The furniture is smashed to bits, his vinyl is scattered and broken all over the floor, and his bookshelves have been ripped straight out of the wall. Books are lying in destroyed piles underneath them, torn pages floating through the air.

And in the corner, right behind his audio equipment, is another version of me. I’m dressed in my Katmere uniform, but instead of sitting on the bed (as I’ve imagined more times than I want to admit, even to myself), I’m cowering in the corner, crying and begging for someone to, “Stop! Please, please, please stop!”

Someone is snarling loudly enough to be heard over the music, and when I turn to try to figure out who it is—and what’s going on—I find Hudson standing right there. His fangs are extended and dripping blood, and there’s a look in his eyes that warns me that my time has run out. There’s nowhere to go, no place to escape to.

“I can’t stop, Grace.” He’s screaming at me. “I can’t stop. I can’t stop.” He reaches up and grabs handfuls of his hair in his fists. “It hurts. It hurts. I’m trying to—” He breaks off with a growl, his entire body convulsing as he fights against the urge to lunge for me.

“Please, no. Please don’t make me. Please, please, please.” He seems to plead with someone I can’t see. “Don’t make me do it. I don’t want to hurt her. I don’t want—” He breaks off, another shudder running through him. And then he yells, “Run, Grace, run!”

And the other Grace tries. She does. She springs into action, racing for the door, but even as she runs, I know it’s too late.

He’s on her in a second, leaping the length of the room in one bound. She screams for one long moment, the sound hanging in the air as he rips her throat out and starts to drink.

The moment she dies, the compulsion ends and Hudson is left, covered in her blood—in my blood—as he sinks to the ground. He cradles me to his chest as blood continues to spill out of my severed carotid artery, and though there are silent tears running down his cheeks, he doesn’t make a sound. Instead, he just holds me in his arms and rocks and rocks and rocks as my blood spills all over the both of us and onto the floor around us.

His hand is on my neck, and it’s obvious he’s trying to stop the blood flow, but nothing can stop it. It keeps pouring out until we’re both drenched in it, until it coats his floor, soaks the pages of his favorite books, covers his entire room—so much more blood than my body could ever hold.

But that doesn’t matter in this hellscape.

Nothing does but torturing, breaking, destroying Hudson.

And when he throws his head back and screams like everything inside him is shattering, I can’t help but think it’s succeeded.

Then, in the space between one blink and the next, the blood is gone, and Hudson is sitting on his couch reading The Stranger by Albert Camus (of course). JP Saxe and Julia Michaels’s “If the World Was Ending” is playing as a knock sounds on his door, which breaks my heart all over again.

It’s the other Grace, and she throws her arms around him as soon as he opens the door. He drops his book and picks her up. Her legs go around his waist the same way mine did that night in New York, and they’re kissing like it’s the only thing that matters in the world.

Finally, she pulls her mouth from his and gasps for air.

He grins and whispers, “You smell so good,” as he nuzzles his way along her throat.

“Oh yeah?” The other Grace tilts her head to the side a little and whispers, “Maybe you should take a little bite. See if I taste as good as I smell.”

He groans low in his throat before scraping his fangs along the sensitive column of her neck.

She shivers, her hand clutching at his hair as she tries to pull him closer. “Please, Hudson,” she whispers. “I need you.”

But he just shakes his head and whispers, “I can’t. If I bite you now, I won’t be able to stop. I’ll drink you all up.”

That’s when it hits me. Hudson’s crime—the thing he has to atone for—is compelling everything that happened at Katmere before Jaxon killed him. Whether it was for the greater good or not, whether they were secret supremacists working with Cyrus, he took their choice from them and turned them into murderers.

And now the prison is doing the same thing to him, compelling him to murder his mate again and again and again.

The Hudson in the vision must realize it at the same time I do, because he sets her back on the floor and whispers, “Run,” right before his fangs explode in full force.

The other Grace heeds the warning, but he’s blocking the door, so she runs deeper into the room. She trips on the corner of his rug and goes flying, though, and that’s how she ends up cowering near the audio equipment. As he walks toward her and the music switches to Lewis Capaldi’s “Grace,” I realize that this is it. This is where he kills her. And as horror registers on Hudson’s face, I can tell that he knows it, too.

I also realize at the same instant that the real Hudson—the one shaking and pleading on the bed next to me—is so far gone that if he has to spend another hour killing me, even if it is only in his nightmares, it just might shatter him forever.

127

If You Can’t Stand

the Heat, Stay out

of the Hellscape

I don’t know what to do for him, don’t know how to stop this from happening—how to stop any of this from happening.

As I stand here, watching the prison compel him to do this, I finally understand—really understand—what he meant when he told me his power was the nuclear option. And why he’s refused, over and over again, to compel anyone to do anything.

I thought he would do it at the Firmament when the Watch surrounded us. Later wondered why he hadn’t in New York when Nuri went to arrest him. But he never did—and now I know why. He’s never forgiven himself for what he did last year, never forgiven himself for what he caused. He did it because he felt he had no choice, and those boys died. Which was tragic.

Were they planning horrible things? Yes, absolutely.

Would they have killed people of their own volition? Probably.

But we’ll never know.

And now, watching this—watching him—I realize it’s not them being dead that is eating him up so completely. Yes, the deaths obviously bother him, but what is destroying him is him having taken away their choice. He compelled them to do something so appalling, so soul-crushing, that he can never forgive himself. Disintegrating them would have been more humane, but he couldn’t let his father know that ability still existed. So instead, he was cruel and forced those boys to play bystander in their own bodies while they killed their classmates—killed their friends.

And now he’s suffering the same thing, over and over and over again.

No wonder he looks like hell. No wonder he can barely stand to be near me. Every time he looks at me, all he sees is what he did. And what he is capable of doing.

Right in front of me, the other Grace is looking for someplace to run. Someplace to hide. She tries to make it back to the front door, but he cuts her off. When she rushes toward the library, he leans over and catches her in the shoulder with his fangs. And when she darts toward the bed, he follows her, fangs dripping blood even as he begs her to run. To get away. To not let him hurt her.

And then, there she is, cowering behind the audio equipment, exactly as she was when I first entered this hellscape, and I know we’ve all run out of time.

Desperate to stop him, desperate to spare him the terror and the agony of murdering me again, I call out to him. “Hudson! Hudson, stop! I’m right here.”

For one second, two, he freezes, head tilted a little as if he could hear me.

“Hudson, please! Hudson, it’s okay. You don’t have to do it! You’re okay. You’re—”

I break off when I realize that, not only isn’t he listening any longer, but my shouting is actually making things worse. Because there is a part of him that can hear me, and it’s adding to his desperation to stop even as the compulsion pushes him forward. Now, he hears not just the compulsion in his head but my voice, too, and as agonized tears roll down his face, I can’t help thinking that I’m only torturing him even more.

The idea traumatizes me, and when he grabs the other Grace again, when he tears her throat out again, I can feel his terror as clearly as I can feel my own. And when he drops to his knees, the other Grace in his arms, I can feel something deep inside me break into a million pieces. Because the look on Hudson’s face as he tilts his head back—the tears, the anguish, the soul-deep guilt—is more than I can bear.

Because this boy, this beautiful, beautiful boy whom I love so much, doesn’t deserve this.

He doesn’t deserve to suffer like this.

He doesn’t deserve to be broken like this.

He’s already learned his lesson, has already repented for the things he did. He’s changed, he’s really changed, and this forced atonement is destroying the person he’s working so hard to be.

I have to stop this. I have to fix this.