My phone buzzes,histiming impeccable as always.
I fish my cell out of my pocket and answer it. “Yes.”
“Report,” Malcolm says, his voice the same as always. Calm and controlled, never hesitant or unsure.
I step back and turn away from the body as though I don’t want it to hear what I’m about to say. “Target located. Noncompliant. Terminated.”
“Efficient as always, Mr. Morgan.”
There’s something like approval in his tone, but not warmth. Never warmth. Maybe respect, though I don’t like it or need itcoming from him. In another life, I might’ve sought it out—that approval from a father figure or someone I cared for. Someone who looked at me like I was something worth choosing. Someone who, inthislife, I can’t touch, who believes I’m dead.
I may as well be.
“Reese?”
I realize my vision is darkened around the edges, and I evict the shadows from my mind.
“Return to the Institute. We have another assignment.”
“Understood.”
The line goes dead, and I lower the phone. For several seconds, neither Ash nor I speak, just standing there with a dead man to keep us company.
Then Ash asks, “How do you do that too?”
I turn to face her. “What do you mean now?”
“Talk to him like that. Pretend like you’re not…”
She gestures vaguely between us, and I immediately understand. Like I’m not what we both are—owned and controlled. Experiments that have been turned into weapons.
I slide my phone back into my pocket as my shadows ripple along the walls around us, restless again, as though they don’t like the direction this conversation is going. I don’t either. As much as I hate my life, the reason I haven’t run away is the reason Iwould’verun away before I was trapped.
Trapped, yes. But trapped where I can make sure he always stays safe.
“I don’t pretend,” I say.
“That’s bullshit.”
Maybe. But it’s easier than the other truth—that I understand Malcolm, that I hate him, that I agree with just enough of what he says to make me nearly as bad as he is. That Ascended like us need purpose, some kind of structure and hierarchy. We’re not fuckingproperty, but…
Wearedangerous.
I meet her gaze, and she stares back, searching for something in me. Not weakness. She knows me better than that. Something else. A crack in my facade, maybe. Proof that I’m not as far gone as I look when I pull a trigger without blinking.
If I give into her idea, she just might find it. The idea of a future that doesn’t end with me taking orders over a dead body, a future that probably gets us both killed.
But one I’m willing to take a risk for.
So I hold her gaze a second longer and give heratruth, just one of many.
“Because I’m going to kill him one day.”
Present day.
The memory from sixyears ago fades, and the room around me settles into focus. I’m sitting in one of the armchairs in the study on the second floor of the safehouse, low light and the faint hum of electronics bleeding into the quiet.
Ash’s voice still lingers in my mind, from the day the idea of our resistance was born, as though she was the mother of the only thing that ever stood a chance against Bellrose Institute. It always belonged to her more than it did to me. That decision should’ve been a burden, a weight, but instead, it lifted so much off my shoulders.
