“What?” I answered, my voice harsh, irritated.
“Is Cinder with you?” Dahlia’s voice filtered through the speaker.
I glanced at Leo, who only raised a brow. “Yes.”
“I need you to bring him in,” she said.
My body jolted up, the blankets falling around me as Leo watched with concern. “He’s still recovering.
Dahlia started to reply, but Leo snatched the phone from my hand. I pouted as he placed a quick peck on my cheek.
“Cinder, here,” he winked at me as he talked into the phone.
Her voice was muffled, and I couldn’t make out what was said, but his face dropped before his gaze set on the window beside us. My body tensed, and I wanted to destroy the VIA in that moment. Finally, we’d found some sort of peace, some sort of salvation.
And now they’re butting their fucking heads in.
“Got it.” He swallowed hard. “I’ll be there in an hour.”
He hung up, and I balked. “You can’t be serious?—”
Leo snatched my hand, placing a quick kiss on the inside of my wrist before he nipped at the skin. “No worries, Sweetheart. It won’t take long. Just a little more bullshit, and we’ll have our time. Alright?”
My brows scrunched, and I wanted to protest, but I could only nod as his eyes pleaded. “…Fine. But if they make anything worse, I’m bringing them into a nightmare.”
He chuckled before his eyes ran down my body. “I’d love to see it.”
TWENTY-FOUR
LEO
My life was finally moving forward, finallyturning in the right direction.
Alex was everything—she was salvation. She’d seen the worst parts of me, and accepted all of it, without even blinking. I didn’t burn her, didn’t make her flinch away from me. I craved her touch, her voice, that calming presence that made everything else meaningless.
There was only one thing left now. The one thing that could make everything collapse around me.
I should have told her first. Before we went too far.
“We’ve been going over the footage of the Splinter attack,” Dahlia crossed her hands over her desk, and I went rigid.
It was only us; Reed and Alex waited in another room, and I knew it couldn’t be good. Dahlia only wanted to speak to me—the anxiety was flooding through me, setting my body on high alert. Still, my watch didn’t go off, and I didn’t burn the new couch that had replaced the last one.
“That Villain you fought, Glitch?” she asked.
I nodded, hesitant.
“We assumed he didn’t have a chip.” Dahlia turned her computer monitor around, the screen set on the VIA database of Variants. “But that’s not the case. He does have one, except it’s been tampered with. From what we can gather, it looks like a new Villain tech, something messing with the feed. There’s a reason why they didn’t take it out, and there’s a reason why they don’t want us to know who he is.”
My head cocked, and I wasn’t sure if I was following. Alex was the smart one, the one who could read between the lines of what people were saying, or dig the information out of them. I followed orders; destroyed what I was told to. That was the problem, though, why my stomach turned to iron as a heavy weight sat in my gut.
The orders weren’t always correct. Sometimes, they got people killed. Thewrongpeople.
“I need you to locate him,” Dahlia’s voice was hard. “He’s the key. There’s a reason Heroes are going missing instead of bodies showing up.”
“What are you saying?” I swallowed, my skin pricking with unease.
Dahlia laced her hands together and tucked her chin on top, her glasses sliding down her nose. “If they can tamper with chips, they can tamper with Heroes. The VIA designed them to ensure Variants could be monitored—abilities, statistics, locations — if anyone decided to turn against society. Villains started finding ways to remove them, or managed to evade getting them to begin with. But if theystudiedthe tech, if they could alter the code, the uses could be endless. Disastrous.”
