Prologue: The Last Mercy
~VICTORIA~
The wind is the only honest thing left on this cliff.
It doesn't pretend to be gentle. Doesn't soften its edges or whisper sweet lies about forgiveness and healing and all those pretty words people stitch into greeting cards when they don't know what else to say to someone whose world has been rearranged by violence.
The wind justis.
Cold. Relentless. Unapologetic.
Like me.
I stand at the edge of a desolated cliffside that overlooks the kind of ocean poets romanticize and survivors fear—black water crashing against jagged rock formations that jut from the surface like the broken teeth of something ancient and starving. The spray reaches high enough that I can taste the salt on my lips if I breathe in deep enough, mingling with the iron aftertaste that hasn't left my mouth since the warehouse.
Since I started cutting.
The sky above is bruised. Purples and grays bleed into one another like watercolors left in the rain, heavy with the promise of a storm that hasn't decided whether it wants to weep or rage. The last threads of daylight cling to the horizon in thin,desperate ribbons of amber that do nothing to warm the air or the hollowed-out cavity behind my sternum where something vital used to live.
Hope, maybe.
Or naivety.
Hard to tell the difference when both leave the same wound.
Behind me, the dirt path we took to get here is already disappearing under the encroaching darkness. The van is parked a quarter mile back, hidden behind a cluster of dead trees that look like skeletal hands reaching for a god who stopped listening long ago. Elizabeth and the others left an hour ago—back to their pack, back to their revelations, back to the mess of truths and confessions that Christmas in Russia decided to unravel for them all.
Good for them.
Truly.
Elizabeth Abercrombie earned her ending. Earned the right to stand in front of Holmes with all her secrets laid bare and not crumble. She earned those men—earned the love that's been clawing its way through every wall she built since Harvard, since the forest, since I found her half-dead and delirious in the underbrush with her dress torn and her spirit shattered into fragments I wasn't sure could ever be reassembled.
I put her back together.
Piece by agonizing piece.
And now she gets to walk forward while I stay behind to finish what should have ended years ago.
The liquid shot I administered took its full effect within the promised three minutes. The compound—engineered specifically through connections I'd spent years cultivating within the Forgotten Omegas network—wasn't designed to kill. That would have been a mercy, and mercy was never part of the itinerary.
No.
The shot was designed to prolong. To preserve just enough biological function to keep the body conscious while it endured the kind of systematic deconstruction that would make even a seasoned surgeon look away.
And I didn't look away.
Not once.
Seventy-two hours.
That's how long it took to reduce Vivian Sinclair from the polished, designer-clad imposter who'd stolen my name, my life, and my intended mate into the thing that now sits before me.
Thing.
Because she stopped being my sister somewhere between the second day and the third, when the screaming finally stopped—not because the pain lessened, but because there was nothing left to scream with.
I adjust my black gloves—the same ones I wore when I stepped into that warehouse light and watched Vivian's world collapse with a single whispered greeting—and turn to face the chair.
