Revenge22 min read
The Incense, the Little Statue, and the Laugh
ButterPicks14 views
"I shouldn't have trusted Kamryn," I said aloud the first night I tried to make sense of what had happened, though no one was there to hear me.
"I told you to be careful," Kamryn had said the night she introduced me. "He's legit. He helped half the neighborhood. You need to sleep, Journey."
"But he—" I started, and then my throat closed. I always call myself Journey when I speak in my head, like saying my full name keeps me anchored, keeps me human.
"You look wrecked," Byron Leone had told me the first week I worked at his streaming company. "Wrap it up, show the audience something. Men want to see a little heat."
"I am not doing that," I had said.
"Not doing what?" Byron had shrugged as if shrugging was innocence. "Look, we pay by results. You want to keep your slot? Pull the numbers."
"I thought you said you wouldn't force anyone."
"You misheard." Byron's smile had been oily. "I suggest. I advise. You choose."
He was always smooth like that: push, pretend, press, then wink away the pressure. I worked nights, streaming until three in the morning, trying every soft, awkward trick people taught me to boost view counts. It never worked. My feed stayed thin.
"You're too tight," he told me once when I refused to dance for male callers. "Men like a little mystery, not a nun."
"You're a liar," I said then. Byron laughed and patted the couch as if we were friends. "You're selling me a ladder to climb. I won't climb your ladder."
"Suit yourself," he said. "But you should know what you're up against."
Kamryn had pushed me into the room full of incense and low lights like a well-intentioned guide. "He fixed my sleep," she said, with a look in her eyes I didn't like. "Just try. It's not like it's risky."
"It doesn't look like a normal clinic," I had murmured the first time I walked into Wilder's place.
"That's because it's real," Kamryn said, as if that made the strange gilded Buddha and the child's statue on the altar not stranger at all.
The clinic was loud with windchimes and warm with herbs. The receptionist wore a Thai-style sash and a smile. Wilder Feng appeared like a carved performer—bronze skin, a shaved head, a necklace of beads, grey eyes that looked almost pale in any light. He had the grace of someone who moved in a world that didn't belong to me.
"It's the little golden boy that helps," the receptionist said, and pointed at a tiny figure in the altar. "Keeps the bad out. Keeps the sleep in."
"Can you fix my insomnia?" I asked Wilder with the cautious hope everyone hands you when they are desperate.
"Sleep is a body and a spirit," he said, as if quoting a lesson. "We will feed both."
He gave me oil and taught me to light his incense. He closed the door, and for the first time in months I slept.
"Two hours," I said when I woke, blinking in the dimness. "I slept for two hours."
"Better than nothing," he said, smiling. "Come back."
"You shouldn't let Kamryn come with me," he told me as if reading my mind. "She'll be fine. You are my patient now."
Byron showed up at Wilder's as well. I wasn't surprised to see him. "I come here too," Byron admitted, red-faced and hovering near the sofa like a man who'd just done something indecent and expected nobody to notice.
"You didn't tell me," I said, surprised and wary.
"It's a private thing," Byron smirked. "I keep private things private."
When I lay down for treatment, Wilder's hands smelled like spice and something metallic. He put a cold disc over my eyelids and the world flipped like a coin gone soft. I dreamed of a child's laugh that wasn't human, of a small shape laughing behind an altar. I woke sure I'd heard a tiny voice whisper my name.
"Do you ever feel watched?" I asked Wilder once, testing the line of reality.
"Only by the things that matter," he said, and his fingers stroked my temple like a promise and like a warning. "Relax. Let the incense take the edges."
It took a while for me to admit it out loud. I liked him. I liked how he made my body calm. I liked how he arranged the house he moved me into when he said he hadn't meant for me to sleep on the couch anymore. He bought me a strange little villa that smelled like incense, on the edge of town with a small cemetery behind it. He said the ghosts were quiet, and that the quiet would be good for me and the baby he insisted would grow inside me.
