“Sterling.”
He circles me, “You look…diminished. I must say, I expected more of a fight.”
“Happy to disappoint.” My gaze fixes on the polished leather of his shoes.
“Quite the spectacle you’ve been running across the South.” He squats down in front of me. “You’ve always been a fucking embarrassment. But this? Leaving a trail of bodies, burning clubs, and compounds? It’s almost poetic.” He reaches out and smears the blood on my chin with his thumb. “So…predictable.”
His finger lingers on my jaw. I don’t pull away. Inside my head, I’m carving the skin from his bones.
“You and I,” he says, rising, “we’re more alike than either of us wants to admit.”
“We’renothingalike.”
“Aren’t we?” He walks over to a table, picking up a familiar-looking knife. “We both understand power. That it’s not given, it’s taken. We both know the old bloodlines are obsolete. The Sovereign, as it was, is a rotting corpse. We need something new.”
“That why you sent Lev to kill me? You trying to start your shiny new world with my corpse?”
He pauses, twirling the knife between his fingers. “You know what your problem’s always been, Priest? You could have been great. You weresupposedto be great. I sent you to Valcross to forge that greatness. I gave you purpose, strength, identity. You’d be nothing without me.”
“That what you tell yourself? You sent a four-year-old boy to hell and called it training. Men are sent there for a year, maybe two, if they can survive that long. You left me there to rot forsixteen fucking years. You let them break me, starve me, bleed me dry until I forgot what my own name sounded like.”
His smile doesn’t waver. “Control was the point. You were supposed to be a symbol of what the Sovereign could be. Refined power. But instead, you became?—”
“Do you know what they did to us?” I snarl, yanking at the chains. “They starved us until we turned on each other. Weeks without food. The older ones would kill the smaller ones for rations. Then they stopped giving us rations altogether. We had to make our own. I was nine the first time I tasted human flesh, Sterling. Tell me again aboutcontrol.”
Blood drips from my mouth as I spit onto the floor between us. “Ibecamewhat you made me. Your fucking monster.”
He walks back over, crouching in front of me again. The point of my own knife presses into the skin under my chin.
“I gave you a chance to be something more—a leader, a king. But you chose?—”
“I chose to survive. Something you’ll never understand.”
“Survive? You call this surviving?” He gestures at me. “You’re dying, Priest.” He presses the knife harder until it draws blood. “You’re a dog, and I’m putting you down.”
He straightens with a sigh, wipes my blood from the blade with a monogrammed silk handkerchief.
“But not yet. First, you’ll confess on record. You’ll own the chaos you’ve caused—the deaths of Dalton and Alistair, your attempted assassination of me, and the Commanders. You’ll be the monster the world believes you are. The perfect villain to bury the old Sovereign.”
“No one will believe you. You might have them fooled now, but they’ll see through your lies.”
He smiles. “Oh, Priest. You’ve already given meeverythingI need.”
He starts pacing, hands clasped behind his back.
“Years of erratic behavior. Unprovoked violence. Ignoring protocol and direct orders. You’ve refused antipsychotics. You don’t sleep more than two hours a night. You haven’t passed a psych eval in six years. Dissociative episodes. Hallucinations. Self-harm. Your kill count is unconfirmable—because you have a habit of mutilating your targets beyond recognition. Do I need to go on?”
He turns and kneels again.
“You crucified a handler on the border of Ukraine. Strung him up outside his home, because he questioned your kill order. You executed a mole in front of his family. You skinned an Associate alive for waking you up too fast. You made a translator swallow her own tongue. You drowned a Servant in bleach. You killed your bunkmate during recruit training—do you even remember his name?”
He tilts his head. “You said, ‘he looked at me wrong.’”
My jaw clenches, throat pulsing with hatred. He stands, brushing imaginary dust from his sleeve.
“Those are a fraction of your unauthorized kills. Everything about you screams instability. The psych reports. The body count. The disciplinary logs. Every scar on your body tells the same story—and now, it’s mine to weaponize.”
He steps closer, lowering his voice until it’s almost a whisper against my ear.
