“Or,” Marco returned, and let me see the flash of slightly crooked teeth, “Captain Rawlings has assigned his best soldier to safe-guard his most valuable asset in a less than ideal situation.”
I whirled to face him, clenched fists held stiff at my sides. “That man caresnothingfor my safety,” I hissed, fury spattering between the points of my modified canines. “He isn’t capable of it.”
Marco shrugged. “Not sure the distinction matters all that much.”
“And why would it?” I asked, a bark of bitter laughter bursting free of my lips. “Nothing matters as long as the empire has access to their precious assets, is that it?”
Taking another deep drag, the soldier’s smirk became a grin. “Now you’re getting it.” A tendril of smoke curled from his nostrils before he snorted, and said, “Not sure what you’ve got to complain about, lady wildcat. You were rescued from a life of struggle and starvation, living in the forest with nothing and no one. And now?” His hands flew out, an all-encompassing gesture that swallowed our surroundings. “Luxury, food, and security in exchange for power your people couldn’t even use without an elite to harvest it.”
Shock rendered me mute. My lips working around a stupefied silence. That this soldier thought so little of the women who’d been stolen from a life of peace and altruism? Women who’d been made to kill for a country that wasn’t their own, whose power of healing had been so corrupted by warmongers.
Caledonian propaganda. Indoctrination for evils the average citizen hadn’t thought to ask forgiveness for.
“That’s”—I shook my head, rubbing at the burn in my throat as I searched for a rebuttal, and failed.
But a moment later, the burn became something else. A reminder of what it had felt like when the chains were first bound to my skin, when I’d lost everything at the captain’s hands. Incinerating heat that didn’t scorch looped around my throat and wrists, the glow from my Tritan chains lit up Marco’s face.
I couldn’t even scream. Couldn’t only gape at Marco’s awed, slack-jawed expression and know my veins were bulging with molten fire that had traveled up, over my forearms, past my elbows on its way to cauterize my heart and wrap it in a beautiful, inert cast of pure gold.
“Such power,” Marco whispered, and turned to watch the window. “Come, lady wildcat. This is what you were meant for.”
But I couldn’t move. Paralyzed in a tomb of complete agony, my lungs seized solid and immobile as the gold crept and wormed. Crackling beneath my skin, baking my flesh.
And then three things happened all at once.
Pure, unfiltered torment tore through my chest—and was gone in an instant, leaving me utterly boneless. Drained to the point of collapse.
A flash of blinding green ignited the distant field, imprinting the contents of the headquarters building into my retinas as the world tilted back on its axis.
My knees kissed the floor, unnoticed in the wake of a mighty explosion.
“Holy shit!” Marco hollered, whopping along with the rest of the soldiers packed into the safety of the headquarters building. “That was incredible! Lady wildcat, you’re—”
But that was all I knew before the last speck of light faded from my vision and everything fell into darkness.
6
“Marco, you have to stop him!”
The voice echoed from a long way off. Familiar and alien all at once. Distorted through the heavy, wet sands clogging my ears. Each wave of sound pulling me deeper beneath the surface where it was quiet. Where I might stay forever.
“He’s killing her!Hurry!”
A muffled curse fizzled against my ears, and the tingling between my eyes spread to the bridge of my nose. My lips and cheeks. Spilling down my chest, where it seeped into numb extremities, leaving my heart to flounder and skip in an irregular beat.
“Mila!” the voice sobbed, and I felt a tendril of something warm and beautiful press against my cheeks. A slight compression that puckered my lips.
The cold swallowed it whole and reached for more with a sucking, ravenous greed. Pulling with such ferocious demand that a tiny, fragile sound of protest slipped through my lips.
A gasp, and the beauty was taken away. “I can’t fix this, Marco! Run! You have to stop him before—”
The voice faded into the frost. Replaced by the electric tingle, a coating of falling dust that was heavier than anything I might lift alone.
And why bother?
This was a place without pain. Without anguish or torment, where I couldn’t be used to kill the people I’d die to save. A place without grief, where my breaths were rigid and frozen in my chest, but only for a moment. Only until the cold began to feel like heat, and the prickle of withering nerves became the searing burn of… life.
A tiny, fragile flicker ignited in my chest as the gushing exodus of my life-force came to an abrupt, merciful halt.
