Page 31 of Antihero (Tregam’s Fractured Souls #3)

Chapter eleven

“ H ere? Not the usual room?” I ask as I sit across from Charlotte at a small table by the low window in the dining hall. At this hour, we’re some of the only ones in here, just a couple of other tenants lingering, reading, or staring into nothing on the other side of the room.

Charlotte looks up, one knee crossed over the other, her blonde hair straight and neat, her blouse pressed. And yet…

I frown at her. Something is wrong. Built up over the previous months, but this is the worst I’ve seen her. Her usually steady gaze flickers, her nails bitten down until the skin is red. She keeps her hands under the other side of the table, her notebook closed on top of it.

“There appears to have been a break-in on the other side of the castle,” she tells me. “A patient is missing. Just a harmless girl…" Her voice trails off, as does her attention. She comes back with a start. "They’re keeping everyone to their own rooms and the main rooms while they investigate.”

“Interesting.” I’ll have to ask Paige about the missing patient, though I struggle to imagine she murdered this 'harmless girl'.

“You haven’t heard about it?”

I shake my head once. “Nope.”

Charlotte’s gaze drops.

“You know the patient?”

Charlotte shrugs. “She had been here a long time.”

“From when you worked here?”

Her eyes cut to me, then narrow slightly. “I worked at the orphanage,” she corrects, voice steady.

If I’m going to save Charlotte, since I’m close to convinced she’s Paige’s next victim, I’m going to have to understand why she’s next.

I glance away as the only other person left in the room leaves.

We’re alone. Charlotte is still staring at me when I turn back to her.

“Those documents lost from the dead guy's safe… your name, your signature wouldn’t be on any of them?”

Her lips part slightly, then close. “It can’t be you.”

“What?”

“Harvey… Wraith’s first victim. He was dead before you ever arrived on the island.”

I straighten. “Why would you think it was me?” I ask, genuinely confused.

“This is what you do, is it not? Kill the ones that deserve it?”

I search her face for some mistake of my own. But all I see is acceptance. The empty room presses on me, the quiet, the isolation. I almost laugh when I realise. She thinks I’m going to kill her. But if she thinks that, then she knows… “Who do you think I am?”

“You’re Needler,” she answers simply. “But you’re not our Wraith. You can’t be.”

My shocked laugh comes out too dry. “How long have you thought that?”

“A month. Two. I’ve known that.”

“And you didn’t say anything? To anyone?”

Charlotte straightens her skirt, looking down to break eye contact. “I suppose I appreciate your work.”

“Even if that ‘work’ included your past colleagues?”

Her expression shutters. “Even then. I’d understand.”

“Why?” I press.

She looks away.

I lean on the table, urging her, “Tell me why the Wraith would be after you. Charlotte, I can help you…”

“No,” she says, softly, but a rejection all the same. I stare at her. “I feel the noose closing in. Harry, then Filan…” She looks back up at me; her voice is so soft I almost don’t hear it. “There’s only one way it ends.”

“It doesn’t have to.” I brace my hand on the table between us, and say again, “ Tell me .”

Charlotte blinks away the brief wetness that threatens to spill from her eyes.

Then, finally, she gazes out of the window, towards the sea, towards Tregam behind its cloak of mist. “I thought we were helping them. I thought…” She looks down, biting her lip, the next words a hushed, hissed whisper, “I thought it was right.” She lifts her chin and swipes away a tear I didn’t see.

“I was young, and so, so, stupid. I should have questioned what was being done. But I didn’t.

That in itself is its own kind of evil. Now it’s all caught up with Harry, with the others. And for what I’ve done…”

“What did you do?” I ask, even though I already know. Harry was no psychiatrist. He needed one to sign off on the treatments he proposed, since he was claiming them as a cure for 'mental discrepancies'.

Her eyes are glassy as they meet mine. “I’m the only reason it could all happen.

They… the doctors, the others, needed a psych to sign off on the treatments.

Because they claimed they were for diseases of the mind, not the body.

Those girls…” For the first time, there’s a break in her.

A hitch in her voice before she goes on, softer now.

“I was at the orphanage every day, talking to the girls. They trusted me. They…” Here, she cuts off, sobs once.

Her hand trembles near her mouth before she goes on.

“The others were always telling me what the girls needed, the treatment that would help so many of them…”

“Lobotomy,” I fill in for her, my voice as gently as it can be around that word.

