The first man catches me around the waist, lifts me off my feet like I weigh nothing. The second one grabs my arm, twists, and the knife clatters to the floor. The third one moves in with something in his hand, something small and metal that glints in the light.
An injector.
I scream. I kick, bite, claw at the arms holding me. My nails rake across someone's face and I feel skin tear, feel blood under my fingertips.
It doesn't matter.
The needle finds my neck. Cold pressure, then a sting, then a spreading numbness that starts at the injection site and radiates outward.
My limbs go heavy. My vision blurs.
The last thing I see before the darkness takes me is the apartment door, standing open, letting in the grey light of a morning that was supposed to be different.
Jace,I think.Jace, I'm sorry. I didn't answer the door.
And then nothing.
I wake up in pieces.
First, the cold. A chill that seeps through my clothes, through my skin, into my bones. I'm lying on something hard, something metal, and the cold radiates up from it like I'm lying on a slab of ice.
Second, the restraints. My wrists are locked above my head, cuffed to something I can't see. My ankles are similarly bound, spread apart, secured to the surface beneath me.
Then, the light. Bright, white, clinical. The kind of light that doesn't leave shadows, that exposes everything, that makes you feel like a specimen under a microscope.
I know this feeling.
I've been here before.
No. No no no no no.
The panic rises like bile, flooding my system, making my heart race and my breath come in short, sharp gasps. I pull against the restraints, feel the metal bite into my skin, feel the futility of resistance.
I'm back. After everything, after Jace, after the illusion of safety and the reality of belonging to someone who chose me, I'm back where I started.
Strapped down. Exposed. Waiting for the pain.
"Ah. You're awake."
The voice comes from somewhere behind me. I can't turn my head far enough to see, but I don't need to. I know that voice. I've heard it in my nightmares for three years.
Alfred Webb walks into my field of vision.
He's exactly as I imagined from Jace's descriptions. Gaunt, hollow-eyed, with the kind of face that looks like it's never known warmth. He moves with a deliberate slowness, each step measured, each gesture precise.
He's wearing a lab coat.
Just like Moore.
"Elliot Rowe," he says, consulting a tablet in his hands. "Asset number 437. Originally acquired by Ministry of Acquisition as a child, out-lasted more clients than anyone before, transferred to Senator Moore for an eighteen-month term, returned to circulation due to diminished functionality." He looks up, and his smile is a wound. "Now the property of a malfunctioning Reaper who seems to have forgotten his place in the order of things."
I don't speak. I can't speak. My throat is locked, my tongue a stone, my body remembering all the lessons it learned about silence and stillness and making yourself small.
"I'm not going to hurt you," Webb says. He sets down the tablet, pulls on a pair of nitrile gloves. The snap of the latex makes me flinch. "Not unless I have to. You're not the problem here. You're just... leverage."
Leverage. A tool to get to Jace.
"He'll come for me," I whisper. The words scrape out of my throat like broken glass.
