Present day
The shutters are closed and the room is in darkness. Neva stretches out her hand and searches for the light switch by the door. In a glare of illumination, the room lights up. Neva stops in the doorway, shocked by what she sees: a child’s room fully preserved from the day she left it.
Except for the pictures.
Photographs cover one entire wall interspersed with newspaper clippings, all of which show details of times and places that Neva remembers. Kills. Her kills. On a small patch on another wall, Neva sees the death shots – pictures she took and sent to her handler as proof that she’d completed each job. That handler had always been Tracey and so she knows she had to have passed them on to Annalise.
Neva walks further into the room, distracted by the graveyard of toys that are covered with a thick layer of dust. There is a child’s bed, turned down ready for use, and a small moth-eaten pile of clothing waiting on top of the dresser for their tiny owner to return.
Memories hit her like a bolt of lightning in the chest. Her heart hurts: a dull homesick longing. She runs her hand over the musty fur of a once-loved teddy, remembering it clutched in her arms as she lay in the tiny bed, looking up at that one person she most trusted. Mother.
Rest, my little one.
A crack inside her brings her to her knees. Neva doesn’t notice the dust that puffs up into the air as the wrenching pain of leaving Mother and Fleur hits her again.
And Mother’s words. ‘She’s only a baby. Be kind to her, please…’
It was the moment she first saw Tracey. Thereafter, Fae died and Neva was born. A child’s life and destiny were forever changed.
‘I’m Fae,’ she says. And the crack in her sanity widens. ‘No. I’m Neva.’
The room around her swirls and writhes as Neva tears herself from one identity to another in bursts of cohesive recollection. Layer upon layer of memories fall back into place. One moment she’s playing in this very room, the next she’s honing her gymnastics skills in the kill house. Each memory overlap blurs together, as she grows and changes under Tracey’s direction. A vision of Fae in the château grounds, holding her mother’s hand, erases Neva. While in another moment, Neva plunging her knife into Kurt, eradicates Fae. Over and over, memories and moments pour into Neva’s conscious mind, dragged as they are from her subconscious. Until, unable to take in any more, her mind short circuits and Neva breaks.
Collapsing forward onto the neglected carpet, Neva’s mind shuts down, plummeting her into welcome darkness until her memories can reshape and find a place to hold it all within.