Taryn stayed still. Still and finally beyond pain.
She covered her mouth with both hands. “No,” she whispered. Then louder, “No.”
Taryn was dead.
Ryker had done this slowly and methodically. To a woman trapped between systems and loyalties. Taryn had never once stood a real chance. He worked like a man dismantling a machine.
And Audrey had not stopped it.
Audrey rested her forehead on Taryn’s bed as a feeling rooted into place. Not relief, not peace—something colder.
Ryker was going to die.
Audrey didn’t know when—just that she would be the one to do it. And it wouldn’t be for sport. Not even for vengeance alone. Because this room, this war, this broken body—everything led back to him.
His pursuit of Sophia.
The fire.
Her father’s death.
Now Taryn.
For the first time since arriving on Nepra, Audrey wasn’t thinking about escaping. Not because Cary mattered less, but because killing Ryker had started to look like the fastest way back to her.
Escape would come. But proximity was the immediate plan now.
Now Audrey understood what Sophia had meant by calling her “dangerous.” Not because of what she could do—but because of what she was willing to become.
She didn’t care.
She would exact retribution on Taryn’s behalf, but what she needed went beyond vengeance and survival. If she could endure—if she could change even one part of this broken world, then there might still be a future waiting for her and Cary. Maybe she could not only protect her sister from this place but find her and live as they should have—together.
The last seconds she had with her dad came to her. How he’d hurled himself in front of her. Now, knowing the floating kitchen knife had been for Audrey’s throat, but she’d stabbed her dad with it anyway, she sobbed. Her dad’s last act was trying to save Audrey’s life. She hadn’t protected him in return, though.
And now Taryn, too. Another person devoured by a war that Audrey had been born into but was never allowed to understand.
She let herself cry on the floor next to the body for a long time—over the first friend she had made since Skyler.
Then she wiped her nose with the back of her hand and went quiet. Tears would not change the body on the floor. It would not bring her father back. It would not keep Cary safe.
Only death would do anything now.
Audrey shut Taryn’s eyes, then grabbed the dirty sheet from the bed and covered her friend’s body.
If Ryker was the center of this machine, then killing him meant getting close enough to matter.
Audrey had spent ten years surviving monsters.
One more would not be different.
After a dayat Taryn’s side, Audrey felt her mind’s seams loosening.
The body had soured the air, rot crawling into each breath.
As she sat alone in the stark fluorescent light, Audrey thought of Cary. The memory of her sister’s laugh reached her through the fog of loss. Taryn was gone, but someone still remained to fight for. Knowing that helped ease the heaviness of grief just enough for her to breathe, to remember that hope would still exist, if only in the smallest corner of her mind.
When two men finally came to remove Taryn’s body, they treated the dead woman with more clinical interest than human respect—photographing her wounds, documenting the damage, speaking over her as if she were evidence instead of a person. Audrey couldn’t imagine why they had waited so long, and she hated herself for wondering whether the delay had been intentional.
