Strip away our identities. Make us believe we’re alone, abandoned, worthless. That we have nothing and no one except the organization.
It’s easier to control someone who thinks they have nothing left to lose. Easier to turn them into weapons when they’re already dead inside.
I think about the other operatives I glimpsed during training. The hollow eyes. The mechanical way they followed orders. Theabsolute absence of hope in any of them. We were all the same. All broken in exactly the same way.
Darius is right: the Covenant got obedient soldiers. All of us were made to believe we’d been abandoned so that we’d do anything they asked.
“Anne…” I whisper, the name tearing out of me. “I need to know she’s okay. Please. Whatever you did to her—”
“That’s not up to me.” Darius takes the evidence he brought with him and heads for the door. “It all depends on what you do now.”
Then, he’s gone.
And I’m left alone with the ruins of everything I thought I knew.
Chapter Nineteen
Kain
The crack of the whip splits the air before the pain registers.
Then, it hits.
Wolfsbane-laced leather tears across my back, and the agony is immediate and all-consuming. My muscles spasm violently, atrophying instantly wherever the poison touches, cells dying and struggling to regenerate all at once. It’s like being burned and frozen simultaneously, my flesh trying to heal while the wolfsbane works to destroy it.
I scream. Can’t help it. The sound rips from my throat, raw and desperate.
Another strike. Another explosion of pain that makes my vision white out.
My wolf howls inside me, trapped and panicked, trying to heal damage as it’s being inflicted but falling hopelessly behind. My back is a battlefield of dying and regenerating tissue, the wolfsbane spreading through my system with each lash.
“Please,” I groan, my voice breaking. “Please, somebody save me. Please—”
The whip cracks again. My body convulses against the restraints.
“Save you?” The handler’s voice cuts through my screams, amused. “Who exactly do you think is coming, boy?”
I can’t answer. I can only cry out as another lash lands, the wolfsbane burning even deeper this time.
“Are you dreaming of rescue? You think that one day your pack will come for you?” The handler’s cruel words echo dissonantly, seeming to come from everywhere at once.
“You poor thing. Your alpha knows exactly where you are,” he cackles. “We made him an offer to allow us to take you, and he accepted it.”
For a moment, my brain freezes, despair tuning out even the sting of the wolfsbane. What? No. No, that can’t be—
“He took payment to forget about you. Called it compensation for his lost pack member.” The handler laughs, the sound reverberating off the concrete walls. “You’re ours now. No one’s coming. No one wants you.”
I want to say that it’s a lie, but I can’t get the words past the agony wracking my body.
The whip comes down again. And again. And again.
My back is shredded, muscles twitching and spasming as they try to heal and fail. The wolfsbane is spreading like acid through my system.
“They sold you, boy,” the handler says with wicked glee. “Sold you and moved on like you never existed.”
I let out another hopeless scream, and it is met with the repeated sting of the whip, beating the fight out of me until I hang there in the chains, tears streaming down my face, my young mind unable to process the senseless cruelty of it all.
“This is your life now.”
