Firecrackers rip through the air—crack-crack-crack-crack—sounding exactly like gunfire, just as we planned. Shouts erupt from below. I hear boots pounding on pavement and see the black smudged shadows of guards scrambling toward the south entrance where Zeke’s motor vehicle victim of choice is presumably going up in flames.
I don’t hesitate.
I launch myself off the roof, and the wire catches my weight with a wary groan that vibrates through my entire skeleton. My shoulders scream as I start shimmying, hand over hand. The wire sways above beneath me, undulating from side to side in lazy arcs that make my stomach turn.
Don’t look down. Don’t look down. Don’t fucking look down.
I keep moving.
The far rooftop rushes toward me faster than expected. I release the harness at the last possible second and drop, tucking into a roll that my knees immediately despise. The gravel tears through my jeans and into skin, but I’m across.
I’m fuckingacross.
No time to celebrate, though.
I find the rooftop access door and wrench it open with a screech that makes me wince. My footsteps echo down the interior stairwell no matter how carefully I place them. I pause between each one to listen for signs of guards.
But I hear nothing. I reach the second floor landing without incident. I ease the door open one inch. Then two.
The hallway stretches before me, lit by a single flickering bulb that casts everything in sickly yellow. I see one guard, just one, slouched against the wall about fifteen feet from Sage’s door, his face illuminated by the glow of his phone screen. His rifle leans against the wall beside him, close but not in his hands.
I move in.
The carpet muffles my footsteps as I close the distance. The guard doesn’t look up from his phone.I hope the TikTok reel was worth it, you miserable bastard, I think to myself.
My arm hooks around his throat from behind, locking into the chokehold Aleksei taught me when I was twelve years old, back when our biggest concern was which corner boys were trying to muscle in on our territory.“Cut off the blood, not the air,”he’d instructed, demonstrating on a practice dummy we stole from the back of a sporting goods store.“If you do it right, they go out quiet in ten seconds flat. That’s what you want. Not a fucking peep.”
All these years later, I still do it right. The guard’s phone falls to the floor. His hands fly to my forearm, clawing uselessly. I count in my head—one, two, three, four—and feel the exact moment his body goes slack.
He never even saw my face.
I drag him to a supply closet halfway down the hallway, stuff a rag into his mouth, and use his own belt to secure his wrists behind his back. By the time he manages to get loose, we’ll be long gone.
I hope.
I approach Sage’s door and test the handle. It’s locked, of course. But it’s a cheap interior bolt, so all it takes is one sharp kick and the door splinters inward.
Sage jerks upright in bed. His face churns through every possible emotion in the span of a single heartbeat. Shock first, eyes going wide, mouth falling open. Then relief pours in, softening the hard lines of his jaw, making him look younger than sixteen, making him look like the little boy I used to carry on my shoulders through Grant Park.
Hope flickers next. Brief. Frail. A candle flame in a hurricane.
“… Bastian?”
And then it dies, snuffed out by a darkness I know well from every time I’ve looked in the mirror over the last two months.
Rage.
Pure, undiluted rage.
“You left me,” he hisses. He hurls it like an accusation, like I’ve committed the worst crime imaginable.
Maybe I have.
“Sage—”
“No.” He shakes his head. “No. You don’t get to say my name. You don’t get to behere.”
I cross the room and drop to my knees at his bedside. The mattress springs creak as he flinches back from me, pressing himself against the headboard likeI’mthe threat here.