Charlotte bites her lip and shakes her head, but not in denial.

“Back then… it was new. They said it could fix… impulses, violence, everything. Hysteria—that was the word assigned to the girls when nothing else would fit. No adverse effect to the patient, they said. They believed in it, made me believe in it. They were older, they hired me because I was young and such a na?ve fool! I thought… I really thought it was the right thing.”

I wait as she pauses, staring out of the window, into nothing, or the past. “Then they weren’t coming back.

And the reports started coming out about the asylum.

The other things… the sterilisations.” She shakes her head.

“I didn’t have any part in those, never knew about them.

But that’s not enough. I should have stopped them.

I could have stopped all of it. But when I tried to sound the alarm, the men, Harry, they quashed every story.

I was a young woman; it was easy for them to discredit me.

” Again, she shakes her head, her voice trembling slightly.

“They had everything so tightly controlled. So much money involved. I’d already signed so much I… I gave up.”

She’s silent, staring blankly at the tabletop.

“You burned down the orphanage,” I say the words as I realise them. I’d been assuming Paige. But the way Charlotte looks up at me now, I understand. “I thought it was one of the girls. Because no one was hurt.”

Charlotte nods once, gaze distant. “I didn’t know what else to do. I waited until they were out on an excursion.”

“But then you stayed here, worked at the asylum.” I gesture at the room, the place. “Why?”

Her straight hair swings with the shake of her head. She lets a single tear fall. “I hate this place! I hate being here. This place is haunted,” she hisses. “I feel their ghosts, always accusing.” She spreads her hands, shoulder slumping. “But so many of them never got to leave. So why should I?”

“You once told me that I didn’t believe I deserved happiness. But you’re the same. Do you really think you deserve to die?”

Charlotte sighs, staring outwards again. “It’s not up for me to decide what I deserve anymore. But if the Wraith comes for me, which I think you know they will, I won’t fight it.”

“Charlotte…”

“Tristan,” she says back, surprising me with my real name. “It’s been too late for me for a long time. But you can still leave. You’ve found your missing pieces now.”

I laugh bitterly. “You’re not still trying to be my psychiatrist?”

Charlotte presses on, her tears forgotten. “Let me. Tell me why you started killing.”

My eyes narrow. “If you know who I am, you know that, too.”

“Say it out loud.”

I sigh through my nose. After everything Charlotte just told me, after all her patience with my recalcitrant ass these past months, I suppose I owe her an answer. Even if it’s just to satisfy her professional curiosity. “I started hunting murderers because I thought one had killed my sister.”

“But she was a killer, too.”

“Yes.” The word catches in my throat. I know what Charlotte is waiting for. “I had to kill her.”

“Did you? Have to?”

I open my mouth to say no , then close it again. I’d always thought it was a choice I’d made, to end her the way I did. That I could’ve chosen otherwise and been a better man for it.

“What else do you think you could’ve done?” Charlotte asks insistently.

“I could’ve…” I trail off, then conclude weakly, “Let her kill the woman who was helping me, while I and the man who loved her watched.” As I say it, I see how improbable that option sounds.

What if I had done that? What might that’ve birthed?

More hatred, endless regret. Dirk would have cut me into little pieces on his way to killing Cassandra, probably in just the way I would have if she’d not been my sister.

In the end, I’d have let him kill me just to be free of the self-loathing.

“I could’ve let her keep doing what she was doing.”

But I couldn’t have. Charlotte smiles softly. She knows this. “You, being who you became, and her being who she was, that wasn’t really a choice, was it? You did the only thing you could have.”

I feel a little dizzy, like something kept behind walls in my mind is suddenly releasing. I feel heavy in my chair. But no tears fall. Because this feeling isn’t grief. I’ve had enough of grief. This is… realisation. Truth.

“Tristan,” Charlotte says, “Now you see, you do deserve happiness. It can be something, or someone, who reminds you how to live again. But in the end, it has to be you choosing to live, with or without them.”

Would I go on? Without Paige? Yes, I now think I’d still leave this island and Tregam, try to carve out a life for myself, not divorced from my past but at least free from it. But I want more than anything to do it with her instead. For whatever time we could possibly have.

Charlotte, watching me, smiles. “I think you’ve already chosen.”

***

Wraith

I heard him.