I’d been careful for so long.
But this?
This felt like an invitation.
Marek cracked the door.
And I would walk right through it.
26 /XEN
In the forty-eighthours since Sophia had been secured, he had come to know her better than anyone else ever could.
A full-spectrum scan, down to the mineral makeup of her bones. Neural telemetry mapped in microbursts, timed to induced REM. Xen traced her dreams while she slept, and measured what parts of her sparked when she imagined escape.
But the lattice was the masterpiece.
Xen had to manage thousands of microneedles, each no thicker than a hair. Pressed against her skin like a kiss. Shallow enough to avoid pain. Deep enough to breach the capillary bed.
Because blood was honest.
It didn’t posture. It didn’t lie.
It touched everything—muscle, nerve, organ—and it carried the memory of all three.
So he spoke to it.
The polymer was bio-adaptive—sensitive to chemical gradients, pressure shifts, thermal flux. It didn’t fight her. It learned her. Moved with her. It charted the soft geometry of her pulse, memorized the rhythm of her flow. And when it knew her well enough to predict her, it hardened. Quietly. Capillary bycapillary. A second network beneath the first. A net, inside her blood.
He let it rest. Let it root. Let her body believe she was healing.
Because when he cut her open now, she would not bleed.
Not unless he wanted her to.
And now, as he prepared to cut, he didn’t need clamps or cautery to bind or crush. The lattice did the work for him—constricting capillaries before the blade ever touched her skin. A thousand tourniquets firing in microscopic unison, responsive to his commands. She wouldn’t bleed unless Xen wanted her to. She wouldn’t bruise unless he allowed it.
But she would likely scar.
There was no way to scrape the invasive filaments off her nerves without exposing them, which meant, to some degree, he would be flaying her alive.
So she would be covered in scars when she healed, but if he did his job right, she would still maintain all of her preexisting function—and it would be better than the alternative.
Xen adjusted his optical zoom without looking up, tracing a filament from the outer edge of her fifth digit all the way back to her spine as Thorne seethed behind him.
“How much longer?”
“As long as it takes,” Xen told him. Just as he had told him before.
The Maukin, vampire, and rest of the MSA team had found a series of dead-drops and information relays that had eventually come to a dead end.
Xen suspected that if he’d been among their number, he would’ve been able to find the next one—but he hadn’t been able to trace Sophia’s minders back to Sirena because he had been too busy here, feigning her signal until he could cut her off from her minders entirely and begin the laborious process of saving her life.
And the entire time, Thorne had been there. Frozen into stone during daylight; a hulking, pacing gargoyle during night.
“She’s mine,” Thorne repeated, with the tone of a man who was slowly dying, from behind the threshold Xen had burned into the floor with a UV stylus.
“I know,” Xen said.
