“Silas,” I tell him, soft and tight, so only the inside of me hears it. “Breathe.”
I don’t know if he does. Maybe I do it for both of us.
We spill into the night.
Nightshade goes first because of course he does, not looking back, not checking counts, not waiting for permission. He walks like the world owes him a path and will be punished until it provides one.
Honeymonster matches his pace without stepping into his shadow, like he’s learned how to stand near a storm without becoming the lightning rod.
Bones hangs a step back and to the left – watching flanks, counting exits, reading the angles of the guards like they’re numbers he can turn into a solution.
Snow bounces into the spaces between us like a bad joke the universe keeps telling.
Hatchet moves quiet as a thought.
I am last, because someone always has to be.
Valentine walks alongside without quite walking with us. He moves like a verse: meter perfect. The wind seems to break and flow around him as if bowing. It shouldn’t, and it does anyway. He doesn’t glance at our necks where the injection sites are hidden, but I can feel the knowledge in him – the certainty of a man who knows exactly where the leash attaches.
Diesel. Wet air. The distant slap of water against pylons. Somewhere a gull makes a noise like a rusty hinge. Somewhere a man with a cigarette looks up, looks at us, and decides he never saw anything at all.
“Stay close,” Valentine orders. “And do not improvise.”
Snow snickers. Nightshade’s mouth does that thing that is almost a smile and isn’t. Bones says nothing and in saying nothing says copy. Hatchet’s shoulders answer for him.
I check my missing pockets out of reflex and find what the system wanted me to find: nothing useful. No weapon. No phone. No comforting weight. Only my own hands and the ache where the leash lives. Motherfuckers couldn’t even give us empty pockets.
We’re going to find her,Silas says, like saying it will recruit reality to his side.
We’re going to break the world,Donnelly says, pleased.And if we’re very lucky, the world will take the hint and break the right way.
“Kayla,” Nightshade says again, to the dark that owes him a debt.
And we move – six of us, and the man who decided not to try to stop the tide – into the teeth of it.
A PREDATOR AT REST
Psychopath - Cece
Kookaburra
I’m sure Calloway expected me to scurry away and start rifling through her files right away, but I’ve got better things to do.
Betterimpulsesto deal with.
The door to my room seals behind me with a soft hiss, sterile white giving way to shadow and the familiar weight of my space.
My hands are still steady. That’s the thing that always surprises them. They expect shaking. Adrenaline. Aftershocks. Some visible sign that what I just did took something out of me.
It never does.
If anything, I feelsharpened. Alive.
I rest my palms against the cool metal of the bed frame and breathe in slowly, letting the echo of her fear replay in my head– not the sound of it, but the moment just before it. The exact second her certainty fractured. When she realised I was enjoying this.
Violence doesn’t make me lose control.
It gives it back.
