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“One of your kind has broken the pact of evil and turned on her own,” the letter read.
My eyes fell to the spot on the stage where my attacker had taken his own life shortly after shooting McCourt.
“So you’re part of all this now? Them?”
“Fucking bitch,” I heard McCourt mutter as I left his office. But to me, it wasn’t an insult. Not the way he said it, laced with defeat and rage. He was like a child throwing a tantrum, with no other way to vent. In this context, it was almost a compliment. Maybe the only time in my life when being called a bitch felt like one.
I was dancing with the devil now, fully caught in the tango. And the thing about dancing with the devil was that once you started, you didn’t get to decide when the music stopped.
She’d called me an angel and hugged me. And, for a moment, it had felt … good. But as my gaze shifted back to Carl Carr, I remembered what I truly was. A monster.
“In fact, I don’t put my faith in anything beyond the immense strength we all possess—the strength to achieve extraordinary things. But as you know all too well, some of those things can descend into pitch-black darkness. That’s the nature of human potential. It’s capable of both brilliance and horror.”
“Cut the shit. We all know you’re just like those scumbags in DC who jerk off people like Jan Novak to keep their power.”
None of it mattered. Not as long as Richter was guiding me through the shadows like the first light at dawn.
The world wasn’t just upside down anymore. It was twisted beyond repair. Chaos had become the new baseline, and insanity was its weapon of choice.
“And the doctrine is flawed because it lets people justify morally questionable actions just because they claim good intentions. The harm is the same, whether it’s deliberate or not. Richter and I live by a much simpler doctrine: the one where monsters are taken out, no innocents harmed. Smaller-scale justice. But even a bathtub fills if the drops keep coming.”
“The Ankh. It’s a mirror,” I murmured. “But instead of reflecting what people want to be seen, it reveals their true selves. Their darkest sins.”
“When you play in shit, you get dirty, you stupid girl,”
But hope in itself wasn’t enough. Not without fuel. It had to be fed and sustained, like everything else in life.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to go anywhere. I hope there’s nothing after this. No smiles. No tears. No love. No hate. No afterlife. No rebirth. Just … nothingness.” I felt a sharp ache in my chest as the weight of my lifelong loneliness pressed in from all sides. “I’m not sure I could bear to live another life as lonely as this one.”
I nodded and watched as his hand slipped away, leaving a strange emptiness where his touch had been.
Our relationship didn’t form through rainbows and pony rides, but through beasts and ghouls. We had been to hell and back, yet here we stood—cracked but unbroken.
Monsters and villains. One you had to kill. The other… was a bit more complicated.
I was a killer of killers. And on a killer’s playground, there was only one rule. Win and live, or lose and die.
