“I know all their names. I’ve kept tabs on you until the day you came to the Nesting House.” Mom shrugs it off and continues. “They gave me access to everything: Subject lists, observer notes, genetic screenings. The bond stability reports.” She tilts her head. “You were always obsessed with knowing how the world worked, Kiera. Are you really mad I tried to understand the rules they were using to hurt you?”
The way she says my name makes something inside me uneasy. I take a step closer until I’m standing within reach of her. “Try that again. This time without pretending it was fucking charity work.”
Her smile drops. For the first time since we pulled her out of that facility, Mom looks almost tired. “You think I was hiding,” she says. “That I died a martyr for you?” Her lip curls. “You built yourself a very pretty story to survive.”
“I built myself the only story I had,” I snapped. “You, bleeding on the floor. Wade with the knife. Refusing to sign the Cicada files. That’s all I saw.”
“And then what?” she asks quietly. “What did you think happened next?” I open my mouth, then close it. What did I think, that the program vanished? That the men who wanted to buy my future packed up and went home because Mom said no? No. I knew better. I just didn’t want to believe it.
Sterling’s hand finds the back of my neck, his thumb pressing in at the base of my skull—grounding, claiming. “We’re not here for your philosophy lessons.” His voice is low and controlled. “We’re here for answers.”
“Why?” I demand. “Why go back? Why work with them?”
Silence stretches. The bulb hums overhead. Somewhere in the house above us, a floorboard creaks, one of the kids shifting in sleep. “Because this was my program,” she says finally. “They decided that when I wouldn’t sign those papers just yet, they were going to take it all from me! I didn’t have a choice.”
“There’s always a choice!” I scream back, my voice cracking under the waves of emotion. “You made one sixteen years ago when you wouldn’t sign. You made a damn decision when you fucking left me in that house with him. But you couldn’t love me enough to come back for me? To be the fucking good mom you always pretended to fucking be?”
“You think that was about love? You think I died for some noble reason? I didn’t sign because I didn’t want to go through with it. The contract was wrong. The terms were wrong. The price was wrong. I thought I had time to renegotiate.” Years of built-up rage and sadness coil around my spine at my mom’s confession.
“The Cicada files. What are they?” I keep my voice calm, pushing down everything that is flowing through me.
“A transfer of ownership. Your father wanted to domesticate you before he sold you. Make you… palatable.” She glances at Sterling. “The program was supposed to create a bond, something that would make you easier to handle. Easier to hand off.”
“A transfer to who?” I hear myself ask, but my voice sounds far away.
Evelyn smiles again, thin and humorless. “You already met one of the highest bidders,” she says. “He died in a warehouse at your hands.”Asher. I swallow bile. Sterling’s grip on my neck tightens. “They pulled me in after I ran,” she continues. “They showed me pictures of you. Screenshots from the Hawthorne house cameras. Files from your doctor. Your school. They wanted to monitor you and your… attachments…” Her gaze cuts to Sterling again. Her eyes flick back to Sterling, then to me. For a moment, something like regret crosses her face. It’s gone so quickly, I might have imagined it. “Fine. My part was watching. Reporting. Making sure you stayed alive long enough to become what they wanted.” She leans forward as much as the chains allow. “And then tonight, you walked back into their hands all on your own. With him.”
“He’s not theirs.”He’s not really mine either, but he damn sure isn’t theirs.
“Doesn’t matter. He’s still the question they’re trying to answer.”
I take another step in until my boots are almost touching her bare toes. The cramps in my lower belly pulse with my heartbeat, a sick drum. “What question?”
Mom’s smile turns soft. Almost maternal.God, I’m so fucking sick of her damn smile.“That’s the million-dollar question,” she says.
“Stop stalling and answer it,” I bite out.
She studies me for a long moment, eyes tracing my face like she’s measuring how much truth I can take before I crack. The worst part is, she doesn’t look afraid of what I’ll do. She looks afraid of what I’llbe. “They wanted to know,” she answers finally, “if what you feel is inevitable… or engineered.”
The words land like a blade to the sternum. “What I feel.” My voice sounds wrong, too thin. “You mean for him.”
Her gaze flicks to Sterling again. “For him. For anyone. For the boy they paired you with. For the ones before him. Whether the bond was something they discovered or something they could build from scratch and sell.”
“The bond stability reports.” All of the evidence snaps into focus, suddenly making more sense. “That’s what you were logging. Sterling and I.”
“And your responses,” she adds quietly. “What decisions would you make. Who would you protect? If you’d burn the world for each other, or if you’d walk away when they told you to.”
“You turned my life into a fucking lab report.” My voice comes out as a fragile whisper. “Like I was a lab rat. You watched your own daughter suffer, sat back, and took notes.”
“I watched yousurvive,” she snaps. “Do you really think they would have stopped experimenting if I said no and walked away? They would havekept going blind. I made sure they at least had toaccountfor you. That they couldn’t just make you disappear into a spreadsheet and call it a failure.”
“Congratulations,” I mock. “You turned me into a successful faulty product. Too broken to even know what love is and who is safe to trust. Hope it makes you so proud, Mom.” Spitting venom with the last word.
Sterling presses his thumb harder into my neck, like he’s trying to keep me anchored instead of spiraling into violence. His voice cuts through the rising static in my fucked-up head. “What did they want tonight?” “You said we walked back into their hands. Why would they set the whole thing up just to let us burn it down?”
“You didn’t let them. You did exactly what they wanted. You returned to the starting point. To the Nesting House together. They needed one final data point,” she continues. “They needed to see how you were firsthand, and with other variables in play.” Her eyes meet mine, and for the first time, there’s no mask. Just brutal honesty. “They needed to know, with no sedation, no observers, no controlled conditions, if, when forced to choose, you were still going to pick each other.”
Silence slams down. I think about the Nesting House. The alarm is screaming. Smoke fills the tunnel. The kids, sedated, piled together from the blast. No way forward or backward. Sterling hoists children up three hundred feet, muscles shaking. Both of us hurt, but we still chose to move in sync because working together was the only way to get every single one of them out. I did choose. Over and over. My vision blurs. I blink hard. I will not cry in front of her. “So?” I ask, my voice a rasp. “Did you get your answer?”
