Careful What You Wish For - Jack Harris
Nightshade
Forty-eight hours is an eternity and a blink.
The first twelve I spend trying to tear the door off its hinges.
Not because I think I’ll succeed. But because I need my hands on something solid while my head tries to split itself open. Because if I sit still, I see Kayla’s face in the blank wall and I’ll start carving it into my own skin just to make the image stop moving.
I don’t know how the others are so calm, so broken and beaten. Despite everything they’ve put me through, my righteous rage has fuelled me, kept me going, kept me strong. Kayla. I’m as rabid to find her now as I was the day I learned she was taken. Why aren’t the others? Do they not care like I do?
By the second cycle, the staff stop reacting.
No guards rush in. No barked commands. No sedative fog. Just the same quiet hum behind the walls, the same patient system letting me rage until the rage runs out of oxygen.
That’s when I know Bones is right.
They’re not containing me. They’re letting me burn off excess heat.
A controlled fire is useful.
The door opens exactly when it’s supposed to.
Valentine enters without ceremony. No entourage. No Seytan. He looks like he stepped out of the night and never bothered to change. Hair neat. Gloves black. Eyes the colour of a storm that doesn’t need lightning to kill you.
“You’ve been informed,” he says, voice level.
I stand. The room feels too small around me. “Where is she?”
Valentine doesn’t blink. “Not here.”
My laugh is ugly. “Brilliant. You came to tell me what I already know.”
“I came to tell you what happens next,” he replies.
I take one step forward and the guards on either side of the doorway shift, barely. Not raising weapons. Not threatening. Just reminding me the room is not mine.
I’m faster than them. Stronger. Meaner.
I don’t move anyway.
Because Valentine is the real door.
I can kill the guards. I can paint the corridor with their insides. It won’t open the world. It won’t bring Kayla back.
Valentine watches me weigh it. Like he’s watching a gauge. Like he’s waiting for the needle to settle.
“What happens next,” I say, slowly, “is you tell me where Kayla is.”
Valentine’s gaze doesn’t flinch. “No.”
The word lands clean. Not defiance. Not fear. Procedure.
“You’re not just leaving this island to search,” I growl. “You’re bringing her back.”
Valentine’s jaw tightens a fraction. “We’re leaving. That’s the order.”
Order.
