Chapter 15: The Book
Scott’s voice on the phone was a fractured thing, a whispered plea spliced with hitched breaths. “Luke? She… she wrote a book.”
Luke was already pulling on his jacket, the phone tucked between his shoulder and ear. “Who did? Slow down.”
“Michelle. She published it today. It’s… it’s about all of us. The group. Everything.” A wet, ugly sob escaped him. “Everyone’s calling. My phone won’t stop. My department chair left a voicemail.”
“Don’t move. I’m coming over.” Luke’s voice was a calm, low command, the tone he used to talk people off ledges. Inside, a cold, intricate clockwork began to turn.
“You don’t have to—”
“Scott. I’m coming over. Now. Sit tight.”
He ended the call and went straight to his computer. The book was easy to find. Survivors’ Scars: The Unvarnished Truth Behind the Final Girls. Michelle Jackson. He clicked ‘Look Inside’.
His eyes scanned, skipping the self-aggrandizing prologue. He searched for Scott’s name. It appeared, again and again, like a target.
…Scott Navarro, then 17, exhibited a paralyzing cowardice that likely cost lives. While others fought, he hid under a bed, listening to the screams…
Luke’s knuckles whitened on the mouse.
…his path of self-destruction post-trauma was predictable: promiscuity, alcohol dependency, a series of public breakdowns. He is a case study in failed resilience…
A slow breath hissed through Luke’s teeth.
Then he found the passage. The one that made the killing urge in his chest solidify into a perfect, gleaming point.
…his fixation on Officer Luke Allen, the responding officer who ultimately killed the murderer, borders on the pathological. It is a transference of epic proportions, a child’s need for a savior twisted into an adult obsession. Interviews with family members suggest this dependency has stifled any genuine growth. It is also worth noting that the perpetrator, Robert Riggs, was Scott’s own father. The familial connection, long suppressed in the official narrative, raises uncomfortable questions about shared pathologies and whether the tragedy was, in some terrible way, a domestic issue that bled into the communal space.
Luke closed the laptop. The room felt very still. The word “pathologies” echoed. She had dissected Scott in public, hung his trauma on a peg for gawkers, and in the same breath, she had tried to diminish Luke’s role. Had tried to sever the tether between them. Had called it sick.
He drove across town with a detached focus. Scott’s apartment building was a modest, post-war structure. The door to 3B was slightly ajar.
Luke pushed it open.
The living room was dim, lit only by the blue glow of a muted television. Scott sat curled in the corner of his sofa, knees drawn to his chest. He was staring at nothing. A glossy hardcover book lay splayed and face-down on the coffee table like a dead thing. Empty boxes of his things sat packed from earlier.
He looked utterly hollow. The careful reconstruction of the last few years—the therapy, the sobriety chips, the grad school acceptance—seemed to have been blasted away, leaving the raw, eighteen-year-old boy from the closet.
“Hey,” Luke said softly, closing the door behind him.
Scott flinched, then turned his head. His eyes were red-rimmed and swollen. “You shouldn’t see me like this.”
“Cut that out.” Luke shrugged off his jacket and sat on the couch, not too close, leaving space. He nodded at the book. “I read some of it.”
“Did you read the part about my pathologies?” Scott’s laugh was a brittle crack. “Or the part where she says I was the reason he came there? That because my mom left him, it was basically a family reunion? That it’s my fault?”
“It’s not your fault.”
“She has receipts, Luke. Text messages I sent when I was blackout drunk. Details Melissa told her. She… she made me look like a pathetic, obsessed loser. And she made you look like a… a crutch for a cripple.” Fresh tears spilled over. “My program. They’re talking about ‘conduct unbecoming’ and ‘ethical scrutiny’. I wanted to help people. Like you helped me. Now I’m just a… a case study in failure.”
Luke let him cry. He watched the shaking line of Scott’s shoulders, the way he bit the cuff of his sleeve to stifle the sound. The protective fury in Luke’s gut was a living thing, coiling and poised.
“Where’s Ethan?” Luke asked, his voice neutral.
Scott wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Out. Some party at a gallery. He said… he said I was bringing the vibe down. That I needed to stop catastrophizing.”
Luke stored that. Ethan. Another name for the list. “He left you alone like this?”
“He said Michelle’s just capitalizing on trauma, and capitalizing is what people do, so I should get over it.” Scott’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I just wanted someone to sit with me.”
“I’m here,” Luke said. He meant it in more ways than Scott could comprehend.
He moved closer then, slowly, giving Scott time to pull away. He didn’t. Luke reached out and pulled him into his side. Scott came willingly, collapsing against him with a shudder, his face pressed into Luke’s shoulder. He was slight, all sharp angles and trembling heat. He smelled of salt and despair.
Luke’s arm went around him, holding him firmly. His hand, so capable of violence, came up to cradle the back of Scott’s head, fingers threading through his soft hair. It was an echo of his fantasy, but this was real. This broken weight against him was the reason for everything.
“She can’t take what you’ve built,” Luke murmured into his hair. “She’s just words on paper.”
“They feel like scars on my skin.”
“Then I’ll deal with the words.” He said it so plainly, so matter-of-factly, that Scott didn’t immediately grasp the promise beneath.
Scott tilted his head back, looking up at him. His eyes searched Luke’s face. “Why are you so good to me? After all this time?”
Because you are mine. You just don’t know it yet. “Because I was there,” Luke said instead, the partial truth. “I saw you. The real you. Not her version.”
Scott held his gaze for a long moment, and something flickered in his wet eyes—that old, desperate devotion. The “pathology” Michelle had mocked. It was the most beautiful thing Luke had ever seen.
“Just… talk to me?” Scott asked, settling back against him. “About anything else. Make the world go away for an hour.”
So Luke talked. He talked about nothing. A crossword puzzle he couldn’t solve. The stubborn stain on his driveway. The way the city lights looked from the bridge at night. His voice was a low, steady rumble in his chest, vibrating through Scott’s body.
He felt Scott slowly unwind. The tremors subsided. The hitched breathing evened out. The trust was absolute, a tiny bird cupped in his hands.
Scott fell asleep there, against him, exhausted from the weeping.
Luke didn’t move. He held him, watching the slow rise and fall of his chest. In the silence, his mind worked, cold and precise.
Michelle. She had sought to expose, to profit, to damage. She had tried to reframe his holy intervention as a sick dependency. She had hurt what was his. That was a capital offense in the new cosmology he was entering.
Ethan. The supposed boyfriend who left a shattered man alone to go to a party. Who dismissed his pain. Who was unworthy of the air he breathed in Scott’s presence.
The list, which had once been abstract final girls, was becoming satisfyingly personal. Noah Kemp, the upcoming tool, was a means to a magnificent end. But Michelle and Ethan? They were punishments. They were practice.
Scott made a small, pained noise in his sleep, a remnant of the day’s horror.
Luke tightened his hold, just a fraction. He bent his head, his lips hovering just above Scott’s temple. He didn’t kiss him. The claim was deeper than that.
“Soon,” Luke whispered, a vow breathed into the skin of the only thing that had ever mattered. “No one will ever hurt you again. I will burn their words. I will break their bones. I will build you a world where only I exist.”
He sat there in the dark, a statue of intent, holding his future kingdom in his arms. The hunger was no longer just for power. It was for a purification by fire.