The Queen

by Skye Warren

  And wrong because I have no claim on this man. If he was able to find any solace in a horrifying situation, that’s a good thing.

  He shakes his head once, sharp. “There was no one.”

  The words strike me in the soft flesh of my heart. No one. “Then who—”

  “My mother.”

  A knot forms in my throat. “You never told me about her.”

  “I never tell anyone about her.”

  I reach across the console for his hand and squeeze. I’m convinced he’s going to pull away. Probably send me a scathing look for daring to touch him without permission, but he does something I don’t expect. He squeezes back.

  “She had schizophrenia,” he says softly. “At least that’s my best guess according to the records from the doctors. They had no idea what to do with her at the time. Mostly they just locked her up and tried every kind of barbaric treatment they could come up with.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I whisper.

  “Sometimes I think, can you even blame her for falling for Jonathan Scott? Her family had abandoned her. The doctors basically tortured her. He would have been the only man to show her any kindness.”

  “God. I’m sorry.”

  “And other times I think, maybe my father actually loved her back. They were both fucked up, both trapped. The asylum didn’t want it known that they had let a patient get pregnant, especially one who was sixteen, so they kept it quiet. Had them married in secret as if that could erase the fact that she couldn’t consent.”

  “How old was your father?”

  “Twenty five.”

  About the same age difference between Damon and me. What a sad way for him to come into the world. My eyebrows press together. “Then what happened to you?”

  “I stayed there,” he says simply.

  “A child. In an asylum. With actual patients.”

  He flashes me that signature smile, and I realize how much pain it hides. “Not exactly an idyllic childhood. They didn’t actually treat me that badly, even though I think all the doctors assumed I would be batshit insane.”

  “That’s terrible,” I whisper.

  God, no wonder he wouldn’t send anyone else into the asylum to die there. And no wonder he wouldn’t agree to blasting it to pieces, with the innocent patients inside. Patients like his mother. The only option was for him to come himself.

  “I don’t have very many memories. Running down the hallway. Sleeping in the same room as my mother. She would sing songs at night, but during the day her condition got worse. She wouldn’t stop screaming. Wouldn’t stop fighting.”

  We pull onto a paved road. A sign that’s clearly new and crisp proclaims that this is private property, no trespassers, violators will be prosecuted. We must be close. “What happened?”

  “They tried this new treatment. All of the inmates got daily exercise in the pool. They thought her wildness was a choice, that they could punish her out of it.” He gives a laugh hoarse with grief. “They would hold her under longer and longer. Until she finally drowned.”

  My eyes close in pain, but not before I see the trees lined up in a neat row on either side of the road. We’re about to go inside a building almost everyone would try to escape. And our only goal is to kill someone. Not just someone. One person in particular.

  “That’s when my father really snapped. News of her death came out in the press, and the place was shut down. Maybe we could have had a normal life, but he completely lost it after that. He believed that everyone was out to get him. That we would only survive by fighting, by stealing. By killing. And the worst part is, I understood. Even that young I knew that my mother was gone, and I knew exactly why. God, I understood him back then. What’s sick is I understand it now.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The front of the building looks brand-new, a smooth white exterior that might have been built five years ago instead of a hundred. Maybe they tore out the entire prison and made something new. That’s my fervent hope as we speed along the smooth pavement.

  Damon parks without any sense of fear or subterfuge.

  I squint at the dark glass, where I can only barely make out a wide reception desk. “You aren’t worried he’s going to… shoot at us?”

  Though even as I say the words, that doesn’t feel like Jonathan Scott’s style. There are many terrible words I could use to describe him. Monster. Sadist. But he isn’t a coward.

  “Why would he do that? He could have come to Tanglewood if he wanted me dead.”

  I glance at him, taken aback by how casually he discusses his death. “So he isn’t going to hurt you?”

