We arrive at a small, private landing strip in New Jersey, about half an hour from the facility, and load into rented vans ready for us at the airstrip. We make for the ping on Simon’s map, watching it carefully. Cora doesn’t move as far as we can tell, and I send up a prayer to the saints that she’s merely being cautious, not something worse.
When we reach the industrial zone, we trace Cora’s ping to a facility. The steel door hangs off its hinges, creaking.
“Cora?” Graeme asks.
I reach out with my affinity and find her within a block of our location. “She’s close. Due west about a block. You and Jack should go to her. She’ll be happy to see you both. We’ll get this taken care of.”
They set off, scribes raised. The deepest concern rolls off them as I watch them go.
My affinity flowing through me, I scan through the industrial building, finding it completely abandoned. There isn’t a single soul within its walls. “Empty,” I confirm. Cora must have been right; this place was vacated the moment she set off the alarm. Whatever they were doing here had to have been so damnable, so horrific that they couldn’t risk being found out.
Ian skirts the building, scribe held aloft. “Whatever wards were here before, they’re gone now.”
“All right,” Cassian says, hesitation in his voice, still worried for me despite the facility being abandoned. “Move in.”
The resistance precedes us into the building, followed by Cassian and Ian. Simon and Luca follow while Marcus and I take up the rear, Marcus at the ready should anything threaten me.
Simon lets out a low whistle as we walk deeper into the facility. “They sure left in a hurry. They didn’t even turn the lights off.” My brilliant beta checks for tech as we go, but all the computers we find have been destroyed, and just as many have been taken. With a growl of frustration, Simon strips every computer we find of its hard drive, working quickly and efficiently. Even to my uneducated eye, I can tell the drives have been fried, but maybe Simon can pull something off them.
“Whoa,” he says as we step into another room. “MRI machines? This place was definitely used for something medical. There’s no doubt about it.”
Another clandestine facility of my father’s. I shiver, thinking of the space I was confined to. A padded room, a gleaming operation table, IV tubes sneaking into my veins. Weak and woozy from dose after dose of sedatives.
We walk past rudimentary barred cells that are barely bigger than cages. Fifty of them. It’s unclear how many wereoccupied, but I shiver at the thought. The test subjects my father was experimenting on werecaged.
My thoughts spiral back to my own confinement. Watching the sparks of magic flickering between my fingertips slowly disappear. My father’s voice echoing in my thoughts.I will deal with her.Aspen, bitter disgust in his words.This is what you call handling it?
I jerk back to the present, shaking my head to clear it of the memories, just as we round the corner into an operating theater.
My thoughts rush into overdrive again. Being strapped to a table, held down so I couldn’t fight. Poison being pumped into my veins. Strapped to another table, just like the one in this room, Rad pressing his scribe to my heart to test if I had an affinity. The pain as his scribe burned through skin. Then, Rad trying to burn off my mating bites—and nearly succeeding.
We walk through the operating theater slowly, Simon picking up any piece of tech he can possibly salvage.
I stoop when I see a hospital bracelet on the floor. The bracelet is bloodied, as though someone broke skin trying to forcibly remove it. I pick it up gingerly and turn it over in my hand. When I see the serial number, I go completely still. It’s an exact match to the number I saw tattooed on an omega’s shoulder in my vision. ‘AFFINITY: ICE’ is listed beneath the serial number. A power so great my father was trying to lock it away, just like he locked away mine?
A thready breath heaves out of my aching lungs as panic spirals through me. My fingertips go numb, and my vision narrows to a pinpoint: the bracelet. What happened to the omega who wore it? Did she endure what I did, or worse? My ragged breath saws in and out of my lungs as I collapse to my knees, a barrage of memories whipping through me. Thisomega faced my greatest fear: being strapped to an operating table again. I feel faint.
Marcus kneels in front of me just in time to catch me as I sway. He pulls me close, holding me tightly. I wrap my arms around him, trying to suck his scent into my lungs, but my breath is quick and shallow in my chest.
“I’ve got you, Juniper,” he says quietly. “Never forget that I’ve got you.” He presses my head into the crook of his neck, and the scent of winter wind and towering pines is enough to get me to draw in a deep breath, and then another. When I’ve finally stilled in his arms, I cling to him, eyes shut tightly against the threat of tears.
I wordlessly push the hospital bracelet into his hand, but I can’t get the words on it out of my head.
AFFINITY: ICE.
Marcus guidesme out of the facility, leaving the rest of my pack and the resistance to complete their sweep. I’ve seen all I need to, and the thought of it all makes my stomach swoop with flares of nausea. We sit down against the side of the building, and Marcus holds my hand as I drop my head between my knees, focusing on steadying my breath.
Terrible. The walkthrough of the facility was terrible, and something I won’t soon forget. What does the hospital bracelet I found have to do with my vision of the alpha with ice powers? What became of the omega, reduced only to her affinity and a serial number tattooed into her skin?
Jack and Graeme return to the facility, heads hung, downtrodden.
“No Cora?” I croak, looking up at the two of them.
“Not yet,” Graeme says with a heavy sigh.
I don’t even have the wherewithal to reach out with myaffinity in search of her, and guilt lances through me as I make a shaky attempt at it.
“I came looking for you,” a small voice says from behind a dumpster. Cora emerges, limping, a hand pressed to her side. “I stayed hidden until you arrived.”
