Nichols made a choked noise of surprise. “You’ve been having a romantic liaison with a corrupted empath?” he hissed at Grayson.
Grayson opened his mouth.
“The bigger problem is that you kidnapped a corrupted empath’sromantic liaison,” Reece said, speaking first. “AndI found him in chains.”
The words echoed around the room, the thunder no longer a distant threat but directly overhead as Reece’s empathically fueled anger vibrated underneath his words.
Then Reece took a step into the lab. “I asked you what you were planning for Evan, Dr. Nichols.”
“Where is security?” Nichols hissed at his scientists, who were already backing up.
Reece took another step forward. “Those are some pretty nasty-looking tools on that tray.”
“We needsecurity—”
“Were you going to use any of that on him?”
The syringe and vial clattered to the floor as Nichols snatched up a scalpel from the tray. “Stay back,” he demanded, brandishing it at Reece. “Security is on their way, and they’re ready for you—”
“You mean these guys?”
As Reece gestured around him, more people were already flowing into the room. Three, now seven, now ten, some in lab coats and some in fatigues, all of them wearing identical expressions of menace trained on Nichols.
“My first thralls,” Reece said as the newcomers advanced, parting around him like a river around a rock and fanning out to flank him. “Go big or go home, as they say.”
He shrugged. “I can admit I’ve made a bad decision or two in my day. But I’m making only good decisions tonight.”
Nichols’s eyes widened. And then he was lunging not for Reece but for Grayson on the table, scalpel brandished like a sword.
Reece’s thralls were faster. Screams erupted as four of them surged at Nichols, wrestling him back before the scalpel made contact and dragging him away from Grayson. As the screams rose in pitch, Grayson heard Reece over the din.
“Get Evan free and maul the rest of them. Bring Nichols to me.”
The roars of the thralls joined the unceasing upstairs alarmand fresh screams. Grayson yanked uselessly against his cuffs. “Reece—”
In the edge of his vision, he caught Reece and Nichols. Reece’s hand was on Nichols’s face as his expression transformed from terror to wide-eyed devotion, and then thralled soldiers and scientists were blocking Grayson’s view.
“Here’s what you’re going to do for me,” he heard Reece say somewhere in the chaos as the thralls spread out around the exam table. “You’re going to take that tray of yours into the next room and lock yourself in. And then anything you’ve ever done to another empath, or their siblings, andespeciallyanything you were planning to do to Evan, you’re going to do to yourself instead. Sound fair?”
Jesus. “Reece,” Grayson tried as a new thrall popped up on his right, key in hand.“Reece—”
Nichols voice came with an unrecognizable bright eagerness. “Yes, sir, Mr. Davies.”
On Grayson’s left, beyond the thralls, a body hit the metal cabinet with a dull clang. Then, under the clamor around him, he caught that same sound of wheels on smooth flooring as Nichols grabbed the edge of the tray, pushing it like a shopping cart and practically skipping with glee out the still-open door at Grayson’s feet.
A petite woman in a blood-splattered white lab coat was now unlocking the cuff on Grayson’s wrist. Reece appeared next to her. “Get him free,” he said to the woman. “And make sure he gets out safe.”
Reece began to turn.
“Wait,” Grayson said as his right wrist came free and the petite woman passed the key to a thrall on his left side. “Don’t go.”
“You don’t want me here,” Reece said, not turning around or looking back at him. “You always knew it was only a matterof time before I became a monster. That time has thoroughly arrived.”
There was a wet squishy sound somewhere behind Grayson, and a new scream. The cuff on his left wrist came loose. He sat up, pulling the IV line out of his arm. “I’m coming with you.”
“Evan, no,” Reece snapped. “You don’t want—”
“Idowant,” Grayson said. “You think you can rescue me out of a nightmare and then I’m gonna let youleave?”
