Page 32 of Antihero (Tregam’s Fractured Souls #3)

I didn’t say it back. I wanted to, so much that my chest constricts just thinking about it. How I could’ve opened my eyes, kissed him, said sorry for the terrible things I said. And then told him I loved him too.

But that wouldn’t be fair.

“Paige? Do you understand what I’m saying?” The soft voice brings me back. Colour has drained from the small, sterile room. Probably from me, too. Dr Goodry is peering at me. That look—concern, yes, and… pity.

My mouth forms the words, ones I knew I’d say someday. They come out clear, even. “I’m sick. It’s happened.”

The pity is outracing the concern now. “I’m afraid so.” His hand, brown and wrinkled, pats the back of mine. I barely feel it. “We can fight it. You can beat it…”

“They’re low, though, aren’t they? The odds.”

His lips tighten. Dr Goodry presses a pill bottle into my hand and instructs, “Take two each night and each morning. Start tonight. 7pm. We’ll start the treatment next week, okay?”

Very, very low, I conclude to myself.

I say okay. I nod. But I don’t know if I mean any of it.

And that’s why. Why saying it back would’ve been crueler than not. Why I can never say it back. Because I’ll be gone, sooner rather than later.

But first. Just one left. One more who needs to pay.

And I’m not going to wait any longer.

***

“I’ve got a feeling I won’t be back after this.”

The grave doesn’t answer. Not even a conspicuously timed breeze for some reassurance. What would Molly want me to do? Live, and let live, probably.

Odd, I’d never considered that before.

“Well, there’s only one left now,” I say, almost arguing with words unsaid. “I’m dead anyway, so…” Maybe I’m mad, talking to a grave. Moreso than I’m mad for committing all these murders.

A bird tweets behind me. The sun is going down. I stopped at my house long enough to leave the pills, and something for Tristan. He wants me to live and let live, too. Would tell me to take the pills and just try to fight this thing. I can’t face him.

He’s going to hate me after tonight anyway. Probably better that way.

I lean over my crossed legs—the quiet in my mind is so deep that the loneliness crushes down on me—and press my hand to the dry grass covering the mound.

The grave I dug. “I’ll be seeing you soon, Mol— ah !

” I snatch my hand away, finding a thorn buried deep in my palm; and glare over my hand at her resting place, setting my jaw.

“There’s really no need to be like that. ”

***

I didn’t really think she’d come. But here she is.

She’s been here often enough to know her way around.

I’ve watched from the dark as she stepped over these ashes, as she climbed that fallen beam that used to hold up the veranda and walked across the blackened pallet we used to make our beds on.

The dining table still sits with its chairs, all black and filthy with ash.

She’s sat there now, dirtying her neat clothes.

She’s so out-of-place now, just like she was then. Too pressed and put-together, with tailored feminine suits and her reassuring smile we all trusted too well. We handed our secrets over. Secrets she passed on. They became faults that were used to justify the need for ‘treatment’.

I see her face. Haunted. That fits here, at least. Dark clouds are rolling in, angry and black.

The wind is coming ahead of it, gusting, hinting at the violence it precedes.

Out towards Tregam, the lights of boats dwindle.

The ferry is nearing the end of its three-hour route to our dock.

The Bunker is open tonight. I won’t be going there.

I won’t be going anywhere after this. There’s no future for me anymore.

The storm can take me. I feel it pushing and pulling at my limbs, like it's impatient to get on with it. So am I.

Charlotte takes the stone steps down, blackened by the fire. People say the fire started in the basement, devouring upwards from there. Tristan thinks it was me. It wasn’t.

I step out from behind one of the pillars that still stands in the basement, stone columns reaching up to a roof, now nothing but three fire-eaten planks, open to the sky.

Beyond the crumbling stone walls of the basement, the ruins of the orphanage tower like depressing sentinels.

Rubble litters the space between us, with the remains of a couch off to one side.

We girls used to come down here to watch movies on the projector, in a sea of cushions and blankets.

The top and bottom of the image were always cut off because the basement was only five feet tall and not big enough for it.

I haven’t bothered to hide myself, my face, anything.

Charlotte stills, stares at me. She doesn’t seem surprised. I wonder if she ever suspected me.

“Paige,” she says, almost sounding relieved. But she must know I’m the Wraith. This makes her the lamb, come willingly to its own slaughter.

