A prickle at the nape of my neck crawls down my spine and spreads across my shoulders. The hairs lift on my arms. I search for the male who held me like I was precious. For the softness in his jaw, the heat in his eyes. For any trace of the Zavin who pressed his lips to my hair and told me it was different, that I was different.
Zavin stalks around the prisoner in a slow circle. The prisoner twists his head, his shoulders, anything to keep Zavin in his line of sight. That’s the prey instinct: don’t let the predator leave your sight.His mouth moves fast. Too fast. He’s saying too much. He’s terrified. Zavin keeps walking and the prisoner keeps turning, craning his neck, his bound arms jerking as he tries to rotate his body to follow.
Zavin lashes the male with a brutal backhand that snaps the prisoner’s head sideways and sends him to the ground. I can’t help the shocked gasp that leaves my mouth, the tremor in my hand at my lips.
The violence is so casual. So absolute. I’ve seen fights before. This isn’t a fight. This is intended brutality.
Resh and two other security males haul the prisoner upright. His mouth stretches wide with a silent scream, the tendons in his neck standing out. They force him back to his knees. His face is visible now. He’s babbling. His mouth won’t stop moving. The words spill out of him, nonstop, and I know begging when I see it.
Zavin goes very still. Preternaturally still, as though every word the prisoner is saying hooks something inside of him.
Resh hands Zavin a gun.
No. My hand goes to my mouth. No, no, no. Zavin takes it without looking. The gun fits his hand like it belongs there. Like it’s always belonged there. He cocks it, smooth and practiced. He’s done this before. How many times?
He presses the barrel to Tevan’s forehead. Zavin speaks and the prisoner slumps. His head bows. I can’t see what he’s doing, but something has clicked. Something bad.
Zavin’s face sets in harsh lines. Hard, like stone as he squeezes the trigger. Blood sprays the wall. The floor. The prisoner’s head blows to the side and his body follows. Half of his head is missing. Blood spreads across the floor with fragments of bone.
Zavin lowers the gun and hands it back to Resh. He says something. The security males reach for the body and drag him out of frame.Zavin hangs his head, and for a moment I think I see regret flash on his face but when he looks up again, nothing is there but harsh stone.
Breathing stops. Movement stops. Zavin killed him. Minutes ago he was inside me and now he’s shot a male in cold blood. Minutes ago he shuddered in my arms. Now there’s blood on a wall somewhere in this building. On his hands. I try to stand. My knees buckle. I hit the mattress hard, landing like dead weight, staring at nothing.
Logically I know who Zavin is. What he is. He’s violent. Dangerous. A crime lord. But seeing it…
I was fucking delusional.
The two versions of him won’t fit together in my skull, if they ever will. The gentle and the brutal. The vulnerable and the merciless. He kissed my throat and then he put a bullet through a man’s skull. Both things are true, both things happened.
I still want him.
That’s the part I can’t look at directly. It sits in my peripheral vision, too ugly and too honest. I should run. I should already be running. A female with a shred of self-preservation would be halfway to a transport by now with nothing but the sheet she’s wearing and a plan to figure out the rest later.
That’s what I did after Helix. Running first. Thinking later. That’s how I ended up here.
Running blind is what gets you caught. Running without money, without an identity, without knowing which corridor leads to the surface and which one dead-ends in security’s lap — that’s not survival. That’s handing yourself back to them with a bow on it.
So I stay. I need time. Time to map the route out of this warren. Time to build an identity that will get me past the checkpoints. Time to think.
But somewhere underneath that clean, logical plan, the tug is still pulling behind my sternum. It doesn’t care what I just watched. It doesn’t care about checkpoints or identities or smart exits. It wants him back in this room.
And I don’t know which version of me is running the show. The one with the plan, or the one pressing her fist to her chest trying to silence something that won’t be silenced.
I feel sick. I feel stupid. I witnessed the evidence with my own eyes — blood on a wall, brain on the floor — and I am still here.
The sweat cools on my skin. Eventually the shaking eases. My spine is cold where the sweat has dried. I sit still as my brain clicks through the checklist: location unknown, no currency, no ID, no weapons, no map. I can’t run tonight. I can’t run tomorrow. I need days. Maybe longer. I need to play this calm and safe and not bolt the way I did after Helix, when panic made every decision and every decision made it worse.
If Helix taught me anything, it’s that the unprepared run is just another kind of surrender. I won’t do that again. So I’ll wait. I’ll smile if I have to. I’ll let him touch me. I’ll play the role until my exit is real enough to hold onto.
And if some small, treacherous part of me is relieved to have an excuse to stay — I’ll deal with that later.
I reach for Percy’s console, fingers trembling. I don’t know the schematics of the Warrens. I never learned them. I should have spent my first week mapping every exit, every blind corner, every unguarded maintenance hatch. I let it slide. Why? Perhaps because the air was fresh. Because he gave me a room with a window, and food, and I let myself believe that meant I was safe. Perhaps because he’d given me the bare minimum and I’d been on my own, struggling so long that I’d stopped thinking.
So stupid.
I don’t know the route from here to the surface. Where the security stations sit. When the patrols rotate. Which doors lock down at night. I know only the corridor outside this room, the stairwell leading to the balcony where I stood tonight, and the service hallway behind waste processing. Everything else I’ll have to learn.
I pull up transit schedules, off-world departure logs, and cargo ships with life support I could hide aboard. I draw routes from the Warrens to the Docks, from the House tiers to the lower concourse. I map every single exit and memorize every route. Save nothing. Burn nothing into Percy’s memory.
