“Arden,” he whispered.
I lifted my tear-filled gaze to his. “It didn’t burn, Thorne. It bled. Just like us.” A sob cracked out of me, and he leaned down, wrapping his arms around me as if he could suffocate the pain into submission.
“That doesn’t mean the wildfire is lost forever, little flame,” he said against my ear, smoothing my hair with his palm.
I cried harder into his shoulder, clutching him. “They took it all,” I said. “There’s nothing left.Nothing.”
He jerked back and looked down at my stomach, his skin paling further when he realized what I meant. He rubbed at his mouth and shook his head.
After that, I didn’t help Rafe anymore. I could barely look at him without feeling myself splitting in half. Florence tried her best to help him in class, and she did, for the most part. By the end of that first year, Rafe Creed could finally speak but he chose mostly not to. He only used his hands to sign during drills. Occasionally, Icaught him signing in my direction, trying to talk to me, but I couldn’t bare it.
I was…done. I didn’t care if I died. I didn’t care if I was sold, raped, and murdered. I didn’t even feel as if I was part of my body anymore. It moved of its own accord, like muscle memory, through drills. Halden had finally gotten what he wanted from me. I killed, and I killed without remorse, blood splattering over my face and my heart thrumming a dull, nearly lifeless beat. I no longer balanced at the threshold of death; I was death, and I was expensive.
The others fell into line, too. No one touched. No one talked unless necessary. Kane stopped joking. Thorne quit checking on me. Rafe stopped trying to talk. We had lost all fear of death, all want for life. We were Creed. Fully. Entirely. Corpses had no hope, and weapons lived for targets. That’s all we were, and through Halden’s efforts, it became all wewantedto be.
For Rafe, they provided a sniper rifle. Kane—nothing. He didn’t need anything except his mind and his fucking fists. Thorne they sat in front of their computers and gave his sly hands digital things to steal:information; money; unarming federal facilities. And me?
Halden finally gave me my lighter back.
?Arden?
BEGINNING OF THE SECOND YEAR
Do you know how long it takes a person to die once their body’s engulfed in flames?
Four minutes.
The first thirty seconds are always screaming and blistering. The skin balloons, splits, and peels away. By a minute, the throat swells shut from the heat, choking the voice down to a rasp. Smoke claws the lungs, and they usually start drowning in it while they're still burning. By two minutes, the body fights itself, muscles contracting so hard the arms curl in, the jaw locked.
The third minute is nothing but twitching and collapsing as organs shut down. By the fourth, they stop moving. After that, all that's left is the smell. Sweet, greasy, sick. Fat melts and the air turns heavy with it.Then the hair goes, and that's worse. Acrid, chemical, clings to your tongue so you taste it for hours. It sticks in your nose, in your teeth, until you can't eat another piece of meat again without remembering a simple flame can reduce you to the bottom of the food pyramid.
Prague. Seoul. Rio. Cairo. Each job felt like drowning in that fucking Tank, heavy andendless. There was no line between one mission and the next. Killing became something to fill the silence when nothing else would. Every time we landed in a new country, I told myself it would be the one where I’d feel something again. I never did. Just fire, and the faint echo of my own name, fading quieter each time Rafe, Thorne, Kane, and I chose to sit as far away from each other on the plane as we could.
But there is, admittedly, some beauty in it. Especially with the targets Halden chose for me. As it turns out, evil men are magnets for other evil men. Everyone Halden knew was another Viktor, and every Viktor deserved to fucking burn.
Fire stripped the pretense of an evil man faster than any interrogation, burned away the wealth and the speeches and the polite smiles until what was left was the thing thatactuallylived inside him, usuallygreed, cruelty, and so many goddamn excuses. Under flame you can read a life like a confession; you can see where cowardice sat, where arrogance burned brightest. There is, admittedly, also a clean geometry to it—the way the light fell, the timing of the breaths, the decision of when to step back.
During my first missions, watching those men burn wasn’t an act of cruelty as much as another heartbeat taking the place of the one that long fell silent. One match, four minutes, an ending that was exact, final. Fire seemed to not only burn the man but burn his ghost; it was far too bright for a soul so dark to hurt me once I walked away. That kind of reassurance? It felt impossible to claim so Ihadto have it, and to an extent, I did.
Halden sold Creed exactly as we were. We were beyond military-grade soldiers by the end of that first year at the compound, and when he renewed us for a second year, Viktor sold Creed back to him for three billion. That was chump change for Halden, especially when he already had Buyers lined up who ran wealthier than him—men in government suits who couldn’t afford to have blood on their hands, officials who signedtheir names to laws in the daylight and contracts like ours in the dark. Every contract Creed took cost the Buyer millions, and all the jobs were things you thought only existed in movies like vanishings, staged accidents, or entire buildings burned to ash. They sent us names and deadlines; we killed in ways that could never be traced back to the Buyer.
And we did it all as separate entities, check marks on a list. We didn’t talk to each other, but somehow it worked. I was the first sent in, always in my heels and the same black pearls Viktor gave me, and I was the last to leave the building, lighting a cigarette on the burning entryway. We had become murderers. Soldiers. An estranged family. It was almost like when I stopped looking for them, they stopped looking, too, I guess. Creed,divided. That was how Halden liked us and how we stayed. The jobs weren’t overnight, not how we originally hoped they would be. We were typically sent in and sent straight back to our cell in the compound.
Until the gala.
The job was an arms dealer. The bastard sold rifles to children and missiles to governments, building wars out of other people’s sons and then throwinghimself outlandish parties in celebration. Halden’s client wanted him gone before midnight, but we knew we could do it in two hours, less.
We moved the way we always did. Thorne cut the cameras. Kane cleared the service halls. Rafe set his scope on the upper windows. And me—I walked through the front doors as a guest, my heels clicking and my curls ironed out to a pin-straight length flowing down my back. My uniform those days always consisted of a pair of elegant gloves, too, hiding my burned hands. The other wounds were strategically covered with makeup, jewels, and sloping straps, creating the facade that I was another oblivious rich women looking to make myself an equally oblivious rich wife. My ring finger was left bare while every other gloved finger held a diamond. It was a tactic that immediately drew men's eyes to the fact I was available, and italwaysworked. The process was so simple, so monotonous. Boring, really. The gala should’ve been just that—another monotonous, boring thing. The only bright side should’ve been lighting the bastard on fire in his study upstairs.
But then I saw her.
Leah.
She wasn’t supposed to be there. She wasn’t supposed to beanywherenear men like that. When I left her, she was working on cars, covered in grease, keeping that last little bit of spark alive. But there she was, painted up in a dress like mine, black pearls, lips red. She looked like me before Halden, like a Doll.
Her eyes slid past mine like glass, empty and obedient. She smiled when some disgusting bastard skimmed a hand over her ass. She laughed when another whispered in her ear. Every movement was choreographed, every breath a trick to make men think she was enjoying it.
Staff is relocated to the rear. Arden Creed, confirm you’re en route.The tiny diamond stud I wore in my good ear snapped with Kane’s voice, but I couldn’t answer.