"You're mine now," he used to murmur as his shadow bent over me. "You and the child."
I lied and told myself he meant well. We joked about marriage with a private warmth that felt like sun on cold fingers. I told Kamryn, and she smiled like a woman who has already decided which side she will stand on. Later, when the laughter became cold and sharkish, I realized I had let myself be woven into a net.
"Don't tell anyone," he said once, eyes glinting. "Not even Kamryn. People don't understand."
"Why would I hide anything?" I asked, caught.
"Because some things are sacred," Wilder said. "You will want to protect them."
The morning I found out I was pregnant, Wilder acted like a child bursting with good news. "We will make a family," he told me. "We will name him. He will thrive."
"You're sure?" I asked, my voice thin in the new quiet of the house.
"Of course." Wilder's fingers pressed to my belly like a vow. He bought me steaks cooked rare and fish that tasted of salt and sea. I started to eat things I've hated my whole life and loved them. My body churned—then stilled. The appointments multiplied.
"Eat more, Journey," Wilder said one night as if the room belonged only to him. "The child is strong because you are strong."
It was Kamryn who warned me, one evening by my kitchen table when she looked like she had aged ten years in ten days.
"Don't have the baby," she said, voice broken, eyes hollow. "You have to get out."
"Kamryn, what are you—"
"I can't explain it all. Go to the hospital. Don't let him touch you. He will say anything."
She handed me a flash drive. "If I die—give this to the police," she whispered.
"Don't say that."
"Keep it safe." She was shaking. "Please, Journey, please."
She was gone within days. Her mother wrapped her in blankets and took her away to her village, or so I thought. She called once, weak. "You must not keep the child," Kamryn breathed. The line clicked dead.
The night Byron came into my streaming room with a plate of noodles and sat down, I had already decided to leave Wilder. Byron reached for my hand and tasted like soy sauce and fear.
"Eat," he said. "You look pale."
"Don't sit in my studio," I said.
"Relax, I'm your boss." Byron smiled. The smile was a knife in cheap metal.
He kissed me then, lightly, a quick press. I pulled away, palms slick. He didn't stop. He tried to shove his hand down my shirt and I blurred into alarm and motion.
"Go away!" I slapped him.
His fingers tightened on my arm and my legs felt like ladders cut in half. Something in my skull went cottony. I remember the frame of the streaming stand crashing, glass shards, Byron's breath, and later emptiness like a room shut in winter.
"I didn't do it," Byron muttered when I pushed him off. "You want attention. You staged it."
"It wasn't staged," I sobbed.
The police didn't want to take statements without evidence. "She could be lying," one of the officers said like an aside. "These streaming scenes get messy."
Kamryn told me not to report it. "You will be ruined," she said. "No one will believe you."
I resigned instead. It felt like a small burning peace. I stopped streaming and doubled down on my visits to Wilder, whose eyes seemed to glow with a promise of safety.
Weeks passed. Wilder's treatments became more intimate. "You are the most special," he would whisper while his fingers brushed the hollow of my throat. Then, one night, he kissed me like someone who had practiced the ritual all his life.
"Be mine," he said, and I let myself be. I told myself it was love. I told myself I was not the same frightened girl who slept in corners.
When I discovered Kamryn had died—when the hospital told me her mother had called and said Kamryn had passed—I felt a single color of grief, a slow, hard black. She had given me the flash drive. She had begged me to be careful. Her dying words were shards in my head. "Don't have the child."
At her funeral, I sifted through the box Kamryn's mother handed me and found a pulse in a tiny metal drive. The USB was small and thick with silence. I took it home and plugged it into the laptop.
The first images were Kamryn and Wilder, together in a room I recognized. Then Byron joined them, smiling as if nothing unholy was happening. There were pictures—too many. Kamryn holding a pregnancy chart. Wilder holding her hand. Byron in photos with them—smiling, tender. Then the photos became worse: intimate, invasive, staged.
"I didn't know," I whispered to no one, fingers numb. "I didn't know."
