They sent me the coordinates. I followed the orders. I was a perfect little serial killer. I hadn’t been Max in three years. I was just a conduit for a world of darkness, killing unknown men I knew nothing about because they told me they would hurt her.
Some would say I’d gone mad. Maybe I had.
“What are you fucking laughing at, you psychopath?” the man screamed from behind thick gurgles of blood.
Had I been laughing? Shit, I had.
My laughter died instantly. The only sound left in the alley was the dull pitter-patter of the rain.
“Are you going to kill me?” he sobbed.
I lifted the bat, rubbing the blood-soaked wood against my FBI jacket. They had upgraded me over the years. It was tactical now, bulletproof, knife-proof.
Everything I needed to be an actual psychopathic war animal.
The skull mask was the same, though. It helped me disappear. It helped me become the man behind it.
The Executioner.
That’s what they called me in the news, anyway. I was an A-list celebrity in Athens.
I had no idea who this guy was. The only thing I was given was a picture of him touching Mackenzie. He had forced himself on her at a club in Florida.
So naturally, he was a dead man to me.
“Please. Please! I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m a good guy!”
I lowered the bat and tapped it against the pavement.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Most days, I didn’t feel right in the head. If I wasn’t hallucinatingMackenzie, I was killing. I liked the feeling of swinging my bat and hitting a target.
Every guy I killed was a predator anyway. After Blackshear, it felt like the only way to bleed out the trauma. I had held back too much then. I knew better now.
Did I hate that I had somehow become the very thing Mackenzie was terrified of? Herdad.
Yeah. It stung to think about. I’d spent years trying to protect her, and it turned out it was a complete waste of my time. In the end, she was always going to hate me, and I was always going to become a monster.
For the first two years after I was taken, after I lost Mackenzie, I obsessed over her. I checked the news. Hacked accounts. Drove past places we had been together, hoping maybe, just maybe, she’d be there.
I memorized every conversation. Every kiss. Every breath she ever gave. And I bled them into my nightmares. Every single fucking day.
After Jackson’s death, everything changed. I only remember flashes. The swing. His blood. Then, I woke up in my room with no real memory of how far I had gone.
They told me she would be killed. My parents would be killed.
So, I played along.
Until I didn’t want to anymore.
One afternoon, they cornered me on campus, dragged me into a van, and took me to a warehouse with barred windows on the outskirts of town. It happened so fast I barely felt it, but the pain seared my skin for weeks afterward.
They had branded me with a cattle prod—a deep, thirteen-pronged star. Right over my heart.
They had claimed me.
I was an Alliance creation now.
