Page 169 of Nemesis

Pop, pop.

Gunshots.

“Octavia?” I roar, slamming harder. “Octavia!”

My chest splits open. It doesn’t matter that the door is unaffected by my efforts. I keep hitting. Keep screaming her name over and over. The skin on my fists tears off, and my limbs ache from slamming the expanse. I’m a damn idiot. I should’ve seen the signs.

I can’t survive this failure. I won’t—I…

The metal groans.

For a moment, I think my force has finally had some effect, but then I hear the lock twist from the other side.

With a whoosh of stale air, the door swings open.

And a body crashes into me.

It is only when my lungs heave, and my soul returns, that I realize it has been sliced in two. Ownership is no longer mine to hold. I fold around her middle. Drown in her perfect scent. I know every cell in this body. I know how she breathes. How she laughs. I know there are twenty-two freckles on her left cheek and thirty-nine on her right. If she wishes to take so much every time she leaves, so be it. I will learn to be soulless without her.

“I’m okay,” she soothes, one hand brushing the back of my neck. I can’t respond. All I can do is hold her tighter. “Everything will be okay now.”

She’s okay.

I bury my nose into her neck.

She’s okay.

“I can’t get his chains off,” she whispers.

My attention finally drifts to the room behind her. Bodies litter the floor where Kirill is chained to the wall, slumped back in exhaustion. One particular corpse differs from the others. Igor Popov’s lifeless form lies a few feet away, throat split in a glistening puddle of red.

She did it. She killed him with her own hands.

“He’s in bad shape, Vas.” Her green eyes are wide and consuming, impossibly bright beside flushed, swollen cheeks.

“I’ll take care of it,” I murmur, slipping my lock-picking kit from the lower pocket of my pants. Pulling away from her proves harder than I expected, especially when she tugs me back with a grip on my shirt. Her forehead presses to mine. Then her hand trails over my waist until her fingers wrap the gun still sitting in my holster.

She checks the chamber. Her hand drops from my collar. I don’t move as she walks back to her grandfather’s body, flicks off the safety, and aims the barrel.

The gun fires.

It doesn’t stop firing, not until the entire magazine is buried into his lifeless body, and whatever’s left is unrecognizable in the gore.

What does it mean to become a monster?

These days, arbitrary terms like right and wrong smear together like parallel swatches of paint. I suppose redeemable people regret their misdeeds. They kneel in pews and beg the stars. They erase the sweet taste of vindication from their tongues and move forward with their lives.

Vasiliy watches me the entire ride home. Ever since we stepped out of that mansion, some part of his body has always been in contact with mine. Now he sits and waits for the numbness to fall over me. For my mind to catch up with my hands’ sins.

And with good reason. It wasn’t so long ago that he coaxed a different girl back from the cliff’s edge. I press my fingers into his skin, carefully avoiding those bright blue eyes. They will see right through. He’ll realize the woman he fell in love with is gone, and in her place is this.

When we pull up to the Siderov gates, he squeezes my wrist. The rest of the vans follow ours to the roundabout, where blonde hair flows in the wind. My door swings open, and I step into the night.

Aunt Juliet shifts nervously in the center of a large contingent of guards. Her typically powdered cheeks are puffy and damp, and she chews on her manicured nails while she watches me step out. I’m not surprised that someone sent for her to return to the compound. It took a while to sort through the bodies and calculate how many we’d lost.

“Is he…are they…?” She rushes over, eyes pinching at the blood soaking my hands and dress. An answer is on the tip of my tongue when the next van’s door opens, and Alex climbs out, supporting a dazed Kirill.

She cries, stumbling past me.