I stared at the files and felt a slow, molten hatred. I felt Kamryn's last rasp in my ears.
"There are more," I muttered. The folder held hospital scans bearing Kamryn's name, dates, and images of a fetus.
My chest tightened like a vise until I could not breathe. I smashed the laptop into the table as if that could unmake the pictures. It couldn't. The images burned through me like acid.
I confronted Wilder that night. He smiled that serene smile. "You shouldn't have looked," he said. "But thank you."
"You made me pregnant," I accused. "Kamryn—"
He raised a slow hand. "Kamryn wanted the life she got. She was greedy. She wanted what was mine."
"You're mad," I heard myself say. "You engineered it."
"Yes," he said simply. "You were special. You're the kind of body that can take a little extra. I needed a vessel."
I ricocheted between fury and nausea. "You killed her."
"No," Wilder corrected, eyes steady. "You don't understand the work. There is a line between blood and blessing. Sometimes the work takes those who cannot hold it. It was not my choice."
"Wilder," I spat. "You used her. You used them. You used me."
He laughed then, a small, cold sound that made the little child statue on the altar seem to grin.
"You are dramatic," he said, pale grey eyes sliding over me. "You are special. I planned it that way."
"You're a monster."
"Monsters make the world clear."
I tried to run. He closed the door and the room darkened with incense. I remember hands, cold and firm. I remember his voice threading promises and commands. I remember waking somewhere cold and empty.
When I came to, I was in a small windowless room with a thin mattress. Someone had drawn a small black image on the wall: a child with large dark eyes. A scent I could no longer stop smelling—the same scent from Wilder's oil—hung heavy.
"You're awake," Byron said in a voice that sounded far away. "You've been upset."
"Where are you?" I croaked.
"Safe," Byron said, smiling like a man who has already sold his dignity. "You're sheltered."
I realized I was pregnant and alone, and in that moment I felt two things with absolute clarity: a feral, hungry love for the child inside me, and a blistering, burning rage for the people who had put us both there.
They kept me there. They fed me unsteady meals. They lit their incense and argued about rituals. They talked about "good forms" and "spent vessels." I lived like a ghost inside a temple built on top of my life. The child's tiny body moved like a secret pulse beneath my ribs.
"I will raise it," I told myself, though I could barely stand. "I will save it."
I tried to leave once. Wilder's hand closed on my throat and his gaze turned to a pale, pleasant madness. "No," he said softly. "You do not leave. You have a role."
I slept, and in sleep I often saw a tiny thing—no bigger than a doll, with black eyes like coins and a tail that curled under it. It laughed sometimes, a sharp, thin cackle, and I felt my heart break with longing and confusion. It was mine or it was made by them out of me. I could not tell.
Then—pain like someone tearing the world in two. I remember the sound of metal, a smell of iron, Wilder's face close and calm. Byron whispering things like a man who prays for absolution. I screamed. The darkness swallowed me.
Later I woke in a hospital bed. Men in white coats leaned over me. "You’re in the psychiatric ward," a nurse said. "You were found wandering. You were unwell."
For a year I didn’t understand what had happened. Memory returned like scattered coins. Pieces slipped into place: Byron's hand, Wilder's smile, Kamryn's last plea, the USB. My parents found me—my father with tired eyes, my mother who kept stroking my hair like I might disappear. They told me I had been missing. They said I had been through a bad episode. They told me nothing of what really happened and yet everything unraveled until it did.
When I was well enough, I went back to Wilder's place. I could not get the flash drive out of my head. I had one weapon: the truth stored in a tiny chip. I knew they had done this to more than me. I needed names, faces, confession. I wanted Byron and Wilder exposed so the world could watch them twist and fall.
I sat outside Wilder's clinic in the rain. I watched the comings and goings. One night a fat man came out—Jonas Farrell, one of Wilder's patrons. I followed him to a car dealership where Jonas did business. In Jonas's office, behind glass, hung a small golden statue of a child on a shelf like a trophy. The same face, the same tilt of the head.
