Page 15 of Monsters Like Us
Katana is still sitting in the chair in Vale’s office, shaken and small. I step from the shadows and hiss her name. She flinches, spinning around in her chair to face me. I crook my finger, beckoning her closer. She stands on wobbly legs, approaching me like the good, obedient girl she is. She stops in the doorway, so close I can smell her.
“Don’t tell him anything,” I say, my voice low and steady. “Vale is not to be trusted.”
Her lips part. “W-what?”
“When Vale returns… don’t tell him what you did to end up here. If you have to answer, tell him mundane things—stories from your childhood. Nothing about how you survived. Understood?”
She stares, like she’s weighing the truth.
Then she nods, a promise shining in her eyes.
I lift my hands, my chains rattling as my knuckles graze her cheek. Her skin is warm beneath my touch.
“Good girl,” I whisper, and the slight whimper she makes is both a reward and a punishment.
I step back into the corridor, melding with the rush. My palms close around the strand of her hair I slipped into my pocket earlier. The tang of cinnamon still clings to it, proof that she belongs to me.
Vale lost this round. He doesn’t know he played right into my hand.
I head back to my room, my face smooth and unreadable.
Inside the small, barren space, the storm tightens. I already have plans for Katana. And when the moment is right, I’ll claim her. Own her.
My little murderess.
The pretty little monster who’s just like me.
CHAPTER 13
Katana
Vale’s footsteps grow louder,matching the pounding of my heart, before he steps back inside, his white jacket rumpled, hair out of place like he’d been running. He gives me a distracted, tense smile and breathes once, hands flattening on the edge of his desk as if to steady himself.
“Katana, I’m so sorry. There was an incident in Ward B with one of our patients. I had to go.” He forces a smile that trembles at the edges. “We have about three minutes left of our session.”
Three minutes.The number tacks itself to my ribs like a weight.
I wanted more time to stall, to deflect, to find a way to say nothing. Three minutes is a trap.
“Okay,” I say. My voice shakes a little, and I clamp my hands together in my lap to stop them from shaking.
“Tell me,” he says, settling into his chair with the professional patience he wears like armor. “How have you been sleeping? Eating? Any nightmares?”
He’s starting with the obvious, the routine questions, theones used to ease into prying. I let him have those easy things. They’re safe. I can give him vague answers.
“I sleep on and off,” I say. “It’s an adjustment being here. I eat during meal times. The food here is… consistent.” I force a small, humorless laugh that I hope reads as self-effacing, not evasive.
He nods, his pen poised over a pad. “And your family—how have things impacted you? Your relationship with your mother?”
A memory spikes of the knife in my hand, the blood on the floor when I opened my bedroom door. That was the moment I realized my mom’s life was about to end, and I couldn’t do anything about it.
For a second, my lips part, the words desperate to escape. But I press my lips together, holding it in.
This is the line Micah told me to take. The mundane thread. I pull at it and weave something bland but true. Sorrow without confession.
“My mom struggled,” I say. The words come like practiced steps. “When I was a child, she drank a lot and did drugs. She wasn’t always there for me. Some days she was fine; other days she wasn’t. I missed school and got held back.” The memory sits behind my teeth like something I don’t let out often. It’s safe; it doesn’t tell him the whole story of my life.
Vale’s pen pauses. He leans forward, his gaze searching, moving from my clenched fists then back to my face. A practiced psychiatrist’s curiosity is in his eyes. “When you say ‘wasn’t always there’—can you tell me what that looked like? Specific incidents that stay with you?”
