“Bill Ferrars. My former boss,” Emma clarified, her voice thick with the pain of loss, the grief clinging to her like a second skin.
His expression remained blank. It was clear he had no clue what she was talking about.
Caden’s brow furrowed. “I don’t think that was Stephen’s doing. If it was, it’s news to me.”
Stephen shook his head firmly, his wariness hardening into resolution. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. If a human was killed, it wasn’t by my order.”
Emma pushed to her feet and started pacing the room in slow, measured steps, her fingers curling and uncurling at her sides. Every few moments, she shook her head, her movements tight, controlled—but the turmoil brewing beneath them was impossible to miss.
Then, at last, she spoke.
“You traveled a hundred years into the future.” Her lips moved with intention, as if she were piecing the truth together one jagged shard at a time. “You saw how humans would use tracking devices to erase us, using the tracking technology of the LiaPrism. And you decided the only way to stop it was to make James the next Leader of Cyclos, to put him in a position where he could destroy every single one of those, before the Great Exposure.”
Stephen nodded, his face a mask of grim determination.
Against all odds, my voice held steady. “Meanwhile, you went out of your way to find someone with untraceable translation. You found Emma, forced her into training with me—and thenunleashed your pet, Caden, and his Radicals to abduct and torture her, all to uncover why her haze couldn’t be tracked.”
His eyes flickered with a hint of annoyance. “They weren’t Radicals,” he corrected, his tone growing colder. “The only time you’ve actually encountered real Radicals was at the border of Antwerp when you picked up Maria and when they attacked Cyclos with the Amplifier. All the other times? They were Caden’s men—Offensives.”
My blood ran cold as his words settled over me, heavy and suffocating. Those men I’d tortured. The ones I’d killed in the caves…They were Caden’s men. Not Radicals.
My thoughts were spiraling in a chaotic loop. Had the Maumars known? Who else was fucking involved?
I whipped my head toward Caden, and he instantly met my stare, that infuriating smirk still carved into his face—clearly guessing at what was going through my mind.
“Eliot?” He lifted a shoulder in an effortless shrug. “Yeah, he’s one of mine too. Planted him in Cyclos a long time ago.”
Motherfucker.
But it didn’t add up. “If they were trained Offensives, how the hell did Emma escape fifteen of them at Coastal by herself?” I shook my head, skepticism running through me. Emma was powerful, but that… that was highly improbable.
Caden’s face remained unreadable, his tone cold, calculated. “Actually, we only needed her to translate inside the building. By escaping and using her powers on my men, she gave us everything we needed. We let her go. Let her believe she had bested us.”
“Bullshit, I saw the bodies,” I snapped, my hands shaking with fury.
Caden shrugged, casual as ever. “Illusions. Playing dead. Tactical retreat.” His delivery was so detached, so unaffected,it made my blood boil. “She did manage to kill two of them, though, so that’s something.”
A sudden darkness flickered in his eyes—a shadow I’d seen before, when his men were wounded or killed on the battlefield at Crown. But the smug mask never slipped. He was hiding his true feelings, and I wasn’t interested in digging deeper.
Emma sat back down, her gaze finding Caden’s before she spoke—calmly, almost unnervingly soft. “What did you find out?” There was a strange kindness to the question which seemed completely out of place. “About my magic?”
Fuck, in the heat of everything, I hadn’t even thought of that. The idea of someone like Caden knowing the truth about her sent more than a ripple of dread through my entire body.
Caden seemed just as taken aback by Emma’s sweet tone. He blinked, his usual smugness faltering for a moment, before he cleared his throat and straightened.
“Not much, to be honest,” he admitted. “As I told you back then, we didn’t find anything conclusive in your blood. We lured out your haze, contained it, filtered it through every possible source we had to determine how yours differs from ours. And found absolutely nothing.”
I let out a quiet breath, a flicker of relief washing over me despite the whirlwind of confusion still spinning around us.
Caden glanced at Emma, his mask still intact, unreadable, but her unshaken calm seemed to disarm him a little.
“It was only ever about preserving the safety of our people. Saving their future. You hold the key. That’s it.” Caden’s voice was flat, emotionless. If it was meant as an apology, he still had a lot to learn about remorse. His words sounded more like a dry, calculated statement rather than anything resembling real regret.
Emma nodded slowly, her demeanor composed, though I could see the chaos simmering beneath it. “Which is why youkilled Rex when he hit me. You only wanted to use the amount of violence you thought was necessary to trigger my energy.”
Rex? Who the fuck was Rex?
Caden’s composure visibly changed, any trace of his everlasting fake charm finally vanishing. He didn’t even bother to deny it. Instead, he slowly nodded back, clearly reflecting on that moment. “Yes.”
