“You’ve been suppressing your powers,” Mihail said calmly.
Sophia strained against the bindings, jaw locked.
“Damn it, Sophia,” Mihail snapped.
Audrey backed away, eyes moving between her mother’s bound form and Mihail’s looming silhouette. Then she saw it: Sophia’s left hand was missing two fingers—the same as at the crime scene. It was the detail Audrey could never forget.
After the fire gutted their house and tore her family apart, investigators found severed fingers among the ashes. That grisly discovery became the key evidence that put Audrey behind bars, accused of murdering her own mother. Now, standing in front of the woman who was supposed to have killed her family, Audrey didn’t know what to say. Even when she’d stopped looking, a need to know what happened that night—and prove her own innocence—burned inside her.
Cold realization climbed her neck. She turned to Mihail. “You said she had something you wanted. What is it?” Audrey asked.
Mihail didn’t take his eyes off Sophia. “We had an arrangement,” he said. “She wants to break it.”
Audrey searched his face, his aura, for anything—affection, resentment, anything that suggested what he and Sophia might be to each other. There was nothing except hard, practical interest, like he was talking about a malfunctioning weapon.
Shaking his head in disgust at Sophia, he turned back to Audrey, tracking the way she moved and the gun in her hands between them. “Sophia and I go way back,” he said. “You, I don’t know as well. Yet. That’s…inconvenient. We’ll fix it.”
Mihail moved with her, matching every step until her back hit the brick. The wall scraped her shoulders, and his body blocked her flank. There was nowhere to go.
She hated feeling small and trapped. He had half a foot and seventy pounds on her, all leveraged to keep her caged.
Audrey saw it: herself dying here, in a piss-stinking lot, without one honest answer. The gun was the only thing keeping him a few feet away. Or at least that’s what she thought.
“You’re aiming the wrong weapon,” he said. “The dangerous one is standing behind it.”
Confused, Audrey narrowed her eyes at him but didn’t reply.
While they stood in silence, the feeling between them changed, pressure increasing like the atmosphere before a storm. Audrey had the strange, fleeting sensation that something around her had just…noticed. Behind Mihail, one of Emerson’s shell casings rolled a few inches across the pavement.
Mihail’s eyes clocked the movement, then slowly went back to her. “Tell me, what’s your plan? Shoot me and toss my body to Emerson?” His mouth curved. “Or just your bare hands?—”
She fired before he finished. If guns couldn’t stop him, she’d find out the hard way.
The kick jolted up her arms, reverberating along her bones.
He barely twitched. With his hand lifted, he showed her the bullet resting between two fingers. Mihail studied it like a bug he’d plucked from his sleeve.
“Primitive,” he whispered, tossing the bullet onto the ground. It clinked onto the asphalt and disappeared inside the shadows. His posture asked,That it?Then he looked back up at Audrey, his eyes roaming over her unabashedly. “You solve everything with weapons. We solve things with evolution.” He smiled. It wasn’t kind. “Evolution always wins.”
The gun was enormous in her hands, like she was holding someone else’s weapon. Guns were useless. What is he? Like her to be sure, but so much more powerful. Emerson had mentioned that some Voíríans had the ability to wield objects with their minds.
Her brain raced through her assets. Emerson was unconscious. Her mother was tied up, gagged, and useless unless she could get her free. Audrey prayed Sophia would see reason and help her against this monster.
She tried to keep her breaths even. “I’m not here for Emerson,” she managed. “He wants Sophia. I want her more. I’m here for myself. No loyalty to him if you make him disappear.”
“Good,” Mihail said, pleased. “He’s noise we don’t need.”
“We?” she snapped. “Don’t group me with you. And don’t tell me what I need.” She fired again, this time multiple times at his feet, just to wipe that smirk off his face.
The shots blasted through the lot, ricocheting off the walls. He didn’t flinch. He glanced up to the sky as if appealing to some distant god while he tossed the bullets aside on the ground. “He’s going to fucking kill me,” Mihail muttered.
She knew exactly who he meant. The ghost in every file, the man everyone talked about, and no one claimed to see.
“Ryker?” she asked.
“What do you know about Ryker?” Mihail asked. He sounded casual—but his aura writhed at the name.
Her mouth pressed closed as she refused to reply.