  His laugh is a cold sound. “Oh, he’ll hurt me. Pain only makes you stronger, don’t you know? But he won’t kill me. Not yet. He would have stopped anyone else from entering these doors, though. That’s why I couldn’t have brought the mercs, even if I wanted to.”

  My footsteps falter. COME ALONE. “Will he stop me from entering?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I do.” Damon looks back at me, and his eyes soften. “I can’t swear to you that you’ll be safe here. I want you on the other side of the country. I want you on the other side of the world. On the moon. But I will do everything in my power to let you walk out of here unharmed.”

  It comes to me as I watch him in the overbright sun, standing in front of a modern asylum, that all he knows is sacrifice. All he knows is running through the halls of a dangerous mental hospital or leaving people behind so they don’t get hurt. Even coming here is a form of sacrifice, searching for some way to save the inmates who are still here and still alive.

  Of course Damon doesn’t want me here, where I might get hurt, in defiance of every sacrifice he’s ever made, and it’s a testament to his respect for me that he’s even honoring my request to come.

  “I trust you,” I say softly.

  I’m the one who pushes the door open, who steps inside first. He strides in after me, immediately moving to block my body with his. This is how it will be, unless I stop him. With him throwing his body in front of mine. He can’t stop himself. I’m the one who has to stop him.

  “Lovely,” he mutters.

  The place is eerily empty, the front desk unmanned, security stations to the right and left unguarded. There’s a cup of coffee in the waiting area, sitting cold and full beside one of the chairs, as if someone just got up to go to the bathroom and disappeared. It feels like waking up in Avery’s room, but she’s missing. Everyone is missing.

  “We should go to the security headquarters,” I say.

  He glances at me, curious. “I have his room number from Gabriel.”

  It was clear the second I looked at the schematics. How anyone in the outer circle, kept apart, would yearn to be in the center. It would literally make someone insane to sit at the outer edges. They wouldn’t stay there if they had the run of the place.

  “He’ll be in the center.”

  Damon looks like he considers arguing. And then he nods, once. And that trust takes my breath away. We move in long purposeful strides, directly back into the heart of this dark building. How many people went crazy between these walls? Some were already crazy, but others—others became that way.

  Around a corner I come to a halt. There are bodies strewn along the ground, dressed in beige, covered in blood. Oh God. Are these the nurses taken hostage? The other patients he couldn’t control?

  Damon steps around their bodies with casual indifference.

  As I follow behind him I realize they’re local police. This is what authorities sent in to deal with the situation? More death, more suffering. And for nothing.

  We come to another set of glass doors, this one completely blackened with some kind of tinting. There’s writing on the glass. Numbers and symbols scribbled in permanent marker. It’s a proof, I can see that right away. The kind I would love to mull over with a cold cup of coffee.

  And the marker sits on the floor directly in front.<
br />
  “One of his fucking tests,” Damon mutters.

  “Then let’s pass it.” I’m not going to waste time. There’s a clock counting down our lives. I lean down to pick up the marker, but Damon grabs it first.

  “Tell me what to write and I’ll do it.”

  “That’s not how it works. I need to think it through while I solve it.” I reach for the marker, but he holds it up high, like a high-stakes game of monkey-in-the-middle.

  “No.”

  I glare at him. “Why not?”

  “Because it’s probably rigged,” he shouts.

  Realization sinks into my stomach, cold and heavy. This glass is probably only tinted one way. The person on the other side of the door can see us. Or maybe they’re just using cameras. Jonathan Scott is still controlling things from behind the curtain.

  “I know you want to protect me,” I say softly. “But this proof? He left it for me. That means I need to solve it. This is why I had to come, even if I didn’t know it.”

  A muscle ticks in Damon’s jaw. He doesn’t want to let me. He doesn’t even want me to be here, but I’m as much a part of this as he is. Maybe he does see that, because he holds out the marker.

  It takes me longer to do the proof because it’s in a domain I haven’t worked in lately—trigonometry. I draw angles and equivalencies beside the door to remind myself of them. Then I solve the proof directly on the door, working line by line.

