Page 109 of Infamous

My grip tightens. “Your partner?”

“In private work. Off the books. No restrictions, no ethics boards. We could have changed the world, she and I.” His voice takes on a manic edge, the words spilling faster. “We could have saved lives that were never supposed to be saved. You don’t understand what we were doing here…”

“Oh, I understand perfectly,” I cut in, low and deadly. “Organ farming. Black market transplants. People who never made itout alive so you could sell what was left of them. That’s your miracle work, isn’t it?”

He laughs again, but it’s weaker this time. “Call it what you want. Everyone profits. Hospitals, senators, insurance companies.”

“Nother.” My voice rips through him. “She didn’t profit. She was another one of your goddamn experiments.”

“She was chosen,” he rasps. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to touch genius? To shape it? She was going to change medicine. She was going to help meperfectit.”

I spit in his face. The sound is wet and ugly. “You didn’t want to perfect medicine. You wanted to play god. You turned her into your lab rat, and when she fought back, you broke her.”

He smiles through the blood. “She broke herself. You can kill me,” he wheezes, “but it won’t change the fact that your little girlfriend did it to herself.”

The words slice through the room.

“What?” My hand freezes midair.

He smirks, teeth pink with blood. “That wound. The one you’re so upset about. She stabbed herself. I didn’t touch her.”

For a moment, my breath stills and the air goes dead quiet.

A part of me knows it’s possible.

A darker part refuses to believe it.

“You’re lying,” I snarl, grabbing him by the collar and slamming him back into the wall again. “You pumped her full of enough drugs to screw her head sideways. You did this to her.”

He laughs, low and breathless. “She wanted out. I just… facilitated the moment.”

That’s the last straw.

I slam him down onto the ground, straddling him as my fists find their rhythm - cheek, jaw, temple. Over and over until the bones give way beneath my knuckles. Until his laughter stops.Until the sound of his breath turns into a wet rattle that barely qualifies as life.

“You think she’s just another body?” I snarl. “You think you can cut people open and still sleep at night?”

He doesn’t answer. His eyes are rolling now, lips twitching in something that might’ve been a grin if he still had the strength.

I grab a handful of his blood-slick collar and haul him up one last time, forcing him to look at me. “You took everything from her. From me. From every family that buried an empty box because of you.”

He wheezes, “You’re just like me.”

“No,” I whisper, pressing the barrel of my gun to his temple. “I don’texperimenton monsters like you. I end them.”

The shot is loud.

Final.

Kellerman’s head snaps back, and he slumps to the floor. A single drop of blood splashes across my sleeve, warm and dark.

For a long time, I just stand there - breathing hard, chest heaving, the world ringing in my ears. The rage drains out slow, replaced by something heavier.

Grief.

Because he may be right about one thing - that she did this to herself. Maybe not by choice, not fully, but through despair. And now, I’m the one left holding what’s left of her hope.

When I finally climb out of that concrete hole, they tell me she’s in recovery, that her pulse is “stable for now”. Her chest is moving. Faint. Shallow. But it’s moving. For a stupid, holy second my knees go soft and I have to brace myself against the wall to stop from collapsing.