"You're seeing things," someone said behind me. "You should go home."
"No," I said, and I walked in like a woman with a plan. "Excuse me. Jonas?"
He looked at me, puzzled. "Lady, I—"
"Who sits in your office with that statue?" I asked, voice steady. "Where did you get it?"
Jonas blinked. "It's a collector's piece. Wilder gifted it."
"It came from Wilder," I said. "Do you know what he does with those?"
"I don't want trouble," Jonas said then, and I saw fear like a small animal in his eyes.
I did things people might not understand. I forced Byron to tell me who he had met with, who had paid. I made him watch the photos. He watched his handsome face, his hand placed near Kamryn’s shoulder in a picture where she looked so tired it hurt. He tried to laugh it off.
"It was a joke," he said. "We were messing."
"Where's Wilder now?" I asked. "Where do those sessions happen? Who else is involved?"
"Do you really have proof?" Byron asked, the bravado thinning. "Who will believe you?"
"I will make them believe," I said.
I tied Byron to a chair and gave him nothing but water for three days. The first day he raged. The second day he begged. The third day he cried.
"Let me go," he said one night, voice raw. "I can't—"
"Tell me everything," I said. "And don't lie."
"You'll put me in prison."
"Tell me."
"Fine." He spat the words like they burned. "Wilder says it’s work. He says some bodies are right. He recruits girls—host girls—and uses the incense and oils to quiet them, to make them obey. He says the golden boy wants a body."
"Who else?" I asked.
"Sometimes clients," Byron said, eyes wild. "Sometimes men who are lonely. Jonas—Jonas came too. He liked the…smells."
"Where's Kamryn?" I asked.
"She was angry," Byron said. "She wanted out. Wilder got angry. He says 'the work demands.'"
Byron's face crumpled and he began to sob. "I didn't want this. I swear. I didn't. We—"
"Then sign a statement," I said. "Swear to tell the police everything. Make a video. Tell the whole company."
"I'll—I'll do it," Byron whispered.
But Byron's confession alone would not be enough. I needed Wilder in a public place where his charm could not rescue him. I planned a spectacle under florescent lights where the world could see.
I walked into a bar where Bruno, Wilder's favorite client, liked to sit. "Where's Wilder?" I asked every man there. They looked away. "Call the press," I said to a bartender. "Call someone."
In the back room a man laughed. "Little crazy woman," he said, and slapped a hand on my shoulder.
"Not anymore," I said.
I worked my plan the way a cook seasons a stew—patient, tasting, waiting for the heat. I arranged a meeting with a freelance journalist and Conrad Correia, a lawyer who had once done a favor for Kamryn. Conrad agreed to sit in if I could produce evidence.
"I need two things," he told me. "Proof and witnesses."
"I have both," I answered. "And I need a place with cameras."
We invited the press to a staged "healing demonstration" at Wilder's clinic, under the pretense of exposing a suspicious practitioner and asking him to clear his name. I registered it as a public forum, using Byron as a reluctant confession piece, Jonas as a witness, and Conrad as counsel. The clinic's waiting room filled with cameras and viewers who clicked and tuned in.
Wilder arrived, all calm and beads. "I don't have to explain to a mob," he said.
"You do," Byron announced, hands trembling. "I said what I said."
"You're a liar!" Wilder said to Byron. "You were the one who wanted—"
"Shut up!" I yelled, climbing onto a chair so all the cameras would see me. "Do you remember Kamryn? Do you remember the USB?"
Silence filled the room for a heartbeat.
"Show it," Wilder said, voice low. "Show your proof."
I handed Conrad the flash drive. He plugged it into the laptop. The projector threw sharp images on the wall. There were Kamryn's pictures, hospital scans, Wilder with doctors, Byron smiling into Wilder's camera. There were contracts, receipts, messages where Byron and Jonas joked about the "sessions" and Wilder's "miracles."