“Yes,” I say. My arms are bare, but I don’t feel the cold, don’t flinch at the first icy drops that hit my skin. I’ve felt nothing since the doctor’s office. Charlotte glances at the sky, the blackness deeper as the clouds close in on the island.

“I want you to know, I’m sorry,” she says. “For what I let happen… for what I did to you.”

“I’m not going to let you live because you’re sorry ,” I bite out, my voice breaking on the last word.

A helicopter blazes overhead. I watch it with a spike of panic in my chest. We never get helicopters here.

We’re not important enough. When I look back at Charlotte, she’s watching it pass, too.

“Did you call the police?” I ask accusingly.

She could have confessed to them, told them who she was.

Is she bait? I glance around, but the tops of the basement walls remain empty, the ruin dead but for us.

“No!” She meets my eye. “But they could still be here for the Wraith. You need to get away. Now.”

“Uh-huh. Sure.” The helicopter has disappeared towards the other side of the island. Kidswal. It’s chopping echoes back to us. What’s it here for?

“I’m not asking you to let me live,” Charlotte returns so evenly that I believe her.

That makes me angrier. I want her to be afraid, to fear and fight like we did. “ None of it could’ve happened without you!”

"I know. I'm sorry."

“I don’t care!” I shout. Whether she’s crying or if it’s just the rain coalescing on her cheeks, I can’t tell and don’t care. “It’s too late to be sorry.”

Charlotte nods weakly, then falls to her knees, heedless of the rubble that cuts at her pants.

She’s waiting. I grit my teeth and pull it out of my waistband—the cord.

It hadn’t felt right when I packed it; it doesn’t feel right now.

But I’ll use it. This last time. Now, Charlotte looks up. “You’re not safe, Paige.”

I frown at that. “What do you mean?”

“You need to leave this island. Just go, don’t come back. Don’t trust anyone you know here.”

Does she know about Tristan? Who he really is? Perhaps she thinks he’s going to come for me. “I’m not leaving.”

She shakes her head, like she knows it's hopeless. “They’ll get you. You’ll never be free of them as long as you stay.”

“Who?” I demand. “I’ve killed them all! Who’s left?”

“I don’t know!” she shouts back. Wind throws her hair across her face. “There’s more than you think. I don’t know who they are. If I knew, I’d tell you. But they kept things from me, too.”

My jaw tightens. “You’re lying. Like you lied to us back then.”

“It won’t end with me. I wish it would.”

“Then how will it end?”

***

Needler

Paige wasn’t at work. Nor was she at her house.

She’s doing more than avoiding me now. She’s hiding from me.

But she knows this island better than I do, having lived here her whole life.

I search for her. I wait for her at her door, and I go to the grave I know she visits up on a northern hill.

There are flowers there, recently left. So, I go back to her house.

I haven’t gone inside, not yet. Perhaps I’m afraid of what I’ll find. Perhaps I know it’ll be a goodbye.

This lingering is how Charlotte slips through my grasp, too.

I’ve been watching her, waiting for Paige to come, to either lure or attack her.

I realised too late that trying to track both women was stupid.

But I’m not thinking straight. And now both have managed to elude me.

As the sun starts towards a horizon darkened by storm clouds, I get desperate.

Paige hasn’t bothered to fix her door since I broke it down last time. I brace myself as I walk right into her home.

Empty. The kind of emptiness that speaks of abandonment. The kind that mirrors itself in my chest as I look upon the space.

The first thing my eyes catch on is the mask.

There on her coffee table. Silver, full-faced, angry.

I nearly stumble to see it; it reeks so strongly of a past I’ve tried desperately to step away from.

Tried, and failed. Beside it, is a long, wickedly sharp tine— a needle as long as my forearm, as silver and shiny as the mask next to it.

I want to tell her no . That I choose her, not this. I want to pick up the mask and break it in half. Damn her.

She thinks I need this. But she’s wrong.

She thinks she’s sparing me the tragedy of her. I don’t want to be spared.

Further back on the table, I see the small box. Within the span of a breath, it’s in my hands with the lid flipped back. My laugh is nearly a sob as I see what’s inside.

Heart-shaped chocolates.

Dropping them back on the table, I know she’s either gone or about to be. I take a step back, needing to think more clearly. The mask stares back at me.

I turn away, dragging my eyes from the lidless face, the future in being Needler and nothing else, and step into the cramped bathroom, hoping that things are missing—a toothbrush, or a comb. More that would indicate she went prepared, that she planned to live.