of a memory I’ve spent years building a wall around suddenly having a face put back on it.

“You were kind to all of us,” I say, because staying silent isn’t working and maybe words will buy me something, time or information or just the small mercy of him talking instead of doing something worse.

“You were different.” He says it simply, like it’s just a fact, like the sky being a particular color. “I knew it the second I saw you. I used to imagine, you know. What would happen when you didn’t belong to them anymore.” He reaches out and tucks a piece of hair off my face, and I flinch so hard the rope bites into skin I thought had gone past feeling. “I’ve been very patient.”

I think about being sick. I think about the ring, the terror of being fifteen and property, and somewhere underneath all of it, cold and steady, I think about Lennox, because thinking about Lennox is the only thing keeping the room from spinning.

“He’s coming,” I say, before I can stop myself.

Something moves through Dave’s face, quick and unimpressed. “Is he? Your detective.” He says the word like it tastes bad. “I’ve been very good to you both. I gave you flowers. I let him think he was clever.” He stands, drifts back toward the window, the broken one, the one with the two snapped cords hanging like something’s spine. “He won’t be able to find you.”

I close my eyes and pray even though none of my prayers have ever been answered.

The sound that comes through the building isn’t subtle, glass giving way somewhere below us, then feet on stairs that don’t sound careful at all, and Dave’s whole body goes rigid in a way that tells me, even before I hear the voice, that he knows exactly who’s coming.

“Micah!”

It’s the only thing in the world I want to hear and it terrifies me anyway, because Lennox comes through the doorway with his coat torn at the shoulder and blood already on his knuckles from somewhere and his eyes go to me first, just for a fraction of a second, checking, cataloguing, the way he catalogues everything, and in that fraction of a second Dave moves.

I scream his name. It comes out wrong, cracked, useless.

They go into each other hard enough that the whole structure seems to shudder. Dave gets a shoulder into him first, drives him back into the door frame with a crack that I feel in my own teeth, and for one horrible second I think that’s it, that’s the whole fight, over before it started, and then Lennox comes off the frame swinging and I understand for the first time in my life what it actually looks like when a person decides they are not losing something.