The kitchen is large and aggressively modern in style, all metallic sharp edges and decorated in a cool colour palate. It isn’t quite as awful as the outside would suggest, but the extreme sterility of it leaves me feeling cold. This isn’t the sort of kitchen a family could gather in for breakfast despite its vast counter space and ridiculously big granite island in the middle. I want to ask if Rohan ever sat in this room with his bastard father and the woman he had me murder for trying to escape him, and presumably, the frostbitten life he’d trapped her in.
I’m not sure if I could ever bring myself to feel sympathy for a woman who willingly married a man like Ian Stone, who gave that man a child and let him brutalise it. But the concept of choice is subjective, so maybe she thought she had none, and to be fair to her, the moment she decided that was the last choice she ever made.
Rohan pauses for a moment to get his bearings. He checks Stone’s tracker, then turns to us and signsground-floor office. His hand movements are quick and practiced. Over the years with OI, I was taught to speak and understand various different languages, including both BSL and ASL. Leo nods along in understanding, having been taught some basic sign language as part of his early agent training.
We move through the house silently, feet treading lightly and fast across the wooden floors. Thankfully, we don’t come across any more guards, and Rohan leads us to a room near the front of the house. He pulls us to halt outside the office door, holding up his fingers and counting down from three.
When the last finger drops, he kicks open the office door and rushes inside with his stolen gun raised in front of him. I follow closely behind, with Leo bringing up the rear, both of us similarly holding our guns up and pointed forward.
Inside the office, we find three guards, with Ian Stone sitting behind his desk at the far end of the room. Rohan dispatches one of the guards with a solid head shot, and I take out the two remaining before they can touch the guns strapped to their sides.
I sneer at the dropped bodies of the OI guards. Sloppy, slow, and incompetent. Stone might as well have hired a bunch of untrained tweens to protect him.
Stone looks just like I remember him. Blandly attractive in that disarmingly approachable way, jaw strong and stubbled and immaculately dressed in expensive, casual clothes. The man almost never wears a suit. Rohan inherited his black eyes from his father, except where Rohan’s hold a spark of warmth, a footprint of humanity, Ian Stone’s are as opaque and lifeless as rocks, chips of obsidian cut into his handsome face.
He sits behind his large glass desk, leaning back in his chair with the same bored expression that Rohan had on outside when I snapped the necks of those guards. His arms aren’t crossed, but the casual slump of his body is insultingly unconcerned.
Stone’s horrible eyes flicker from his son to me. “Hello, boys,” he says, voice shockingly genial. “Thank you for coming so promptly.” His mouth curves into a slight smile on one side when his gaze shifts to Leo. “And for bringing a gift.” He inclines his head. “It’s good to finally meet you, Leo Snow.”
Leo blinks at Stone in confusion, thrown off by the false friendliness in the other man’s tone.
Leo’s name coming out of Stone’s mouth, paired with the interest he rakes over him with those terrible, awful fuckingeyes, has me stepping forward and raising my gun again, pointing it right at him and pressing my finger over the trigger.
But at the last moment, Rohan is there, knocking my arm, sending the bullet I just fired flying wide. It lodges inside the wall behind Stone, missing his head, my intended target, by a mile. Rohan doesn’t hesitate to use the second of shock his betrayal just earned him, moving in close and grabbing my throat with his bare palm.
“Rohan, no!” Leo shouts from behind us, but it’s too late.
Pain, familiar and devastating, explodes across my neck, every nerve igniting like tinder, shocks of agony branching outward like electric surges travelling through exposed wires. It’s so intense this time that I drop to my knees, choking on spit, vocal cords twisted into tortured silence, a scream trapped somewhere in my esophagus.
Rohan doesn’t even need to take my gun; the pain is so acute that my muscles spasm, and I drop it to the wooden floor. It hits the ground with a loud bang that echoes around the big, mostly empty office, like a fumbled Bible thumping against the floor of a church.
Distantly, I hear the sound of Leo gasping my name in horror and rushing forward to intervene. Rohan lets go of my throat to intercept Leo, throwing himself at the other man like a wild animal, taking Leo down to the ground despite his larger body.
I’m doubled over, still reeling from the aftershocks of pain ravaging my nerves, like hot knives coated in acid slicing at tendons although that still doesn’t quite do it justice. The overwhelming burn is almost pure. It’s unfiltered agony, like nothing else I’ve ever felt. My hands are pressed to the floor, fingernails scratching marks into the wood. I’ll be lucky if I don’t end up with splinters under my nails.
Leo does his best, from what I can tell without looking back at him, to fight off Rohan, but the smaller man has strength anda literal debilitating superpower on his side. Not to mention the fact that Leo will do anything possible to avoid killing Rohan, no matter how bad it gets. It would enrage me if I didn’t know that’s just how Leo is. He wouldn’t be the man I’ve fallen in love with if he made any other choice.
When the sound of fighting stops, I assume Rohan has Leo pinned beneath him, unable to move let alone escape. Not that Leo would run even if he could, loyal nightmare that he is. He’d never leave me here, which scares me more than anything. Imagining Leo taken into OI’s custody is enough to make me push through the pain and attempt to stand.
Stone has gotten up from his chair and walked around to lean against the side of his desk, one hand in his jacket pocket, the other holding the gun I dropped that he now has pointed right back at me.
My eyes dart to the desk, made up almost entirely of glass. Stone follows my gaze and huffs out a semi-amused laugh.
“One move, Jack,” he warns me, “and I won’t just put a bullet in you, I’ll get your brother to use his power on your boyfriend until he screams himself to unconsciousness, got it?”
There’s a pause where I process a series of emotions ranging from apoplectic fury at the threat toward Leo, to abject confusion over what the hell Stone is talking about.
Glaring at Stone, I resist the overpowering urge to go for his exposed throat and rip out his jugular with my teeth. “My …whatdid you just say to me?” I demand in a snarl.
Leo inhales sharply behind me, and I half turn, keeping Stone in my eyeline, unwilling to put my back to him entirely. Rohan is looking up at me with a blank expression, Leo pinned under him with wide, too-blue eyes moving between us fearfully. There’s something there, on his face, that sets off a firebomb of dread inside me, flames rushing to fill the space, scorching wet flesh, turning bones from white to charred black.
“Jack,” Leo tries to speak, voice heavy with an emotion I can’t read. He sounds sorry. He sounds so sorry, and the depth of understanding in it makes me feel sick to my stomach, like I might vomit up all that fire melting my intestines and burn this entire fucking house down.
“Your mother was a brilliant woman,” Stone says conversationally, snapping my attention away from the empathy in Leo’s eyes. He doesn’t look at Stone at all, every bit of his concern reserved for me.
“My mother?” I scowl, honestly bewildered for the first time, wondering if I heard him right.
“She was a truly one-in-a-million mind,” Stone goes on, like it’s completely normal and fine to be talking about my mother, the woman I’m certain he had killed just so he could turn Dan and me into fucked-up science experiments. “One of the best scientists I’ve ever worked with.”
