Page 69 of Psycho Obsession
Hallow looks out the open back doors. She sees thefamilies huddled by their cars. She sees the flashing lights of the police who are too late to save anyone. Then, she looks down at our father. He is weeping, the tears flooding his pinned-open eyes, his mouth moving in a silent, pathetic prayer for a mercy he never gave.
She meets my eyes. For a heartbeat, I see the girl I found in the funhouse—the one who wanted to be held, the one who wanted the light. Then, the light goes out.
“They watched,” she whispers, her voice projected one last time through the cracked PA system. “The whole city watched me break. And they didn’t move a fucking inch.”
She slams her heel down on the button.
The world doesn’t end with a bang. It ends with a blinding, white-hot roar.
The charges Ryker set weren’t just on the cables. They were in the pilings. The bridge doesn’t just fall; it disintegrates. I feel the floor of the ambulance vanish. We’re weightless—a white metal coffin falling through the smoke and the fire.
The last thing I see before the black water swallows us is Hallow’s face. She isn’t screaming. She’s smiling.
And next to her, Ryker is laughing, the silver of his mask reflecting the orange glow of the dying city.
The water hits like concrete. The windshield shatters, a wall of freezing, oily darkness surging into the cab, crushing the air out of my lungs. I’m spinning, tangled in wires and glass, the pressure screaming in my ears.
I reach out blindly, my hand clawing through the dark, searching for the only thing that matters. I find a wrist. Small. Cold. Tethered.
I pull with everything I have, my muscles screaming, the salt-water burning my eyes. I’m not letting go. Not again. Not even if I have to drag her through the gates of hell.
We break the surface fifty yards away from the wreckage. The bridge is gone. Only the two stone towers remain, standing like tombstones in the fog. The harbour is a graveyard of floating debris and burning oil.
I’m treading water, gasping, holding Hallow’s head above the surface. She’s unconscious, her hair a dark web around her face.
Then, twenty feet away, a black shape breaks the water.
Ryker.
He’s holding the gurney. Dad is still strapped to it, coughing and sputtering, the salt-water finally forcing his paralysed lungs to fight. Ryker wipes the water from his silver mask and looks at me.
“Phase one is complete, Jex,” he shouts over the roar of the fires. “The world thinks we’re all dead. Now… we go to work.”
A silent, black submersible—a sleek, predatory shadow—rises from the depths behind him, its hatch opening like a mouth.
“Coming, little brother? Or do you want to try your luck with the search parties?”
Part Four
They thought they killed us in the water.
They thought the fire took the truth and buried it in the silt.
They were wrong.
The monster in the mask didn’t come to bring us home.
He came to give us the throne.
I’m not the girl on the gurney anymore.
I’m the blade in the dark, the blood in the water, and the nightmare my father created.
Ryker owns the shadows.
Jex owns my body.
And I? I own the trigger.