  The strange thing about the proof is that, despite its complexity it’s not meaningful or even very interesting. Almost as if it’s making me think in circles for no reason.

  Only when I get to the end do I realize what he’s done.

  Sigma for the sum of a sequence.

  Psi, the closest greek alphabet letter to W.

  Epsilon, epsilon, theta.

  He’s spelled out SWEET PEACH, which is what he called me when he hurt me.

  Damon swears under his breath. The doors open with a muffled whoosh, and from instinct I jump back. He moves in front of me, but there’s no one on the other side. They must be mechanized. Someone controls them, a puppetmaster—so what does that make me?

  My sneakers crunch on glass as we step inside. I look up to see a modern glass light, only half of it remaining in a long jagged edge. It suddenly seems silly to have such an impractical fixture in such an important place. Why are the walls in such a secure place made of glass?

  They probably never expected inmates to break out of their cells. They never expected Jonathan Scott. Like the Titanic that couldn’t sink, they were brought down by their own hubris.

  Only once we’re inside do I see the man sitting behind the wall of monitors.

  Jonathan Scott is such an intimidating presence that it’s strange to see him wearing plain white scrubs and a five-day-old beard. He looks unkempt and tired, as if years of terrorizing people have caught up to him. Only his eyes look the same as I remember them, silver and sharp, as when he came to me on the elementary school playground.

  “Hello, Son,” he says in that silky, scary voice of his.

  Damon doesn’t crack a smile. That signature charm that he can give out evaporates completely, leaving only a cold stone of a man. “You summoned. So here I am.”

  “You say that as if I should have expected it. But you were never very obedient.”

  “No, but you figured out how to get me here anyway.”

  “It’s a father’s prerogative, wouldn’t you say?”

  That prerogative is plainly visible in the wall of flat screens behind Jonathan Scott, the video cameras pointing into each cell. Some of the inmates pace in their cells. Others lie on their beds.

  And still others are twisted at odd angles on the floor. Already dead.

  “I thought they were working for you,” I say, my voice hoarse. “They helped you take the nurses captive. Helped you keep them prisoner. Why are they locked up?”

  “They failed,” Jonathan says sharply, his eyes flashing with venom.

  They failed because Avery helped the nurses escape.

  She was kept in this asylum for hours, for days. And now I’m here, a mental hospital like the one where I was attacked, a place completely different from that abandoned building. That had been moss-covered and dirt-blackened. This place is sterile and cold. The only thing they have in common is the callousness of the people who ran them.

  “Spare us the sob story,” Damon says, his voice cold. “You are a kind and benevolent leader. Someone dared to disobey you. And now you have to kill and torture people to make things right.”

  Jonathan’s smile reveals teeth stained with blood. My chest constricts. How would his mouth be bloody? Is he injured? He sits in a casual and comfortable way. Then again he would be excellent at hiding pain.

  A darker thought occurs to me. What if he put that blood there—by drinking it? By biting someone, so deep and so intensely that their blood spilled into his mouth?

  My stomach turns over, and I press my hands to it, grateful I didn’t finish that muffin this morning.

  “Do I disgust you, sweet peach?” Jonathan Scott says in a singsong voice.

  “Don’t speak to her.”

  “Then why did you bring her if she isn’t going to play?”

  “I brought her because you preyed on her when she was only a child. And I know from experience how large you can loom in memory. But you aren’t that grand, really. You aren’t as scary or as smart as you think you are. And who better to see you for who you really are than Penny?”

  Jonathan’s face lights up with twisted pleasure. “She is a smart girl. Outsmarted me when she was barely a baby, didn’t she? Skinny legs and pigtail braids, and there she was pretending to be dumb so I wouldn’t take her. Thinking about it is enough to make me hard.”

  Damon pulls out a gun so quickly and so smoothly I barely have time to register the sharp turn in conversation. “And now she gets to see you die, you sick fuck.”

