Page 81 of Psycho Obsession
She yanks the woman’s head back and leans in close.
“You wore these diamonds to my ‘coming out’ party,” Hallow whispers, her voice a jagged caress. “Do you remember? I was bleeding under my dress while you toasted to my health.”
Hallow doesn’t slit her throat. She drives the serrated blade into the woman’s shoulder, twisting it until she hears the wet pop of the joint. The woman’s scream is a raw, guttural thing that fills the ballroom. Hallow pulls the knife out and starts to methodically slice the silk dress away, carving thin, shallow lines into the woman’s skin, painting her in her own blood until she looks as wrecked as Hallow felt on that gurney.
I turn my attention to the remaining guards. They’re shaking, their training failing them as they realise they aren’t fighting men—they’re fighting the physical manifestation of the city’s sins. I move like a blur, my combat knife finding the soft underbelly of the nearest guard. I gut him upward, feeling the heat of his entrails spill over my hands. It’s slick, steaming, and beautiful.
I grab the next one by the throat, hoisting him up and slamming him onto the buffet table. I shove his faceinto a silver platter of oysters, then grab a heavy carving fork and drive it through his hand, pinning him to the mahogany table. He howls, his blood dripping into the expensive hors d’oeuvres.
“Look at them, Ryker!” I shout, my face splattered with red. “Look at the elite!”
Ryker is standing over the magistrate, who is now a whimpering, faceless mess on the floor. Ryker looks up, his eyes cold and dark. He walks over to the heavy velvet curtains and rips the gold-tasseled cord away.
He walks to the centre of the room where the chandelier’s winch is located.
“Jex,” Ryker says, his voice devoid of any humanity. “Help me hang the Magistrate from his own house. I want the people outside to see him swinging against the fire.”
I grab the half-dead man by his collar and drag him toward the centre of the room. We loop the gold cord around his neck, the silk biting into his throat. I kick the winch release. The magistrate is jerked upward, his feet kicking frantically against the air, his face turning a deep, bruised purple as he’s hoisted toward the crystal lights.
The remaining Council members are catatonic, some vomiting on their shoes, others praying to a god who left Oakhaven an hour ago.
Hallow stands in the middle of the carnage, her white skin almost entirely hidden by the red spray. she looks at the swinging body, then at the terrified survivors. She raises her blade, licking a streak of blood from the serrated edge, her eyes glowing with a sick, ecstatic light.
“Who’s next?” she asks, her voice a sweet,deadly sing-song. “The night is still young, and we have so many more sins to pay for.”
The Magistrate’s heels drum a frantic, dying rhythm against the mahogany belly of the grand piano as he swings. Each kick sends a fresh spray of blood from his carved face, speckling the ivory keys like a sick piece of sheet music. Above the wet, choking sounds of his execution, the room is a vacuum of horror.
“Stop… please…” a voice whimpers.
It’s the High Priestess of the Cathedral we just levelled—a woman whose hands have blessed every child in this city. She’s huddled under a table, her lace habit soaked in the bile of the man dying next to her.
Hallow stops. She doesn’t look at the woman. She looks at her own hands, then at the Magistrate. She walks over to the piano, sitting on the bench directly beneath his dangling, twitching feet. A drop of his blood falls, landing right on her forehead, sliding down the bridge of her nose like a crimson tear.
She begins to play.
It’s a simple, haunting lullaby—the one our mother used to hum before the “Clinic” took her, too. The notes are clashing and broken because the Magistrate’s feet keep hitting the high strings, creating a discordant, jarring thud-thud-thud against the melody.
“Do you remember this one, Father Peter?” Hallow asks, her voice devoid of its rage, replaced by a hollow, terrifying sweetness. “You sang it to me while they prepped the lasers for my skin. You told me it was the sound of angels.”
She hits a sharp, violent chord.
“I didn’t see any angels,” she whispers. “I just saw you holding the tray of scalpels.”
I move toward the huddle of survivors. I don’t want to shoot them. I want them to feel the weight of what they’ve done. I grab a young man—maybe twenty, a Council legacy—by the back of his neck and drag him toward the centre of the room. He’s sobbing so hard he can’t breathe, his expensive loafers sliding through the slick gore on the floor.
“Look at her!” I roar, shoving his face toward Hallow as she plays her death-song. “Look at what you paid for! You wanted a pure city? You wanted a perfect bloodline? This is the cost!”
I shove him down onto his knees and force his hands into the pool of blood spreading from the guard I gutted. I want him to feel the cooling heat of it. I want it under his fingernails.
“Rub it in,” I hiss, leaning over him, my breath hot against his ear. “It’s your inheritance. Don’t let a drop go to waste.”
Ryker, meanwhile, has found the ‘Record of Sales’—the heavy, leather-bound ledger kept in the wall safe. He walks to the centre of the ballroom, the book open in his hands. He begins to read the names aloud, his voice a steady, rhythmic tolling of a funeral bell.
“Entry 402: Hallow. Sold to the Magistrate for ‘experimental refinement.’ Price: Two million. Witnessed by the High Priestess.”
Every time he reads a name, he walks to the corresponding person in the room and draws a shallow, horizontal line across their throat with a scalpel—not deep enough to kill, just enough to let them feel the bite of the steel.
“You aren’t people anymore,” Ryker says, his eyes landing on the Priestess. “You’re ledger entries. And the debt is being settled in cash.”
