“More, huh?” Nathaniel's lips twitch. “And what, exactly, would that entail?”
Cassian doesn’t answer immediately. Instead, he slowly scans the room, taking in the horrors Laura Collins left behind. The jars, the tiny fragments of lives she stole, the meticulous cruelty woven into every detail.
Then, without warning, he throws the jar in his hand against the concrete wall.
Glass shatters. The tiny ribs scatter, brittle and pale against the cold stone floor.
A tense silence follows.
“Well,” Talon lets out a low whistle. “That’s one way to process your feelings.”
Nathaniel sighs, rubbing his temple. “Cass, you’re making a mess.”
Cassian ignores them both. He turns back to the table where Laura Collins is slumped, half-conscious, her limbs still useless from the biological cocktail Nathaniel made coursing through her veins. Her eyes are wide, darting between us, but her body doesn’t respond.
She can’t run. Can’t fight.
She can only watch.
And for the first time since we brought her here, I think real fear finally sets in.
Good.
“We should let her rot here,” Cassian mutters, his voice low. “Find a way to trap her soul inside these walls. Make her stay with everything she's done. Make her restless and miserable forever.”
Hell yeah. Maybe he’s not as much of an asshole as I thought he was.
I blink at him.
No. Wait. Wait a damn minute.
Am I actually losing it?
Sure, he’s got a soft spot for the families that lost their kids, but he’s still a criminal. He’s literally suggesting we turn this basement into a ghost-infested paranormal crime scene. We’re talking full-on spooky house with an extra side of bad energy and child-murder lore.
This man is not a hero. He is apsycho.
And I’m not even talking about what’s going to happen to the balance between life and death here anymore. This is just plain wrong.
But Nathaniel hums, tapping his chin like he’s actually considering it.
“Clever,” he muses. “But difficult. You know soul binding within walls of a building is a fickle matter. Sooner or later, this building will perish, and she'll get free. We don't want any hauntings.”
Hauntings.
I swear I feel the temperature drop ten degrees.
Listen, I may not have a PhD in Black Magic Fuckery, but even I know that when you start casually discussing trapping souls like they’re fireflies, you’ve gone off the deep end.
The only thing I do know? This is a catastrophically bad idea.
“We could figure it out,” Cassian insists. “We could try breaking her first. Maybe we don’t kill her right away. Maybe we take pieces of her, one by one, like she did to those kids. Maybe we—”
“Enough,” I snap.
They all turn to look at me.
I don’t know what the hell just came over me, but something in Cassian’s tone makes my skin crawl. Not because I dislike him. Not because I disagree. Not because I think she deserves a shred of mercy.
