I’m hungry.
The sky hits first. Too wide. Too black. Too open after years of ceilings pressed low over my head and lights that never went dark. For half a second, my body reaches for a wall that isn’t there. My hand curls around empty air, fingers closing around nothing.
I hate that.
I hate that freedom can still feel like another room I don’t know how to survive.
So I breathe once. Hard.
Then I move.
The black van has been stripped of everything unnecessary. I take the back bench. My hands shake from the sheer compression finally finding room to expand.
Valen lights a joint. “Sokolov is at the warehouse. He thinks twenty men and a steel door make him safe. He’s about to learn what happens when his people break the rules.”
Zero doesn’t look up from the tablet. “He has the ledger, the names, and enough proof to burn half the Order before sunrise. Scholarship students. Prey lists. Payment trails. Everything they pretend doesn’t exist.” The van goes quiet.
That’s why they came for me.
Not because they want me free.
Because the monster in the basement has finally become useful after months.
I lean forward until I can smell the weed on his breath. “That’s because he hasn’t met me. The thing they’ve been keeping in a box for years that wants to turn the world into a red smear.”
“Good.” Valen smiles, and for the first time tonight, I see the family resemblance. A smile that promises a funeral. “Because I’m not paying you in therapy. I’m paying you in blood.”
I close my eyes. Twenty minutes to the warehouse.
Twenty minutes of pressure building, tightening, looking for an exit point.
But the image that surfaces isn’t the target.
It’s an empty hallway, and the sound of a girl fighting her demons trying not to cry.
Amy.
It’s like I can feel her from here. She’s in her room, staring at the note on the floor.
She doesn’t know what’s circling this campus. She has no idea.
But she will.
“Sokolov has twenty-two on the floor,” Garret calls from the front. “Military trained. They won’t roll.”
“Good. I don’t want them to roll. I want them to fight.”
The twins check their magazines.
I reach into the duffel and pull out my brass knuckles, heavy, cold, notched from encounters I couldn’t always be precise about. I slide them on.
I take out the plague doctor mask and robe.
“Saint,” Azriel says, quiet and final. “When this is over, when we get the ledger. You stay away from her.”
I tilt my head. The smile comes slowly. “You think you can protect someone from the air they breathe, Azriel? How do you keep someone safe from the darkness she’s already invited in?”
“She didn’t invite you,” he says.