"In the pictures," Conrad said to the camera, "we can see clear evidence of wrongdoing, manipulation, and—"
"Those are fake," Byron blurted, and then cover melted into tremor. "Those are out-of-context—"
"Play the video," I said.
A video played. It showed Wilder and Byron in conversation—Wilder explaining how incense mixtures produced compliance, Byron laughing nervously, Jonas placing down cash. Then the camera cut to a room where a woman warred with sleep and then slumped under the oil's touch as a small child-like figure perched on the altar.
People gasped.
"What is that?" someone in the crowd demanded.
"It's Wilder's charm," Byron stammered. "It's—"
"That's the golden boy," Wilder whispered, almost proud.
The room changed. The audience that had come for drama suddenly became an assembly of witnesses. Someone in the back began to record on a phone. "This is insane," a reporter breathed, moving closer.
"How dare you," Wilder said at first, stepping forward like he still had control, but the cameras showed his face up close: the beads of sweat, the grey eyes narrowing.
"Tell them what you did to Kamryn," I said, voice steady as stone.
Kneeling on the floor, Byron sobbed. "We told her it would save her. We told her to trust us. We convinced her she was sick and that Wilder would fix it. He—he used us. He used us to get bodies. We—"
"No," Wilder snapped. "It was for the work."
"Well, the work looks like murder," Conrad said calmly into his lapel mic. "We're calling the police."
Outside, phones lit up like a city of fireflies. The press conference quickly became a live broadcast. Within minutes a small crowd had gathered outside Wilder's clinic. The comments piled up. People who had once been in his chair began to call in, weeping. A woman in the crowd shouted, "My sister! She never came back!"
"You think apologizing will fix it?" Wilder said, voice gone thin. He tried to smile, but the camera caught a flicker of something terrible: a small, black shadow curling against his shoulder like a child's hand.
"What is that?" someone shouted.
Wilder slapped at the air like a man swatting at a fly. "It's nothing," he insisted. People in the front row leaned in.
"Tell us about the child statues," I demanded. "Where did you get them? What did you do with them?"
"They're charms," Wilder muttered. "They keep things in balance."
"Balance?" I hissed. "You used those charms to make people obey you. You took their bodies. You ended their lives."
"Stop!" Wilder's voice cracked into something like a scream. He backed away until his hand slammed into a shelf of statues. One banged to the floor and cracked, revealing inside a tiny bundle of fabric that had been stuffed like a small bird.
People recoiled.
"Call the cops!" someone cried. "This is—this is a cult."
At that moment the clinic door burst open and two uniforms poured in. "You are under arrest," an officer said into a megaphone. "Wilder Feng, you are detained on suspicion of human trafficking and assault."
"No!" Wilder shouted, but the cuffs went on like a ritual.
The crowd outside turned fierce. Cameras streamed the arrests live. Social feeds erupted. "He used incense to control women," one headline screamed. "Evidence of cult-like practice found," another said.
When the officer called Byron and Jonas forward as witnesses, the men's faces had changed. Byron looked tiny, like a man undoing himself under a microscope. Jonas's jaw trembled.
"You realize you're ruined?" Byron said to Wilder, voice small. "You promised—"
"I promised power," Wilder said, strange and calm. "You promised attention."
Conrad addressed the cameras with a lawyer's precision. "We have evidence of coercion, of manipulation, of video proof that these sessions were orchestrated. We have victims willing to testify. We will pursue charges."
I watched them process Wilder into the van. On Wilder's shoulder sat, visible to everyone, a tiny shadow—black-eyed, toothless-looking—like a child's sketch of a child. It was not a thing someone could easily fake. The cameras zoomed in.
People around me had changed face. Gasps, hand over mouths, calls to the police, applause at times when a victim told a story, and at other times silence like the lid snapping shut on a jar. "This is monstrous," a woman said. "How did we let this happen?"
