I stepped back then, but not far.
He wouldn’t thank me for it.
That wasn’t the point.
I set an alarm on my watch, a precise ninety minutes. Long enough to take the edge off the exhaustion without dropping him too deep. Any longer and he’d wake disoriented, slower than I was willing to risk.
Then I paused.
The bed was wide enough. There was no operational reason not to stay.
I pulled the blanket up over him first, adjusting it with more care than necessary, making sure he was covered, contained. Safe.
After a moment’s calculation, I lay back, staring up at the ceiling, hands flat as Caleb fell asleep.
What now?
The room was quiet, and the part of me that didn’t want to sleep started the pre-op review without being asked, the way it always did when there was nothing else to occupy it.
I ran what we had on Michael.
Michael Jennet. Father Michael at the compound, SaintMichael online, Uncle Michael to the children he’d bought. Three alter-egos attached to one fucked up asshole. Five-eleven. Heavy through the middle. Hair scraped back into a ponytail.
The control unit he had was the first target when we got inside. Without it, the kids weren’t his anymore. The guard was the second. The man was the third. I’d worked the angles already and run them again every hour since, because rehearsal was important.
The buyers above him sat on a list Caleb said he couldn’t get to yet, because the names lived on his hardware and hishardware lived in the room with the closed door. That was Caleb’s piece of the puzzle—get that information. Mine was taking out the man at the screen.
Beside me, Caleb breathed in and out, slow and unaware of everything I was imagining then turned in his sleep, rolling onto his side in a slow, unguarded movement that carried none of the control he maintained when conscious, and there was no hesitation in it, no break in his breathing, no indication that he was aware of what he was doing as he adjusted his position.
He turned toward me, fingers curling into the fabric of my shirt and holding there. I went still, not out of indecision but because every possible response stalled at the same point, caught between action and inaction with no clear directive to follow.
There was no protocol for this, no training scenario that accounted for a sleeping man choosing proximity to me like this and trusting it without question, no framework that allowed me to categorize the moment into something actionable.
I could disengage, restore distance and control in a way that aligned with every instinct I had ever relied on.
Ishouldmove him.
Instead, I stayed where I was, every calculation running through my head and failing to resolve into an action that didn’t feel wrong in a way I couldn’t quantify or justify.
His grip tightened slightly, not enough to wake him but enough to confirm that the contact was real.
I didn’t touch him because that would have been a choice, but I stayed there instead, rigid and awake, listening to the steady pattern of his breathing while the situation existed without interference, allowing it to remain as it was because, for once, control offered no clear answer, and I had nothing to replace it with.
I only closed my eyes for a second.
“She’s coming! Get ready!”
Gabriel is crouched over what remains of Brother Matthias, hands slick, breathing too fast, while Raphael is still in the corner with me, pressed back to the wall, and Patrick is by the door. Only one of us is armed—Gabriel and the knife he took from Brother Matthias, but none of us is staying here. This insurrection wasn’t planned, but it was happening.
Sister Mary Agnes steps inside and sees the ruin of the body, but she doesn’t scream in shock; she goes straight for the control of our collars around her, and pain detonates, dropping us to our knees as if we are nothing more than switches she can turn on and off.
Like Brother Matthias, she couldn’t know how immune we’d become to the pain.
Gabriel was already there with the blood-soaked knife, and she doesn’t hesitate as she fights him, as she scrapes and shoves and forces the blade back, and it goes wrong, everything goes wrong, because the knife arcs and there is a wet, tearing sound and then blood everywhere as Patrick makes a sound I have never heard before. And then no sound at all, because she’s cut an artery, and Patrick is down.
Gabriel stabs and stabs, and the air fills with the copper stink of blood, thick and choking, until she’s shredded and still on the stone floor. Raphael is still watching, and there is nothing else to do as Patrick lies on his back with his eyes open, blood pooling around his neck, a grimace on his face.
A harsh buzzing echoes in my head, a bell that shouldn’t be ringing, and Gabriel is shouting that someone is coming, that we need to get the collars off, that we need to leave. I’m scrabbling for the control she’d dropped, smashing it under my heel repeatedly until the plastic cracks and splinters and I keep hitting it because stopping doesn’t feel like an option, andGabriel is there, too close, talking but not shouting, his voice cutting through the noise.
