“Grab him. Let’s go.”
No acknowledgment. No reaction. Not even the courtesy of anger. Just orders. Like I’m an object he’s moving. A piece of furniture. Hands close around my arms immediately, rough and impersonal. They haul me up, and Ilet them, keeping my body loose. Compliance keeps them predictable. Resistance makes them trigger-happy.
We reach the elevator. They shove me inside, and Gideon steps in last, entering a code on the panel with practiced ease.
“Don’t forget, Jace. I raised you. I know all your weaknesses.”
He says it like he’s talking about the weather. Never mind that I’m his son and he’s taking me to his interrogation room, where he’ll torture me until he gets all the information he can get out of me.
I’m not a threat or even a disappointment anymore.
Just a problem to be solved.
He thinks he knows how this ends.
He doesn’t.
Time stops meaninganything after the first few hits.
Minutes. Hours. A whole lifetime. It all folds together into one long, dull ache that sits behind my ribs that reminds me I’m alive.
Gideon gets nothing out of me. He knows that. I know that. But that isn’t the point for him.
By the time they drag me back into the cell, my legs barely work. My vision fades in and out, and the world tilts even though I’m lying flat on the concrete.
The restraints dig into my wrists, the skin raw. My chest rises in short, thin breaths—shallow enough not to hurt as much, enough to keep from making noise.
Blood trickles from somewhere near my temple, seeping into my hairline. My shirt is soaked through with a cold mixture of sweat and whatever the hell they poured on me.
I force myself to breathe.
In.
Slow.
Out.
Slower.
Just enough to stay awake, to hold onto that sliver of light. Not what he wants me to be.Damn.The room won’t stop wavering.
I blink hard, trying to bring the flickering light above me back into one piece, but the edges of my vision keep fuzzing out. My wrists burn. My bones grind every time I inhale. There’s dried blood caked under my nose, down my jaw.
I need to move.
Not much—just enough.
The doc scanned me top to bottom earlier. Nothing pinged. Nothing showed. Exactly like Lucian promised.
Prototype:sub dermal micro-mesh lattice. Essentially invisible under any conventional medical or tactical scan, because there’s nothing solid to detect—no metal, no chip, no battery. Just a woven conductive web integrated into the tissue beneath my shoulder, dormant until activated.
I suck in a breath and drag my shoulders back so I can shift slightly on the floor. The restraints bite deeper into raw skin. My fingers curl. My chest tenses. I push my shoulder blades together—hard. A flame of pain rips across my ribs.Good.
The lattice doesn’t have an on-switch. It activates through biometrics—body stress markers and a deliberate muscular contraction pattern that’s impossible to perform accidentally. A second shock flares through me, like static crawling under my skin.
A slow prickle radiates outward from my shoulder. Feels almost like something is sliding under my skin. If Lucian was right, it would take the mesh about sixty seconds to fully power up on bioelectric energy and start transmitting. Undetectable. Untraceable. No signature a scanner would pick up. Gideon’s men could slice me open and wouldn’t know what they were looking at.
A faint vibration pulses outward, like a tiny muscle spasm under the bone.Activated.I exhale a shaky, broken breath through clenched teeth. My head drops back to the floor. They have the signal now. They’ll be coming for me soon. Isobel won’t be coming. Fuck—Isobel.My chest tightens in a way that has nothing to do with broken ribs.