Wilder's reaction changed through the crowd like cold light. At first he was haughty, then furious, then he fought to charm the reporters, then he turned to pleading, then to a quiet crumbling. He offered causeless statements and tucked conjectures. "You don't understand the work," he cried in a moment of frantic reason. "You couldn't possibly—"
"Tell them everything," I told him through the camera's lens. "Tell them every name. Tell them where the bodies are."
Wilder looked at me as if I were a new star he had not catalogued. "You," he whispered, and his voice went somewhere else, like a creaking hinge. "You are the one I left breathing."
Conrad moved close. "Wilder Feng, do you admit to coordinating illicit therapy sessions involving coercion and harm?"
"Sometimes sacrifice is required," Wilder said, and the words were clinical and awful. "Sometimes people break."
"Where are the other bodies?" Conrad demanded.
"Don't—" Wilder started. He looked past the microphones, his eyes widening in a raw, animal way, and for the first time in months I saw him truly afraid.
Outside, the crowd roared as the police read him his rights. The reporters asked every question and Wilder tried to answer. His answers fell apart like bad stitches. He mentioned places, names, dates. He said things a man might say when he finally knew there was no going back.
The punishment was public. It was a long, ugly unraveling. People who had laughed on Wilder’s couch wept in the square. Some recorded, some shouted, some stood with hands over mouths. A woman recognized Gould, one of the men featured in the footage, and began to scream. People advanced on the clinic with phones like torches.
Byron's punishment was different. He was dragged out into the light by his own confession. He had been a boss known for quiet favors, for pushing girls to do more for views. People from the company where he had been beloved saw his videos and turned their backs. His colleagues who had once gotten promotions because of him now walked away shaking their heads. His name lit up in a thousand online feeds and in message threads that had once been about the next campaign.
Byron stumbled through the courtyard, face white. "I didn't know," he said as if the words could be a blanket. "I didn't know."
"Everyone heard from Kamryn and Journey," someone spat. "You knew."
"Everyone walked away," an onlooker said. "And now he is as lonely as he made her."
Jonas, too, was dragged into the light. The man who had bought statues and paid Wilder found his face on the screen under the caption "Client in Dark Rituals." His company issued an immediate statement of "no tolerance." He was asked to resign. His wife posted a terse sentence and unfriended him on every social platform within hours. The real punishment was not handcuffs but the erasing.
The crowd's reactions changed as the story broke open. At first there was confusion. Then anger. Then vindication and a strange appetite for spectacle. Someone held up a phone and played the video of Wilder's little statue again. When the black-eyed child's animated laugh sounded, people flinched as if they'd been struck.
Wilder's face changed shape through the event. He went from petulant villain to pleading madman to small, weeping thing that tried to explain that it had been only "work." He begged for mercy like a man with nothing left but his voice.
Jonas's face turned ashen. "I didn't know," he said to no one who would stay. "I didn't know." But he had known enough to buy the gifts and sit in the chair. Public disgust followed him like a shadow.
Byron's reaction passed from defiance to rage to pleading, and then to a hollow shame. The crowd who had once cheered his company now hissed like cats. Men who had once flattered him avoided his gaze. Women who had been his users stood at the edge and said nothing, which felt like a louder punishment than any shout.
The public punishment went on for hours. Reporters interrogated them. Victims came forward. The cameras never left Wilder's cracked face. His denial gave way to a slow, final admission as police read out the list of charges. People recorded everything—faces, words, the fall from small power to the public shaming.
"How does it feel?" a reporter asked Byron, who stood now in a huddle of exposed men.
"Like the end," Byron said, voice thin.
"It is the end," a woman in the crowd replied. "For you, maybe. For us, we get to tell the story."
By day's end Wilder was taken to custody, his proud beads now a mockery. Byron and Jonas watched their reputations burn. The clinic's door was boarded. The little golden-boy statue was taken as evidence. The black sketch on the office wall sat like a small accusation against all of them.
But punishment alone was not enough for me. I wanted them to feel what I felt. I had to make them see the child.
