He’s been allowed to live for far too long. It’s been seven years of blood and ghosts and rage and empty fucking revenge. And all that time, I’ve been imagining this moment.
Malcolm watches me enter the room with that same unbearable calm he always wears. But I can see it now—the acceptance beneath it. Like he already knows exactly how this ends. I’m sure he does. I heard enough of his conversation with Cason. I told him I’d be right behind him, and I meant it. As soonas I made sure my people had the upperhand upstairs, I followed after him.
And now the shadows that have already approached the closest to Malcolm twitch violently. Hungry. He sees them too and barely reacts.
“I always wondered which one of the futures I saw we’d end up in,” he says, completely composed.
“You won’t have to wonder much longer.”
“Reese.”
Cason turns fully toward me now, eyes still red-rimmed and overwhelmed from all the fucked up shit Malcolm dumped on him. Just hearing him say my name softens something enough that my shadows hesitate.
Only for a moment.
Then I look back at Malcolm, and the rage returns in an instant. My entire body is tense, wound so tight around the urge to finally end this that I can taste it.
Because this man tookeverythingfrom me.
My life.
My identity.
Ash.
Cason for seven whole years.
Too much fucking time lost and too many people around me dead while he sat behind glass walls pretending he was saving the world. And it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to me that he can see the fucking future. It doesn’t change the fact that he manipulated Cason, engineered his suffering, and turned his trauma into a fucking blueprint.
I want him dead so badly my hands shake.
For me. But for Cason even more.
“Not that you deserve it,” I tell him, my voice steady and sure from the promise of fulfilling a prophecy of my own, “but I’ll give you one last consolation. You created me to protect Cason?You can rest assured I will do that until my very last breath.”
Something about him changes then, like a dozen years worth of tension bleeds out of him. His shoulders slump, and he sighs. Then he smiles.
“Reese,” Cason says again.
He moves suddenly, stepping between us. Immediately, my shadows recoil away from him on instinct alone, as though they know they’re far too dangerous to be near him right now.
His eyes lock onto mine. “Don’t.”
I laugh once through my nose, not amused. “It’s too late for that.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.” My gaze moves past him back to Malcolm. “He’s dying tonight.”
Cason glances back at his uncle before looking at me again, and I can see it. The hesitation. That awful conflict tearing him apart right in front of me. Because Malcolm is a monster. But he’s also family.
Please don’t ask me.
“He could still be useful,” Cason says carefully.
But it’s not careful enough. My shadows surge violently, and the machinery around the room rattles faintly as darkness crawls higher up the walls. They need this as badly as I do, and I don’t know if I have the power to stop them.
“You cannot seriously be arguing for him right now.”
