"You're going to die," I said quietly, and the words tasted like copper and ash on my tongue. Like blood. Like justice. "I'm going to tear you apart for what you did to her. For what you're trying to do now."
He couldn't speak. Could barely breathe. His mouth opened and closed, gasping, his face shifting from red to purple as the oxygen stopped reaching his brain.
Good.
He was dying. Right now. In my hands.
And gods help me, it felt right.
My hand tightened incrementally. His pulse stuttered beneath my grip—skipping, weakening, the rhythm faltering as his body began to shut down. Thirty seconds, maybe less. That's all it would take. Thirty seconds to crush his windpipe completely. Another minute to be certain he was dead and not just unconscious.
Then what?
I could be out of this office in seconds. The lower levels had maintenance tunnels—I'd mapped them during my reconnaissance, memorized every junction and access point. If I could reach Merrilee before anyone discovered the body, we could disappear into the tunnels and make our way to the wastelands.
Persico's compound was massive, but it had weak points. The eastern wall backed onto the old industrial sector, mostlyabandoned now. We could slip through there, lose ourselves in the maze of derelict structures and scrap heaps.
By the time they found Hewes's corpse, we'd be halfway to the mountains
It could work.
The thought blazed through me like fire, intoxicating and dangerous. Freedom. Escape. Merrilee safe. Hewes dead. Everything I wanted within reach if I just squeezed a little harder, held on a little longer.
It would work.
My claws dug deeper. I felt them scrape against cartilage, felt his windpipe beginning to collapse beneath the pressure. His struggles were weakening—hands falling away from my wrist, body going slack, eyes rolling back.
Just a few more seconds.
My vision narrowed to the sight of his face—purple now, lips blue, consciousness fading. The pulse beneath my palm was barely there anymore. Faint. Irregular. Dying.
My hand tightened.
Then I heard it. A soft chime from his desk.
Hewes's eyes flickered toward the sound—barely conscious and something in his expression shifted. Even choking, even dying, he looked triumphant.
Every instinct I had screamed danger.
I released him.
He collapsed against the desk, gasping, one hand going to his throat. The other reached for the comm unit.
"I thought you might react poorly," he wheezed. He tapped the screen, and a live feed appeared.
Merrilee.
The world stopped.
Not metaphorically. It actually stopped—sound cutting out, vision tunneling, every system in my body slamming to a halt as my brain tried to process what I was seeing.
She was walking through Persico's compound. Her head was down, shoulders slightly hunched in that way she had when she was thinking too hard about something. Unaware. Vulnerable.
And behind her, barely visible in the shadows, was a cloaked figure with a blaster.
The weapon was aimed at her back.
My vision whited out at the edges. Not red this time—white. Pure, blinding white that narrowed my entire existence down to a single point: the barrel of that blaster tracking the space between her shoulder blades.