"You're going to prison," Conrad told Byron through the lens of the cameras. "You're going to lose everything."
Byron nodded like a man who had lost the map and wandered into a desert. "I was a coward," he said. "I followed."
"And you, Wilder," I said as the officers forced a blanket around the quivering man, "you will see what you have made."
He looked at me then, and his eyes were empty as a dried well. For a second something moved on his shoulder—the little black-eyed shape like a stain—and it turned its head and looked at me. I felt a cold hand in my chest.
"Send him away," Wilder whispered suddenly, breaking into a new kind of logic. "Send him away from me."
They took him into the van like men carrying a box of rusted coins. The cameras followed. The world leaned in.
It was not enough to lose them to a cell. I wanted the shame to be public, to watch the men I had known as a boss and a healer shrink into the people they had always been. Byron's lights went out as friends took their names off invitations, as his company reorganized without him, as his clients said he was no longer welcome. Jonas was removed from the board. Wilder's name trended with words like "cult," "abuse," "ritual."
When the police read the list of victims and of suspects on camera, my face was one of many. "I want them to see," I said to no one in particular. "I want them to remember."
We gave statements. We told our stories at length. I told mine on camera, my voice steady, the flash drive looping like evidence and a string around their necks. "He took my child," I said to the lens. "He took my friend. He used us."
Conrad filed suit. The police made arrests. The press ran the images.
And then—days later—there was another punishment. Not the legal system's dry grind, but a public ritual of shame that the city organized in an ugly, necessary way.
"We will hold a public hearing," a city official said. "We will show the city the names and faces of those who betrayed its trust."
It was packed. Survivors came. Families came. Reporters came with bright lenses like hungry moths. Byron sat in the dock, pale and hollow. Jonas sweated in a suit that had once been his armor. Wilder arrived with a handkerchief white and trembling.
The prosecutor read facts. The flash drive played again in the courtroom screen. For three hours the entire catalogue of their cruelty was displayed. People in the gallery watched, cries rising like waves. "How could you?" someone cried.
Byron's face ran through stages. First anger—he shouted at a witness. Then denial—he insisted he'd been misinterpreted. Then shame—his voice broke. Then pleading—he promised change. At the end he was small and weeping when the judge announced the severity of consequences. "You are stripped of your directorship," the judge said. "You will face criminal charges."
The crowd outside cheered at sentences, though justice was slow and complicated. Byron's downfall was different from Wilder's. Byron lost friends and business. People who once asked him for favors spat on him. He tried to apologize on live TV and was drowned out by calls for his head. The punishment I had wanted—public unmasking and the knowledge that he could no longer hide—had been done.
Wilder's punishment played out like a myth. The little black-eyed shadow that people had seen on his shoulder during the arrest became a symbol in feeds and hashtags. People began to retell stories of hauntings, of the smell of incense, of the laugh that had chased me for months. Some said it was a trick of light. Others said it was a thing no rational mind could explain.
On the day they brought Wilder out for a final preliminary hearing, someone from the crowd shouted, "Where is your golden boy now, Wilder? Does it still feed on people?" Wilder's jaw tightened. He began to cry, then laugh, then plead.
"He's not real," Wilder said through tears. "He's a story we told to make sense of things. We told ourselves stories to sleep."
"Do you regret it?" a reporter asked.
Wilder's eyes flickered like a dying bulb. "I regret getting caught," he admitted. It was not the remorse I wanted. It was a small thing, but it was honest, and in a way that made the crowd roar again.
The city's response did not end at court. Laws were proposed to regulate private "therapies." A hotline was set up for anyone who worried they'd been drugged or coerced. Men like Byron were stripped of their influence in other places as more victims stepped forward.
The final humiliation for each man was different, because ruin travels in many forms. Byron's ruin was his erasure by peers and clients, the slow collapse of a life built on favors and anonymous votes. Jonas lost his position and his family withdrew like a tide. Wilder’s ruin was public: the police press conference where the little statue was displayed on a table like evidence, and where his work was called what it was—predation.
