Page 212 of I Will Break You

“I have to torture a few people,” he says as he opens the door to the bedroom and sets me on my feet. “Can I leave you here on your own?”

I glance back toward the hallway. “Are those men still in the other room?”

He shakes his head. “The two I left alive are being interrogated in a chamber on the other side of the cemetery.”

My shoulders sag. “Good.”

“The bathroom door is beside the skeleton, and the kitchen is over there.” He gestures in the direction of Mrs. Baker’s crawlspace. “And I’ve left your phone charging on the nightstand in case you need anything.”

I rock forward on my tiptoes and give him a peck on the lips. “Go.”

Xero smiles, revealing perfect white teeth. “Get some sleep. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

I watch him leave, admiring how he straightens to his full, majestic height as the concrete floor slopes down to give him more head space. As he disappears into Mrs. Baker’s territory, I walk around to explore.

The first door I open contains an office with a desk and nine monitors mounted on a stand, broadcasting every corner of my house. In each corner are smaller screens showing different angles of each room.

My breath catches. That’s how he made me feel I could never hide from his ghostly presence. He installed cameras everywhere.

But that’s not even the worst of it.

One wall is filled with blown-up pictures of me, going about my day. Some are of me in the shower, others are me outside thehome. In between them are screenshots from some of the spicy videos I shot for Xero while he was in jail.

I gulp. He said he was obsessed with me, but this is pathological.

But there’s more.

The wall opposite that one is like a crime board, covered in a complex web of photos, maps, and articles, all connected by thin red lines of string that lead back to a haunting collection of enlarged polaroids my eyes refuse to focus on.

I work toward them slowly, taking in pictures of Myra, her family, Mr. Lawson. Jake is there, along with the four men from X-Cite Media Xero captured. So is Lizzie Bath.

My heart pounds as I allow my gaze to settle on photos of Sparrow and Wilder, who I thought were only figments of my imagination. According to one picture of a younger version of me dancing between them at a party, they’re real. I study the background, finding the banner of a college frat house hanging on the wall.

Shit. I remember agreeing to go to that party with a classmate, who had even let me borrow her red dress, but I have no memory of even stepping a foot inside. My gaze returns to the photo of me sandwiched between the men. I’m wearing that damned dress.

“How the hell did that happen?” I mutter.

Finally, I force my eyes to confront what’s in the middle, which is a group of spine-chilling images. They’re all me. All naked. All when I was no older than ten. In one, I’m confined in a metal bathtub filled with ice. In another, trapped in a straitjacket. In a third, I’m sitting in a padded room, my eyes wide with terror. There’s even one of me with my head locked in a bizarre form of cage with metal protrusions piercing my skin.

I can’t even dismiss them as artificial intelligence because the child has every single one of my scars. The one someone posted through my letterbox had been disturbing enough, but there are so many here they could fill an entire photo album's spread pages.

Where did Xero get these images, and why didn’t he tell me they even existed?

NINETY-ONE

XERO

Good people work for evil organizations all the time. This is the entire reason why I want to destroy Father and the firm that forged us into assassins. But if the recruiter was an innocent forced to work for X-Cite Media, he wouldn’t be here tonight, marching to his death.

I stand behind a weeping willow in the garden of St. Clement’s Church, peering out at the man approaching a small figure sitting on a bench. Harlan Stills strides with the confidence of a predator who thinks he’s lured a thirteen-year-old boy for a liaison.

Camila has agreed to act as the decoy. In the dark, her smaller frame could be mistaken for a boy’s.

“Jenson?” Harlan’s soft voice carries in the wind.

Jensonsama13 is one of the thousands of social media profiles our tech team set up precisely for this purpose. The men we hunt are cautious, paranoid, and difficult to corner, but they all have their weaknesses. It’s just a matter of scrolling through the most twisted paraphilias and finding which one sticks.

It’s shocking what men will reveal to their forbidden crushes. We’ve gathered schematics, state secrets, and all manner of schemes. All for the price of an artificial intelligence bot capable of catering to any