This had happened before, once, in prison. Another inmate attempted to stab her with a shank, so Audrey flung her into the bathroom tile. The cameras caught everything, and Audrey hadn’t moved an inch. In the aftermath, the woman was carried out on a stretcher, dead, and Audrey spent a week in solitary confinement, watching a blank wall. When she was let out, guards eyed her warily, and inmates avoided her. From that point on, Audrey learned how to fight with her fists, afraid of herself and what might happen if she lost control again.
Audrey’s knees gave out. She dropped beside him, hands floating uselessly over his chest. “Stop,” she uttered to whatever was inside her. “Stop. Please.”
It didn’t.
The deadly ability she’d feared for years—and buried deep—had locked on and refused to yield. Steadily and invisibly killing him. He writhed on the asphalt, hands digging furrows into the grime. His eyes bulged. Red flooded the whites. Sounds ripped from his throat, then weakened.
Tears clouded her sight. She turned her head away and still felt it happening through the tether between them.
Then, all at once, the pressure released and power snapped back into her just as a recoiling wire. Dizziness crashed through her.
Erik stopped moving, and the alley turned silent. Audrey couldn’t hear any music, footsteps, or traffic loud enough to matter. Just the rain ticking off metal somewhere farther down towards the street, and her own rough breathing dragging in and out of her.
His body looked wrong without motion. A minute ago, he’d been furious and alive enough to fill the entire alley with himself.
Now he was only a weight.
And Audrey? She was the cause.
The world turned black.
9
The body sprawled next to her.
An early gray of morning drenched the alley in merciless light. Audrey’s pulse quickened; she nearly blacked out again but forced herself to catalog what she’d done.
Oh fuck.
Oh fuck.
Fuck.
There was no universe where he survived. No one would frame this as self-defense. She was already the girl who escaped three homicide charges. A prosecutor wouldn’t even have to try to lock her away again. Whatever Alex had lied about, she wasn’t putting him through another trial.
Erik looked just like the inmate she’d killed before, with his neck twisted oddly, his jaw limp, and no breath. But this time, it wasn’t simply self-defense; it was a frightening escalation, a failure to restrain herself when scared and angry.
Abject horror threatened to pull her under, but a dark thrill simmered, hard to ignore. Would horror win? Would Erik’s corpse haunt her enough to stop her forever? What would her twin think of this side of her?
The truth was staring her in the face. Her sister would be shocked, even horrified. But despite the risks of using her powers, Audrey felt no desire to quit. Shame flickered, but inevitability glowed stronger.
The longer she stared at the body, the less her thoughts spiraled the way they should have. Killing wasn’t new, and it probably wouldn’t be the last time—a realization that should have broken her.
Instead, she let the feeling settle.
In prison, panic consumed her after killing. Tapping into power she didn’t understand had terrified her. Here, in this alley, she sensed both the moment it took hold and the instant she could have stopped it.
But she didn’t.
Her stomach roiled from cold acceptance. She peered at Erik’s body again. He would have killed her, slowly and mercilessly. Audrey’s fingers tensed at her sides. If she let this become guilt or shock—the narrative others forced on her—she would lose the power she’d found.
I’m done waiting for someone else to tell me what’s real.
She was still staring at the body when she felt another aura. It wasn’t the invasive coil of the killer’s presence—this was something steadier.
Audrey lifted her head.
At the mouth of the alley, framed in the spill of a dying streetlamp, stood the man from the night of her release. The man with the blue eyes in the hooded sweatshirt. Calm as always, he looked like he’d been standing there the entire time. But she had to know for sure.