When they led Wilder away after the hearing I walked past him and, for a terrible second, saw the shadow move on his shoulder like it was signaling me. I felt an ancient fear and a deep, compensating relief.
"You lost," I said.
He laughed. "We all lose," he said.
"And what did you make?" I asked.
He looked at me as if surprised I still wanted the answer. "A voice," he said. "A small thing who knows."
That evening, late, I sat alone in a cheap diner and watched the news cycle sputter. The reports said that justice had been brought. They said more charges were likely. They played my words again, and Kamryn's face flickered in a photo. My phone buzzed with messages from people I did not know, telling me their stories and thanks and wishes.
I had wanted to rip them open where everyone could look, and I had done it. The men were punished—their public unraveling long and satisfying—and the law had moved. But there was a hollowness, too, like a room after a storm.
Conrad came by later with a folder. "This is not the end," he said. "But it's a start."
"Do you think it'll heal anything?" I asked.
"It will help them stop," Conrad said.
"Is stopping the same as justice?" I asked.
He did not answer. He only touched my hand. "It is the best we have."
That night I dreamed of the child again. Only instead of the strange, mocking laughter, I heard a small, patient breathing. I woke and pressed my hand to my belly. I felt nothing but scar tissue and memory. Yet there was a small quiet in the place where the child's motion had once been. I lit incense—Wilder's smell—and watched the smoke climb and dissolve.
Weeks later, at the detention center, I paid a brief visit. Wilder sat in a visiting room, pale and smaller, as if the world had chewed him and spat him out. On his shoulder—there, plain as day—was a tiny black silhouette curled like a kitten. It turned its head and slid its dark eyes onto me.
"You see it," Wilder said with childlike wonder. "I told you. You saw it first."
"I saw it," I said.
Wilder smiled, as if a man can still find some pleasure in wonder. "Take care," he added softly. "It likes you. It chooses."
I left before I could ask what that meant. Outside the detention center, the late sun cut the sky into shards. The city hummed around me, busy with lives that had kept going while mine had been interrupted. News vans pulled away. Cameras blinked off.
At home, the little black mark on Wilder's shoulder haunted my dreams for nights. People asked me if I was satisfied. "Are they punished?" friends texted. "Is that enough?"
I thought of Kamryn's last smile and her sudden final breath. I thought of the flash drive, the cracked golden statue, the child's laugh. I thought of the day Byron walked out of the clinic trying to keep his dignity only to have it shredded by each passerby.
"Justice is complicated," I said aloud. "It's not a single moment."
I kept the little statue in a drawer that once belonged to Kamryn. It was no longer golden—after the police took it, the edges had been filed down, and what remained looked like a child's toy gone wrong. I used to touch it when the nights came heavy.
One late night I opened the drawer. The statue sat quiet. I breathed and said, "I'm sorry."
Then, unexpectedly, a memory arrived: the tiny creature that had once bitten me in a moment of weird maternal clarity. I pictured it curled on Wilder's shoulder, watching. I imagined it a thing that belonged neither fully to the living nor fully to the dead—a wound made into an eye.
Outside, a siren wailed and faded into the city noise. In the corner of the drawer, the statue's small face seemed to turn.
"Goodnight," I whispered, and closed the drawer like a small ceremony.
I do not know what will happen next. The courts will do their work. People will move on or not. Byron will be forgotten by some. Wilder will be locked away and perhaps someday laughed at in a tale of a cult that was not what it said it was. Jonas will lose his company and maybe his family. Kamryn is gone. The child—whatever thing it was—remains part of the story like a stubborn shadow.
When I lock my front door at night, I sometimes feel the cold nudge of a tail against my leg in the dark, like a proof that what we went through left something behind.
"Good night," I say, and the sound is small and private and not the kind of line you'd put in a speech.
Outside, in the quiet, I think I hear a faint, childlike laugh.
The End
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