Page 141 of The Arbiter
I lay on the floor, the cold tile biting into my skin, and I felt... nothing. No rage. No shock. Just a hollow, echoing silence where my soul used to be. I watched her crying on her knees, her silhouette disappearing behind the wall of uniforms. Pathetic. I realized that the Arbiter had finally been judged.
I gave her my darkness, and she gave me a cage.
I don’t move. I don’t blink. I just stare at the wall and wonder if she’s sleeping in a soft bed tonight.
Did she find Lucy? Is she back in her apartment? Or is she somewhere else, somewhere "safe," scrubbing the memory of my touch off her body with scalding water? I wonder if she looks at the bruises I have left on her body and feels a twinge of regret,or if she views them as the marks of a survivor who finally killed her captor.
I wonder if she’s sorry.
I wonder if she sits in the dark and realizes that by putting me in here, she has left herself entirely alone in a world that doesn't care about her "innocence."
I want to believe she’s haunted. I want to believe that every time she hears a heavy footstep or a door clicking shut, her heart stutters because she thinks it’s me. I want to be the ghost that ruins her peace, the ghost lurking in the corners of her peripheral vision.
I'm just another number in a system that has finally swallowed me whole. I don't know where she is. I don't know if she's eating, if she's crying, or if she's already forgotten the way my name felt in her mouth.
The uncertainty is a slower death than any bullet.
I am just a man in a hole, whispering a name to a wall that doesn't answer back. I gave her everything, and she used it to build my coffin. I hope she’s sleeping well. Because as long as I’m breathing, the dream isn't over. It’s just waiting for the lights to go out.
The sound of the buzzer is like a physical electric shock to my system. It feels like I've been suspended in this grey void for so long that any noise feels like an intrusion, a violation of the silence I’ve been using to keep the ghosts at bay. I don’t move from the corner. I don’t want to give the camera the satisfaction of seeing me react.
Then, the heavy magnetic lock clicks.
"Deimos," the guard’s voice is rough, devoid of the fear people usually have when they speak my name. Here, I’m just a number. Just a piece of meat waiting for a trial.
"Get up. You have a visitor."
My heart, which I thought had turned to stone the moment she handed me over in the mortuary, suddenly lurches. It hits my ribs with a violent, agonizing thud.
A visitor.
No one knows I’m here. No one should know. Only my closest men who answered to me. My father’s empire is built on shadows; he wouldn't come to a public precinct. The hitmen I worked with wouldn't risk the exposure.
It’s her.
It has to be her.
The thought is a poison. A beautiful, lethal hope that floods my veins before I can stop it. She couldn't do it. She couldn't leave me here. She realized that the cage she put me in is the only thing keeping her soul from drifting away. She’s come to tell me it was a mistake. She’s come to tell me she’s sorry.
I stand up, my legs feeling like they belong to someone else. I smooth the wrinkled fabric of the jumpsuit. This pathetic, degrading skin I’ve been forced to wear. My hands are shaking. The Arbiter, the man who stared down death without blinking, is trembling because of a woman who destroyed him.
"Move it," the guard grunts.
I follow him down the narrow, bleached-white corridor. Every step feels like an eternity. I’m already imagining her face behind the glass. I’m imagining the way her eyes will look. Red-rimmed from crying, filled with that desperate, frantic love that she tried so hard to deny.
I’ll forgive her. I realize it in an instant. I would forgive her for a thousand betrayals just to see the way her hair falls over her shoulder one more time.
We reach the visitation room. It’s cold. Smelling of industrial floor wax and old coffee. I see the silhouette through the thick, reinforced glass.
My breathing stops. My vision blurs for a second and my mind is already painting in the details of her face, the curve of her neck, the light in her eyes. I sit down, my fingers ghosting over the cold surface of the table, ready to press my palm against hers.
I look up.
The world doesn't just stop. It shatters.
It isn't Madeline.
The face staring back at me across the glass is older. Polished. Cruel. The eyes are a mirror of my own, but filled with a mocking, fatherly pride that makes my stomach turn to ice.