  No surprise registers on Jonathan’s face. No fear, either. “I won’t deny you your chance to kill me, my boy. But you know it will mean I’ll have won. That I’ve finally turned you into me.”

  “Maybe so, but I won’t mourn you for even a second.”

  Another sly smile. This one raises the hair on the back of my neck. “But I think I’ll take something with me when I go. You’ll mourn her, won’t you?”

  My heart skips a beat because I know exactly who he’s threatening. Me.

  Damon knows too. His head whips toward me, his eyes frantic as he makes sure that I’m standing, still safe. And it’s that split second of distraction that Jonathan uses to lunge at him. With almost superhuman speed he crosses the yards between them, pushing Damon’s gun wide. A shot blasts through the air, crumpling drywall in the corner of the room.

  Jonathan tackles his son to the ground, ripping the gun from his hand.

  Pure instinct sends me reeling back, out of the path of men and guns. Not fast enough, because Jonathan moves toward me in a blur of feral silver eyes. Then I’m on the ground, a gun pressed to my temple, a heavy weight on top of me, shards of glass pressing into my back in starbursts of pain.

  A metallic scent enters my lungs, and I realize it’s the breath of Jonathan Scott. As if he’s been more than bleeding. As if he’s breathing blood somehow. I gag against the smell of decay.

  The whispery laugh sends a chill down my spine. “Now what are you going to do?” Jonathan asks. “Are you going to shoot me? Are you going to risk my finger slipping on this trigger?”

  My head turns to the side, half an inch, and I can see Damon has produced another gun. He must have had several weapons on his body. His face is a mask of cold determination as he points it at his father.

  “Let her go,” he says, his voice betraying no fear.

  Nothing about him says that he’s afraid for me, nothing except his hesitation. And his father knows it too, because he sounds almost gleeful. “This is what has made you weak, Son. This is what I’ve been trying to stam
p out of you, and today I’ll finally do it. You’ll have to kill her to kill me.”

  “No,” I whisper against his sacrifice. “Damon. Shoot him.”

  A pause. “Don’t move, Penny.”

  He won’t do it. He won’t risk me, which is what Jonathan Scott calls his weakness. But I know better. It’s his strength. The thing that says he’s still human, despite an upbringing of horror and pain. Despite every single card stacked against him, he’s human.

  Without moving my body, without averting my gaze, I trail my left hand along the floor. Along the bed of glass that I’m lying in. And find a single shard long enough to pierce.

  “Damon,” I whisper.

  “I’ll get you out of this,” he promises, but there’s desperation in his voice.

  A deep well of sadness runs through me. “No, you won’t.”

  And he shouldn’t have to. This isn’t his battle. It’s mine.

  With a strength I find deep inside me, I ram the shard of glass into Jonathan Scott’s neck. Even knowing that he might pull the trigger in that split second. That his spasming body might pull the trigger and kill me as it goes.

  It takes more force than I could have anticipated. The throat seems like a vulnerable place, but there’s flesh and tendons and cartilage. It violates every tenet of my humanity to do this—this act that Jonathan has been trying to force from his son for years.

  The glass cuts both ways, slicing my hand open even as it forges ahead.

  But I was made for this. I have cold calculation instead of mercy. I have numbers, that tell me one death is far better than hundreds. I have the certainty, the logical proof written out inside my head, that tells me I need to be the one to kill Jonathan Scott—not Damon.

  Even once the glass lodges itself completely into Jonathan’s throat, he doesn’t die. His silvery eyes stare down at me, still seeing, still alive. In them I see both shock and gratitude, both fury and an overwhelming relief. This is an animal who needs to be put down.

  It’s the bullet in his head that sends him toppling off me.

  The gun beside me blasts loud enough to make my ears ring. It feels like the pain, the boom of it, and I wonder inanely if I’ve been shot. Then there are arms holding me, feeling me all over, checking me. Damon can’t seem to stop running his hands over me, assuring himself I’m alive.